IN Brief:
- Curo Construction's unsecured creditor claims total £21.2m, including £19.7m owed to trade and expense creditors.
- More than 500 subcontractors and suppliers are affected, alongside former employees and HMRC.
- Administrators are still working through contracts, accounts, and project records to identify potential recoveries.
Curo Construction has left unsecured creditor claims totalling £21.2 million, including around £19.7 million owed to trade and expense creditors, according to the latest information emerging from the London contractor’s administration.
More than 500 subcontractors and suppliers are caught in the failure, alongside liabilities of around £860,000 to 135 former employees and nearly £3 million to HM Revenue & Customs for VAT, PAYE, and National Insurance. Sister business Curo Interiors has separate supplier debts of around £1.9 million and approximately £450,000 owed to the tax authorities.
The figures sharpen the financial picture after Curo entered administration earlier this summer. Companies House records show the administrator appointment was filed on 1 July following the insolvency hearing on 17 June, while a 56-page statement of administrator’s proposal was filed on 13 August, providing creditors with a fuller account of the position.
James Stares and Jeff Brenner of Antony Batty & Company were appointed joint administrators across Curo Construction, Curo Interiors, and holding company Curo Group Holdings. The court approved administration on the basis that it offered a better prospect for creditors than immediate compulsory liquidation, leaving the officeholders to work through outstanding accounts, contracts, and other potential recoveries.
Trade exposure stretches down the project chain
The newly disclosed creditor position makes the supply-chain consequence difficult to overlook. Subcontractors can reach the end of a project carrying certified applications, disputed variations, retentions, materials, plant, and labour costs, all of which become harder to recover once the company above them enters an insolvency process.
Curo’s scale made that exposure substantial. The contractor operated across commercial new build, fit-out, heritage work, industrial projects, data centres, and film studios, with project values typically ranging from around £2 million to £80 million. Its portfolio included Shinfield Studios near Reading and a series of high-end commercial projects in London.
The latest filed accounts had already shown trading conditions becoming more difficult. Turnover for the year to September 2024 fell from £157 million to £108 million following completion of Shinfield Studios and delays to new project starts, while pre-tax profit dropped from £3.2 million to £1.2 million and cash reduced from £22 million to £11 million.
Those figures did not indicate an insolvent contractor by themselves. Curo’s directors had reported a substantial secured workload for the following period and expected activity to rebuild, illustrating the gap that can open between an order book and the cash generated from projects actually starting, progressing, and reaching agreed payment milestones.
Delayed starts are particularly difficult for contractors carrying a permanent workforce and central overhead. Staff, offices, insurance, software, bidding costs, and management functions continue whether a major contract starts on its original date or slips several months, while material and labour assumptions used at tender can move in the meantime.
Administrators have cited delayed projects, higher overheads, material inflation, and losses associated by directors with wider geopolitical disruption among the factors affecting the business. None acts in isolation: a delayed project may reduce incoming cash at precisely the point another contract is consuming more working capital than originally forecast.
Project records become financial assets
The recovery exercise now depends partly on the quality of Curo’s commercial records. Administrators have been seeking access to the company’s COINS construction-management software and reported that they had not received a statement of affairs from the former directors when preparing their proposal.
That matters because contractor balance sheets rarely contain a simple pile of uncontested cash waiting to be collected. Potential value can sit inside applications for payment, variations, final accounts, claims, retentions, plant, materials, or contractual entitlements, and each item requires evidence before an administrator can establish whether it is genuinely recoverable.
Incomplete project information can therefore reduce recoveries twice: first by making outstanding balances harder to identify, and again by increasing the professional time required to reconstruct the commercial position. On projects involving numerous subcontract packages and design changes, the distinction between an accounting receivable and money that can actually be collected can be considerable.
Curo Interiors adds another layer because related companies can share clients, staff, systems, and project relationships while remaining separate legal entities. Administrators have to establish which company contracted for the work, which entity holds the liability, and whether any intercompany balances have value before distributions to external creditors can be calculated.
The administration also shows why subcontractor due diligence cannot stop at a main contractor’s headline turnover. Curo had delivered sizeable schemes and retained an active project portfolio, yet the creditor list now spreads the consequences of its failure across hundreds of businesses, many considerably smaller than the contractor that owed them money.
For those companies, eventual recoveries will depend on what the administrators can realise from contracts, assets, and outstanding accounts. The £21.2 million figure is an estimate of unsecured claims rather than a final distribution calculation, so it should not be treated as the confirmed cash loss to creditors.
What has changed since Curo’s June collapse is the visibility of the exposure. Around £19.7 million of trade and expense claims and more than 500 affected suppliers put a measurable figure on the construction industry’s familiar habit of pushing working-capital risk down the contractual chain. A contractor can cease trading once; the unpaid invoices keep circulating through everybody else’s accounts for rather longer.
