More Rok sales unlikely as jobs axe falls
Administrators are poised to break up the remainder of collapsed building services group Rok after they struggled to find buyers for the rest of its debt-ridden business. A total of 186 jobs are set to go in the West Midlands including 54 at its two Birmingham sites, 115 in Warwick, 16 in Stafford and one elsewhere.
Just 500 jobs out of a workforce of 3,800 look set to be saved as administrator PwC only found buyers for small parts of the firm.
Mansell Construction Services, a subsidiary of Balfour Beatty, acquired Rok's affordable housing and general construction division last week for £7m, saving 381 jobs.
Mears, meanwhile, maintains an interest in taking on another small part of Rok's business.
“We are interested and we are still negotiating,” Mears chief Bob Holt told Insider.
But the majority of the firm’s employees have or will be made redundant after earlier expressions of interest from a number of rival firms came to nothing.
At the end of last week, PwC had had announced about 2,800 redundancies.
Rok entered administration following a wretched year. Its difficulties are seen as having arisen from its dependency on public sector-funded projects, which account for more than half of its business.
Earlier this year, Rok said it had uncovered "serious failings" in financial and operational controls relating to its plumbing division.
