Contract with death

Things often happen at awards ceremonies which are remembered for a long time.

Business awards events are no exception, even in Leicestershire.

A few years ago I attended a county awards evening where two well-known business people were involved in a very vocal stand-off in the middle of the venue.

Last year's Leicestershire Property and Construction (ProCon) Awards was gatecrashed by strippers from Spearmint Rhino, leading to a security clampdown at this year's ProCon Awards, which was again held at Leicester City's King Power Stadium.

The security crackdown certainly did its job last Thursday evening, with proceedings incident-free and slick. But behind the scenes things were not so stress-free for one of the award winners.

Hallam Contracts, the Oadby-based building firm carrying out major projects across the county, won the Small Scheme of the Year award for its work on a new physics building at Loughborough Grammar School.

However, most of the 600-plus attendees, including myself, failed to notice the award was not collected by someone from Hallam. Indeed no one from the company had attended an event which it had helped to set up a decade ago and which it usually does well in.

Hallam's senior staff were instead working hard to stave off administration after sub-contractors which were owed £500,000 by the firm had submitted a winding up petition against it. Bosses had organised for its 10-person table to be filled with other people.

To be fair to those small number of attendees who were aware of the dire situation Hallam was in at that stage, they did well to keep it to themselves, or just a discreet few, during last Thursday evening's raucous revelry.

They no doubt were reminded of the story, written by myself, which appeared in the Leicester Mercury about the gatecrashing lap dancers the Saturday after last year's ProCon Awards.

The rumours about Hallam's problems eventually reached local creditors earlier this week, who called the Mercury hoping for more information.

A story saying Hallam was on the brink of administration was on the Mercury's front page on Wednesday and that afternoon it was announced the company had gone into administration with the loss of more than 100 jobs and owing around £4 million to about 300 businesses.

And so another business awards evening to remember ....

UPDATE: November 24: Lots of talk from high spirited business leaders at Thursday's Executive of the Year Awards about Hallam's 'ghost table' at the ProCon Awards.