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Liquidators appointed for Tintri UK as DDN bids to become reseller

Unpaid former staff will get something... eventually

Liquidators were today appointed to squeeze Tintri UK for whatever cash they can get out of the fallen business.

This followed Tintri's bankruptcy attorney yesterday filing a motion to make DDN a worldwide Tintri reseller.

Tintri filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy just over a week ago, leaving UK, German and Dutch staff unpaid for June.

Smith & Williamson has been appointed as the liquidating agency for Tintri UK, with Adam Stephens and Finbarr O'Connell the named practitioners. In a statement Stephens said:

Our appointment as joint liquidators will enable us to give the former staff support in making claims to the Redundancy Payments Service. This will pay them some of the entitlements that the company can no longer give.

We are now implementing a strategy to maximise realisation for the benefit of creditors and investigate the cause of liquidation. These creditors include a number of employees. It is hoped that there will be a dividend paid to creditors but it is too early to predict that amount or timing.

Creditors have a set priority in the UK, starting with liquidators' fees and expenses, fixed charge holders (like banks), preferred creditors, floating charge holders, unsecured creditors, and shareholders.

Preferred creditors include employees, who are entitled to arrears of wages up to £800 and holiday pay. But this is funded "from the sale of floating charge assets net of costs of the liquidation". Floating charge assets include stock, raw materials, work-in-progress, fixtures and fittings.

Half of the initial £10,000 from the floating charge asset sale is used for this plus 20 per cent of other similar asset sales up to £600,000.

The Redundancy Payments Service is a UK government facility. A Gov.UK webpage states: "Depending on your situation, you can apply to the government for: a redundancy payment, holiday pay, outstanding payments like unpaid wages, overtime and commission money you would have earned working your notice period ('statutory notice pay')."

Tintri laid off 80 per cent of its workforce (200 heads) in the last week of June and had warned it was set to run out of cash by the end of that month. Staff in the US, Switzerland and South Africa were paid, or so sources told us.

It seems that unpaid employees may receive something but it isn't clear whether they will receive everything they're entitled to.

DDN as Tintri reseller

DDN has potentially thrown the US storage array supplier's abandoned customers a lifeline by making a bid to become a Tintri reseller, buy its assets and run the company as a subsidiary.

This means DDN would become Tintri's effective service and support organisation for its customer base, sales arm for its products, and would deal with Tintri's manufacturing partner, Flextronics, which is only shipping product on a cash-in-advance basis.

Tintri would also have a presence at VMworld in Las Vegas, 26-30 August, courtesy of DDN.

The attorney also filed a motion for court assent to Tintri selling all its assets via an auction, with DDN identified as a potential bidder, on 18 July.®

Bootnote

The USA bankruptcy proceeding is case number 18-11625-KJC in The Delaware District Bankruptcy Court.

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