Stricken Evesham says will honour warranties and support

Evesham Technology's founder and chairman Richard Austin has said that DTE Leonard Curtis has been appointed administrator of the firm's accounts. Following on from a very difficult few days for many ex-employees of the firm, Austin finally confirmed yesterday that Evesham had indeed entered administration on Friday 3 August.

He added that the British computer maker had retained 138 staff following last Friday's culling in which many employees, some of whom had worked at Evesham for over 15 years, were asked to leave immediately.

"Although we are all very sad that we have to continue trading without valuable, long standing Evesham staff, we will continue to trade in the UK… We hope that we have now past [sic] this unfortunate time in our company's history and can look to a positive future," said Austin in a statement released yesterday.

Austin told The Register that bailiffs had not been at the firm following our previous story in which sources at Evesham said that "heavies" had turned up and turfed them out.

He said: "This is complete fiction I have neither suggested nor confirmed such; in fact I can categorically assure you that none will turn up."

When asked why many had drawn the conclusion that the people who had arrived at Evesham's Vale Park headquarters were bailiffs, Austin said: "I think that administrators were confused as bailiffs, there have been no bailiffs."

As we had previously learned from documents obtained via Companies House, Austin was appointed as managing director of the newly created Geemore Ltd on 20 July. It detailed the same address as Evesham's head office and also has ties to TimeUK founders Tahir Mohsan and Tariq Mohammed.

Last week, Mohsan had coughed up a rescue package of $22m for Evesham via investment from his Dubai-based PCC Technology firm. He had said in a statement that PCC would take a hands-off approach with Evesham and that customers could expect "business as usual".

By late last Friday, however, it was a very different story with all but two of the stores being closed and many staff being asked to leave.

But Austin yesterday insisted that "it is business as usual." He also added that customers can expect that warranties and support will be honoured by Geemore. He told us: "this was absolutely key to the deal."

As we reported in June, Austin had blamed the government's withdrawal of the Home Computer Initiative (HCI) scheme for Evesham's sorry financial state.

Meanwhile, Matthew Burns confirmed to us that he will be working on the case out of DTE's Manchester office and added that more information about the status of Evesham will be released shortly.

Several representatives from general worker's union GMB are believed to be present at the Vale Park site this morning. According to one Reg reader, the union had called for at least 50 per cent of ex-employees to show up at Evesham's gates in order to gain access to the office. ®