Guest blog post by Adam Kilvington
What I believe I can share is a summary of the meeting and key points I gathered
Key points
· Purnells have been appointed as liquidators (They have no ties to the business and are completely impartial)
· 1st meeting with the liquidators was on the 1st August, they were contacted before this.
· There are little or no assets in the business (some t shirts and caps)
· There are no secured creditors or employee claims (everyone is being treat as an unsecured creditor.
· The bands may still be due money under contracts therefore increasing the debt
· People are going to be lucky to get anything from Altfest Ltd as all the majority of the money has been spent on getting the festival to the stage it was (deposits for bands / etc.)
My views from the meeting
· The directors had a good idea but did not have the ability to fulfil it. (They admitted this in the meeting).
· After realising they did not have the ability they took advice about costs from a third party and did not get any comparative advice / quotes. Later in the day when the size of the festival had grown, they then consulted someone else and they got a higher price. There was not any contingency in their budgets for this price increase, yet they were able to spend this amount on a headliner.
· At the meeting when quizzed about this initial advice and whether it was backed contractually / insured they could not give any confirmation, which is worrying.
· Their accounting appears to be lacking
· They vastly overestimated the pull of one artist versus his fees
· They did not take action to rectify fundamental funding problems early enough.
· ClubTickets are not to blame, they were just the unfortunate company that got in bed with AltFest with regard to ticketing. They are likely to go into administration because of this.
In my opinion
They let the size of the festival spiral out of control, adding more and more unnecessarily. They did not have the management skills to run a festival of this size and did not engage the appropriate help in doing so.
It would appear they did not follow any management principals when constructing budgets or managing them.