Taxpayers to foot £65m bill from Carillion redundancies
Taxpayers are set to cough up £65m in redundancy payouts following the collapse of outsourcer giant Carillion.
The liquidated construction services company, which bucked under the weight of a £1.5bn debt pile in January, has so far paid out £50m of the total £65m after thousands of workers were made redundant.
The figures also come a day after Sky revealed that ministers plan to bail out Liverpool's new £335m NHS hospital in the wake of Carillion leaving the project in crisis after going into liquidation.
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According to construction union Unite, which found the figures through a Freedom of Information request, PwC is expected to have earned “around £50m from the company’s collapse”.
Carillion’s collapse at the beginning of the year dealt a huge blow to the reputation of the Big Four firms, all of which were in some way involved in working with the embattled construction company before its demise.
While Deloitte was Carillion’s sole internal auditor, KPMG serving as external auditor, EY gave turnround advice and PwC advised the company, its pension schemes and the government.
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Amid Carillion’s collapse MPs demanded that the firms be referred to competition authorities for a potential break-up following Carillion’s collapse, and in June the FRC revealed it was taking recommendations to impose much bigger penalties for serious misdeeds by the world’s biggest accountants.
Tougher steps to curtail the wrongdoings of accountancy firms by the FRC comes after the watchdog faced several criticism from MPs for being too slow to take on the Big Four over a series of auditing blunders.