Factory discount clothes store folds

A CUT-PRICE factory outlet clothes shopping store at Clifton Moor has crashed leaving £394,000 worth of debt and the loss of 14 jobs. Disastrous Christmas takings are blamed.Julian Unsworth, sole director of FOSC Limited, today alerted all 96 creditors to an insolvency meeting in Leeds on Monday, February 16, when an administrator will be appointed.The administrator is likely to give priority to preferential creditors like the VATman, the Inland Revenue and employee claims, said Tom Harrison, who works for the appointing accountant at KPMG in whose Neville Street offices the meeting will take place.He said: "Assuming we are appointed, we are likely to have a fairly aggressive sale of stock not long afterwards so prices are going to be fairly massacred," but he agreed that it was unlikely to make a massive dent in the total debt.FOSC, which stands for Factory Outlet Shopping Centres Ltd was started by Mr Unsworth in the 35,000 sq ft former Queensway building near MFI in Osbaldwick Link Road in June, 1993. In its first three months more than 100,000 shoppers were said to have passed through its doors lured by bargains claimed to be 30 to 70 per cent less than the normal retail tag. Other stores were opened, in Hull, in the Salleria Outlet Centre in Hatfield and in Lincoln, but as turnover proved poor, all of them closed and Mr Unsworth decided instead to concentrate his attentions on York alone.The operation moved to Clifton Moor shopping centre last March.lAn unexpected second group of workers at print company Pindar plc in York will be made redundant on Tuesday.This time five jobs will go, with one redeployed, out of the 12 in a department which electronically makes up pages for catalogues.The entire department will move from Piccadilly in York to head office in Scarborough to avoid duplication between the two offices.But a spokeswoman for the company said the latest redundancies had nothing to do with the announcement two weeks ago that six staff had been made redundant, with the prospect of another 20 jobs being lost in November when a contract with the German patents office is due to end.The spokeswoman said: "These latest redundancies, involving editorial people, are a completely separate issue."Different pages were being replicated at Eastfield head office, Scarborough where they were being printed. It made sense to rationalise."