Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Electric vehicles myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Failed electric van start-up Arrival collapsed owing close to £200mn and holding less than £150,000 of cash, insolvency documents show.
Arrival’s debts range from £10mn owed to HM Revenue & Customs and £650,000 to various local councils, to magazine subscriptions, a coffee roasting business and £720 to a document-shredding company. It also owed £421 to private-hire group Addison Lee and £4,000 to a landscape gardener.
Some of the unpaid bills stretch back at least two years, according to people familiar with the list of creditors released by administrators EY.
Backed early by Hyundai, the company was once valued at $15bn when it listed on the Nasdaq exchange in 2021.
The business, which never generated revenues, had been cutting jobs before it collapsed to contain costs. At one point, Arrival said it had let go of so many people that it was unable to file its accounts, something that ultimately led it to be delisted from Nasdaq.
The UK arm of the business fell into administration earlier this year.
The “statement of affairs” released by administrators at EY are an estimate of Arrival’s condition and assets. Fuller details will be published in other documents in the coming weeks.
The latest filing shows the company had less than £150,000 in cash when it collapsed, and that it owed more than £73mn to other parts of the business. Arrival owes about £87mn to secured creditors, £2mn to preferential creditors, and a further £102mn to unsecured creditors, the document shows.
Many of the company’s assets, including machinery, computer equipment and furniture, are worth a fraction of their original value. These include £84,000-worth of motor vehicles.
The documents, the figures in which are estimated, also value Arrival’s intellectual property at £50mn. The company had developed a new, highly automated way of building vehicles using small-scale factories and pre-made body panels, but the system never produced a working vehicle. The first van that the company made using the factory later turned out to have been largely hand-built.
The document also shows the spread of debts, both inside and outside the company. Seven current or former employees are owed almost £17,000 in total. The company also owes money to several other Arrival entities, including a £1.1mn debt to a subsidiary in Mauritius. The business once considered opening an office on the tropical island, where one of its directors has family ties.
It also owes £211,000 to consultancy McKinsey and £295,000 to EY, which is handling the administration process. Other creditors include Savills, LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services, and an immigration agency.
