You are always going to be a hostage to fortune if you insist on calling your company Relax Group. Certainly executives at the debt advisory firm will not be feeling calm after admitting that half year results will be "significantly lower" than last year and seeing the stock price plummet.
In July the company, formerly Debts.co.uk, announced that Ken Gaskell, a former boss of National Car Parks, was taking over immediately from Paul Carter, the man who founded the company in 1998 and floated it eight years later.
Gaskell set about bringing in a new management team - hiring a former colleague from NCP, John Simms, as finance director to replace Trevor Moore - and launched a strategic and financial review.
Today the company said the results of that strategic and financial review of the business and its wider management structure "will be announced shortly".
However, the initial findings are that it is now expected that the results for the interim period ended 30 June 2009 will be significantly lower than for the five month period ended 31 December 2008. There has been a consequential impact on the group's working capital position and banking facilities which are being monitored closely. Significant cost savings have been identified which the directors expect will have a positive impact in the 2010 financial year. The interim results will be released on or before 30 September 2009.
The fact that the poor results seem to have pushed the firm into something of a cash squeeze is all the more ironic given that Relax Group is supposed to specialise in helping out people who cannot pay all their debts, sometimes through the use of individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs).
The shares are down 9p at 27p - a drop of a third.
Back in the main market the FTSE 100 index is up 37.70 points at 4682.71 points just before noon, having shrugged off overnight falls in Asia and yesterday's declines.
Mining stocks have clogged the blue chip leaderboard all morning with Xstrata up 34.5p at 776.5p, Eurasian up 29p at 787.5, Kazakhmys up 30p at 893.5p and Rio Tinto up 74.5p at £23.20 as commodity prices rally following Monday's falls.
First half profits from car dealer Pendragon leave shares in the company down 2.25p at 42.75p, while shares in Rok have lost 5p to 53p after the building maintenance firm announced a near halving of interim profits.
But British Land is marked 9.5p lower at 486.7p after chief executive Chris Grigg poured cold water over speculation in the market that the property firm is a takeover target and is in talks to sell Broadgate. Several names have been put in the frame as possible buyers of the London financial centre including Blackstone, Delancey and MGPA, but Grigg told reporters on a conference call this morning "we've seen no untoward (takeover) activity of any type so we're relaxed."
