YRM bosses jump ship leaving staff stranded
John Clemow: YRM’s former chief executive is one of only five staff offered jobs at the firm’s new owner
Employees left unpaid since October
Architects at YRM have been left with thousands of pounds in unpaid wages after it emerged that the firm went into administration hours before being taken over by RMJM. Around 20 people lost their jobs 48 hours before Christmas with most owed at least two months’ pay.
Just five YRM staff have been offered roles at its new owner, including former chief executive John Clemow, who is now a principal at RMJM.
One ex-employee said: “We have not been paid since October. We’ve been given the runaround by directors who said we would be paid by the middle of November. It’s been a deliberate tactic to avoid staff breaking their silence before the senior staff could salvage their careers at a new company.”
The 67-year-old practice, which has been working on designs for a nuclear power station at Hinkley in Somerset, went into administration under a controversial “pre-pack” which allows the purchaser to buy parts of a company and leave any of that firm’s debts with the administrator.
Accountant Chantrey Vellacott DFK was appointed administrator on December 23 and RMJM took over the practice later that day.
Chantrey Vellacott DFK declined to comment but Clemow said YRM was in administration and admitted: “We approached RMJM [about a takeover].”
Clemow declined to confirm the arrangement of a pre-pack, and repeated earlier claims that the company had been brought to its knees by the cost of closing its offices in Vienna and Bucharest and falling workloads.
But ex-staff blamed management for a series of poor decisions. “This situation was almost inconceivable a year ago as YRM had a number of good prospects and a very successful and growing energy sector,” one told BD.
“It seems incredible that the very people who led YRM into this would be the ones continuing their employment.”
Another blamed the decision to open overseas offices, claiming the Vienna branch “pulled in no work whatsoever”. The source added: “The directors were on high wages and weren’t bringing in the work.”
YRM director Iain Macdonald has now been made principal at RMJM while associates James Thomas, project leader at Hinkley, and Peter Greiner plus architect Adrian Wiehahn will form a new London studio called YRM Lab.
RMJM chief executive Peter Morrison said YRM was a leader in aviation, nuclear and technology projects and added: “It significantly strengthens RMJM’s offer.”
Postscript:
What is a prepack?
Prepack administrations are controversial because they allow companies to leave behind debts – and a trail of creditors – with the administrator.
This week, high street retail firm Blacks was the latest to use the method writing off £36 million of debts.
A prepack usually means a company is put briefly into administration but only before it has arranged a buyer of its profitable assets. It’s not illegal but attracts criticism because it leaves creditors owed money while the firm resumes trading under a new owner.
But supporters of prepacks argue that without them, the situation would be much worse and that they at least help stricken companies keep going and avoid, in Blacks’ case, the need to make thousands of employees redundant.
Related Articles
- YRM owes creditors nearly £900,000
11 July 2012
- YRM bosses' behaviour is a disgrace to architects
20 January 2012
- Architects claiming dole falls to five-month low
18 January 2012
- RMJM struggles to pay staff after YRM takeover
16 January 2012
- When YRM were all prima donnas
13 January 2012
- Responsibility to staff is sign of good leadership
13 January 2012
- Architect's foot soldiers become cannon fodder
10 January 2012
- End of a once-great practice
6 January 2012
- RMJM confirmed as YRM's new owner
3 January 2012
- RMJM set to buy YRM
19 December 2011
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Readers' comments (35)
Financial misery brings out the moral misery in some people. May these YRM high-profile rats rot in hell...
Will the new office be renamed WhyRMJM?
What a shambolic, disgraceful and professionally degrading performance.
Disgust is perhaps the only feeling that most will rightly experience about the actions of the directors.
Time was when Partners shouldered real responsibility and often paid staff before themselves in difficult times, and if things went badly wrong, those Partners caught a huge cold.
Now as Directors, principles seem to play the same pre-pack game best suited to sly retailers and sharp financiers rather than architectural professionals.
Pity the poor creditors as much as the staff.
Management experts sometimes mention Ernest Shackleton as an outstanding example of a manager. His astounding feats in getting all his men all back safely from Antarctica included endurance, courage, technical innovation and improvisation, great seamanship as well as a well-nigh impossible mountaineering feat. In all this he motivated by a big sense of responsibility towards his men, as he recognised he was the one who had got them into trouble in the first place.
The troubled architectural firms being reported on recently in BD seem to have directors with quite the opposite attitude. In short, they have very bad management. Normally one could say this is just their problem, but actually reports like these reflect very badly on the profession as a whole, which makes it a serious problem for all of us, including the RIBA.
Presumably they each walked away with a nice pot of money.
It is like the blind leading the blind and without any walking aid. Sure the rompies allegedly won that recent airport job in Russia - hence the 'strengthened offer'. Both companies have been run into the ground by the management and good designers have left following unpaid dues. A new term is coined (enter drumroll) - behold the emergence of the 'archithug'. And in other news........
Patience guys...this will end in disaster. Let's not forget that wee Peter Morrioson is running the show...and therein lies my reasoned confidence of that.
I joined Yorke Rosenberg Mardall in 1971 leaving voluntarily as an ex-director in 1995, just two years before the practice went bancrupt the first time. Greed, delusions of grandeur and lack of 'Line of Development' (remember Alan Powers book about YRM when it was a design practice?). What a cowardly end to an ill-reconstructed practice.
Let's not forget that according to a book published a few years ago by Jeremy Melvin, Yorke himself was quite a wheeler-dealer and basically set up YRM as a way of getting big government contracts. So in a sense, his wide-boy attitude has filtered down through the years.
This kind of carry on only undermines Architecture and business in the UK in general. These people as far as I'm concerned have committed fraud in not paying their employees wages for two months in a row when they must have known the state of the finances. What do they expect their unpaid workers to live on fresh air, they take the money from the business why should they think their workers should get nothing for their work. Until ARB/RIBA put to rights the wrongs that have happened here they will lack any credability. All we have got from Angela Brady of recent is a string of photo's of her posed bolt upright arms folded with a smug look on her face, really need to see her sort this kind of carry on out I think.