Hot on the heels of the administrators giving up the ghost with menswear seller Austin Reed, the company doctors have pronounced BHS as dead.
It only remains to arrange a decent burial and find jobs, if possible, for the 11,000 or so employees that will be turfed onto the dole as a result of the disastrous takeover of the chain by former racing driver Dominic Chappell.
Mind you, no less an authority than Simon Walker, head of the Institute of Directors, has said Chappell is not solely to blame, and that former owner Sir Philip Green’s handling of the company was indefensible.
"We spend a lot of time agonising about the loss of trust in the business community, and I think we can see why this is. I think there is a lamentable failure of behaviour and there are a lot of questions that need to be asked," Walker said on the BBC’s influential news programme, Today.
Walker said Green had “moral responsibilities” to the employees of the store, particularly in relation to the pension scheme, which was handed over to Chappell with a massive shortfall in funds.
“You can't just get yourself off the hook by selling a business to someone who's been bankrupt three times and is a former racing driver with no retail experience," Walker said.
The demise of BHS has done little to brighten the investment appeal of Marks and Spencer PLC (LON:MKS) in the eyes of JP Morgan Cazenove, which has downgraded the high street icon from ‘neutral’ to ‘underweight’ and chopped the share price target to 307p from 550p.
For many years BHS has been a rival to M&S in much the same way as Leyton Orient is to Arsenal, and Cazenove is more worried about growing competition to M&S online than it is about fellow dinosaurs on high street and edge of town retail parks.
On the subject of football, Goals Soccer Centres PLC (LON:GOAL) has hired an Inter Milan boss to help revive its fortunes.
This masterful piece of headline writing – note, it has hired “an” Inter Milan boss, not “the” Inter Milan boss – comes from a site called Fresh Business Thinking.
Inter Milan chief executive Michael Bolingbroke is to join the board as a senior independent non-executive director.
And there was I hoping Roberto Mancini would be swanning around the Goals board room wearing a knotted company scarf in debonair fashion.
James Fisher lands a catch
Every cloud has a silver lining, so they say.
At Proactive Investors we’ve followed the struggles of SeaEnergy PLC (LON:SEA), a company with a terrific product – Return2Scene – directed at a sector (oil & gas) that, to put it mildly, has been having a tough time of it.
Sadly, the company has gone into administration, and its Return2Scene business, which provides computer modelling to create a 360 degree interactive visual interface that oil rig and gas facility operators can use for virtual maintenance and planning.
Crucially, it can also provide oil companies with significant savings in the planning of decommissioning fields that are no longer economic or that are to be suspended.
Marine services provider James Fisher & Sons plc (LON:FSJ) obviously liked the look of the technology, as it snapped it up for £1.9mln, though the acquisition price could rise by another £1mln, depending on whether it wins certain contracts before the end of the year.
“This is a typical bolt-on deal for Fisher i.e. buying an attractive asset out of a distressed situation. R2S provides visual asset management photographic capture services, digital media services and forensic services to the oil & gas and security sectors and had revenue of £4.7mln in year to December 2014 but was in loss in 2015 year to tune of £0.5mln,” noted broker N+1 Singer.