I wrote a post back at the start of March shortly after I heard that the UK P2P lender Collateral went into administration. As an investor in some Collateral loans it took me by surprise, and at that time I was hopeful of a recovery of the capital invested. This post is to look at some of the developments which have progressed since then.

Communication from the Administrators

As far as communication has gone, I received a series of emails from the current administrators, BDO, across May and June 2018. The emails have a confidentiality clause at the bottom, so I only want to give a brief summary:

23rd May – statutory notice of appointment to creditors & investors. They gave a link to a public facing page with information (https://www.bdo.co.uk/en-gb/collateral-companies-in-administration) to both investors and borrowers. This contains downloadable FAQ .pdfs which are added to on an ongoing basis.

21st June – Joint Administrators’ Proposals for the Companies.

22nd June – A personalised Proof of Debt form. This had my total investment that was in the platform. I had been unable to access that as the website shut down before I was able to check. It matches approximately my estimate from my most recent excel check.

27th June – A further FAQ

Other Notes

• From the (public) FAQs, the administrators have control of the bank accounts
• From the same document it looks like the administrators will try to service the loans going forward, and had a ‘limited’ number of payments up until June. The original security against the loan should be valid for reclaiming unpaid debt. I read on the P2P Independent Forum that another P2P platform Huddle Capital may have taken over at least one of these loans.
• At the time of the Administration announcement the Collateral website was closed with a generic apology holding page (see my last post for a screenshot). I noticed that at some point this was changed to just a ‘This site cannot be reached’ page. The administrators have said in one FAQ that the domain had expired and was listed for auction, which they didn’t attempt to bid on. When I check the whois (a public register of web domain ownership), it doesn’t seem to have moved hands since 2015. So, I’m not really sure what is going on there. Though I’m not sure how much we can trust whois after GDPR, where there was a lot of arguing between different bodies.
• How much have the Administrators charged so far? What happened to the platform and the first administrator? You can find the answers to these questions and more in the detailed read ‘Joint Administrators’ Proposals 21 June 2018’ on the Administrator’s public facing site for Collateral.

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