Three hotels have closed after more companies in the troubled Carlauren group have collapsed into administration.
Heritage Hotels Ltd went into administration in late December 2019, and administrators immediately announced the closure of two hotels: Auckland House Hotel, on the Isle of Wight, and Headway Hotel in Morecambe.
A third, Cumbria’s Lambert Manor, is closing its main hotel but its lodges and pool facilities continue to operate.
In total 64 people have been made redundant across the three hotels - 20 at Auckland House Hotel, 29 at Headway Hotel and 15 at Lambert Manor.
Four staff will be retained to run the lodges and the pool facility at Lambert Manor. A small number of redundancies at head office have also been made.
Other hotels in the group, which employ a total of 200 people, are continuing to trade in administration.
The list includes the Grade II listed Langdon Court Hotel in Plymouth, which is still open but told Business Live no one was available to comment and referred us to Quantuma, one of two companies acting as joint administrators of companies in the Carlauren group.
Quantuma and another firm, Duff and Phelps, were appointed as joint administrators over a number of Somerset-based Carlauren companies in November 2019 with a remit to investigate the disappearance of more than £50million of investors’ money.
In December, Heritage Hotels and six other Carlauren firms including Care Home Freehold 2 Ltd and Respite Rooms Ltd, went into administration.
They joined holding companies Carlauren Group Ltd and Casarian Holdings Ltd (formerly known as Carlauren International Holdings Ltd) and five other companies including Carlauren Travel Ltd.
Another firm, CHF 3 Ltd, which had owned The Auckland House Hotel, was liquidated in September.
Carl Jackson, managing partner at Quantuma, said: “We were appointed joint administrators on November 28 and have been working tirelessly in this time to stabilise the position of the group.
“With regret it has been necessary to make the difficult decision to close three of the Heritage Hotel properties.
“The seasonal nature of these properties means heavy trading losses are forecast for the first quarter of the year meaning that that any profits made elsewhere in the group would be negated.
“Our immediate priority is to ensure that those affected receive the appropriate support required to enable them to make the necessary claims from the Redundancy Payments Service.
“We will be closely managing the group's trading position and will possibly seek to take steps to reopen some or all of these properties as appropriate in due course.
“In the meantime the remaining properties in the group will continue to trade, securing the ongoing employment of the remaining two hundred staff.”
Yeovil-headquartered Carlauren, which employed 260 people, had bought 25 properties across the UK, including Windlestone Hall, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, which it acquired for £850,000 in 2017.
The purchases were funded by selling individual rooms in those properties to investors for about £100,000 a time, but most of those homes never opened.
Investors into Carlauren schemes were told their money would pay for the purchase of long-term leases in the care homes or hotels with on call care.
Some 777 rooms have been purchased by the group in various properties since 2016, many of which did not have planning permission for the use proposed at the time.
By July 2019, all of the firm’s care homes had closed, with the group continuing to run commercial hotels and other non-care companies.
But Heritage Hotels is now in administration and the two men seen as being at the top of the Carlauren empire, Sean Murray and Andrew Jamieson, have resigned as directors.
Running alongside the administrators’ probe is that of Penningtons Manches Cooper LLP, and at least one other law firm.
Penningtons Manches Cooper is already acting for more than a dozen investors and said about 50 have made inquiries. The investors are looking at suing other law firms after taking advice on whether to purchase long-term leases in Carlauren-owned care homes or hotels with on-call care.
Solicitor David O’Brien said the group action for professional negligence would hinge on whether investors were given enough information by their lawyers on the potential risks of putting cash into schemes which promised high returns but where there was also the possibility cash would be lost.
