Cattles Invoice Finance

Cattles Invoice Finance sale announced at long last

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The long running saga of the sale of Cattles Invoice Finance has at last been announced with the purchasor being the private equity house AnaCap Financial Partners LLP who have been lurking in the wings for quite a while.

Whilst the announcement is now “old news” it did come when I was away sunning myself in Cyprus and whilst I thought about writing something for the blog at the time the amount of effort required to research and write something via Blackberry was too much like hard work.

Having belatedly read the press release dated 10th August I was interested to read the comment attributed to Doug Crawford that “The invoice finance industry is enjoying unprecedented growth in the current financial climate………”

The statistics for the factoring industry issued by the ABFA for the last couple of quarters show that far from enjoying “unprecedented growth” the industry has seen a drop in value of sales factored as well as the number of clients availing themselves of the services but I now await with great interest the figures for the quarter ended 30th June (which should be available shortly) to see the official confirmation of this growth.

Cattles Invoice Finance are having a laugh now

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I was checking my site ranking this morning as I’m sure we all do periodically when I spotted an unfamiliar name amongst the paid for Google Adsense adverts so clicking on www.factoring-brokerservice.co.uk I found that not only was it a website devoted to the services of Cattles Invoice Finance but I recalled seeing the site before and commenting on it’s rather deceiptful name.

This time I took more time out to read the webage and there was a section entitled “Simply fill in this short form to receive our 1 minute guide to factoring”

So far so good but a drop down list gave a list of options and you are supposed to select the option which is the most relevant. The options are:-

1) Cashflow Issues

2) Want To Grow?

3) Buying Our Company

4) Buying a Company

5) Want New factor

I know that Cattles Invoice Finance must be getting desperate by now but surely advertising for a buyer on their own website isn’t the answer 🙂

Cattles Invoice Finance – parent company shares suspended

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We were told to expect an announcement this week regarding the proposed sale of Cattles Invoice Finance but much to the surprise of everyone the only announcement to be made so far this week is that the shares in the parent company have been suspended.

According to the report the company is in breach of it’s banking covenants and is currently locked away in talks with it’s bankers in an effort to refinance the company and they are claiming that they are unable to finalise the accounts for the year ended 31st December 2008 until these talks are concluded.

One has to wonder how this announcement tallies with the announcement made just a couple of days ago that CIF were expanding their sales team where the regional managing director made the bold statement that “Despite many of our competitors freezing recruitment as a means to cut costs, we feel it is important to invest in talent because it plays such an integral part of driving growth and business development”

One has to wonder quite what the “talent” has made of today’s announcement

Cattles Invoice Finance

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When the board of Cattles announced to the world in September that their factoing subsidiary was up for sale they stated that they hoped to conclude a deal by the end of the year.

I don’t suppose that they factored in the worsening climate for finance companies and banks at the time and the end of the year has now come and gone with no sign of any imminent announcement regarding the sale.

Rumours regarding the interest shown by Bank Santander have now gone quiet whilst we hear that Hitachi who were the recent favourites have also lost interest.

We have to repeat the advice that we gave in September that until the future is clear we cannot recommend Cattles to any of our clients.

Ian

Factoring Solutions