Time drags on for Granville administrators

There is still no end in sight to the administration of Granville Technology, six weeks after the company behind the Time and Tiny computer brands collapsed.

A spokesman for the administrators, Grant Thornton, told us: "It is a very complicated administration."

He explained that when it went into administration, Burnley-based Granville Technology had around two-million customers, and that it was "taking a long time" to sort through all the paperwork.

"We have no idea when an announcement is likely to be made," he concluded.

Granville collapsed at the end of July with debts of around £50m.

Early in August it emerged that HSBC, the company's main secured creditor, is unlikely to see much of the £19m it is owed, suggesting that prospects for unsecured creditors are very bleak indeed.

MPs of all stripes have called for an inquiry into the collapse of the company and a slanging match has broken out between Burnley's MP Kitty Ussher and Lib Dem councillor Gordon Birtwistle over the loss of jobs in the local area.

Birtwistle called on Ussher to involve Government leaders to help stem the flow of jobs from the area, calling her a lame duck MP and warning that the UK is at risk of becoming a purely service-based economy, the Burnley Express reports.

Ussher, meanwhile, has obliquely accused him of sour grapes: "It must be frustrating for Gordon to have been rejected as the town's MP at three separate general elections but I can assure him things are in safe hands," she told reporters. ®