Investors in The Solar Cloth Company’s (TSCC) crowd funding campaign are likely to be left empty handed despite a sale of the troubled company’s assets completing last week.

TSCC ceased to trade in late April resulting in the redundancies of five staff, but when the company appointed an administrator at the start of this month a potential sale of the company’s assets was discussed.

The company, which claimed to specialise in tensile PV fabrics suitable for installation on non-load bearing roofs such as car ports, raised just shy of £1 million last year through crowdfunding platform CrowdCube.

Investors were offered a share of 10% of TSCC’s equity in B shares, with all funding said to be used to further the development of the company’s technology.

A statement issued to Solar Power Portal by the company’s administrator Irwin & Co yesterday confirmed that an asset sale had been closed last Friday, stressing that the business had not been sold as a going concern.

There has however been no confirmation as to the identity of the buyer, with previous reports linking a previous director and/or shareholder to the purchase.

Irwin & Co principal Gerald Irwin said that shareholders in the firm are “most unlikely” to receive any return on their investment and that the chances of unsecured non-preferential creditors receiving a dividend as a result of the sale are “exceedingly remote”.

“A full confidential report will be made available to creditors in due course and a letter will be sent to all shareholders confirming the position,” he said.

The latest developments will also raise fresh questions over the protection afforded to investors in crowdfunding campaigns.

TSCC stands to become the largest crowdfunding failure as the £956,000 it raised far larger than the previous record set by claims management company Rebus which collapsed in February this year after raising £816,000 via CrowdCube.

CrowdCube said it could not comment further on this individual case.

 

This article has been amended from its original version to include response from CrowdCube.