Carillion

Carillion plc was a British multinational construction and facilities management services company headquartered in Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, prior to its liquidation in January 2018.

Carillion was created in July 1999, following a demerger from Tarmac. It grew through a series of acquisitions to become the second largest construction company in the United Kingdom, was listed on the London Stock Exchange, and in 2016 had some 43,000 employees (18,257 of them in the United Kingdom). Concerns about Carillion's debt situation were raised in 2015, and after the company experienced financial difficulties in 2017, it went into compulsory liquidation on 15 January 2018, the most drastic procedure in UK insolvency law, with liabilities of almost £7 billion.

In the United Kingdom, the insolvency caused project shutdowns and delays in the UK and overseas (PFI projects in Ireland were suspended, while four of Carillion's Canadian businesses sought legal bankruptcy protection), job losses (over 3,000 redundancies in Carillion alone, plus others among its suppliers), financial losses to joint venture partners and lenders, to Carillion's 30,000 suppliers (some of which were pushed into insolvency), and to 27,000 pensioners, and could cost UK taxpayers up to £180M. It also led to questions and multiple parliamentary inquiries about the conduct of the firm's directors, its auditors (KPMG), the Financial Reporting Council and The Pensions Regulator, and about the UK Government's relationships with major suppliers working on private finance initiative (PFI) schemes and other privatised outsourcing of public services (in October 2018, the UK Government said no new PFI projects would be started). It also prompted legislation proposals to reform industry payment systems, consultations on new government procurement processes to promote good payment practices, and proposed FRC reforms to the treatment of directors' bonuses paid in shares.

The May 2018 report of a Parliamentary inquiry by the Business and the Work and Pensions Select Committees said Carillion's collapse was "a story of recklessness, hubris and greed, its business model was a relentless dash for cash", and accused its directors of misrepresenting the financial realities of the business. The report's recommendations included regulatory reforms and a possible break-up of the Big Four accounting firms. A separate report by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee, in July 2018, blamed the UK government for outsourcing contracts based on lowest price, saying its use of contractors such as Carillion had caused public services to deteriorate.