Former Artenius UK boss set to invite ex-employees back

Feb 2 2010 By Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

Sometime over the next few weeks former Artenius employees on Teesside will be receiving a call they never expected. Sue Scott met the man who's spent the past six months preparing himself to pick up the phone.

JANUARY 27, 2010, will go down as one of those rare red letter days in Mark Kenrick’s life - not just because he was in Old Trafford to see his team put away three crucial goals in its Carling Cup final bid.

Impressive as it was, Wayne Rooney’s winning header was nothing compared to the multi-million pound deal the former Artenius UK boss had helped put in the back of the net just hours earlier. That triumph had taken place in the small hours of the morning, 5,500 miles away in a boardroom in South Korea and the cheer that went up for Fergie’s men didn’t get close to how he’d felt as six months of intense negotiation finally came to a nail-biting conclusion.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster,” says the man who exactly 184 days earlier had stood in front of more than 200 of his colleagues, burning with frustration and what turned out to be advanced symptoms of swine flu, and told them the game was up. Artenius, form- erly owned by Dupont and before that ICI - for whom many of them had worked alongside Mark - was starved of cash by parent company La Seda de Barcelona and going down owing millions. There wasn’t even enough to honour the redundancy agreements.

“It was awful. I’ll never forget standing up there in front of those people,” he says. “I was physically and emotionally upset for months.”

Seeing the Wilton resin factory, which had been relegated to the lowest division by La Seda when it triggered administration, re-emerge with both its PTA and PET production plants and more than 180 jobs intact last week, was a real Wembley moment for the Man U fan - and the team that he had to thank was as exhausted as he was.

For months, the 41 staff that stayed behind to sift through the paper trail that would eventually lead to new ownership under Korean owned KP Chemicals - part of the $43bn Lotte group - had picked over the corporate rubble, identifying the structural weaknesses and determined to rebuild.

Administrators from Deloitte, for whom Mark was to develop huge admiration, joined the skeleton staff to save what they could from the wreckage on behalf of former employees and a long queue of creditors - nearly all of whom have since agreed to begin re-supplying.

There were several false starts which, given last year’s hostile financial climate was frustrating but not entirely surprising and indicates that the British chemical industry is not past its sell-by date. A management buyout was contemplated, but the enormous resource needed for PTA production, without which the sustainability of the PET plant was doubtful, was ruled out early on.

A group of venture capitalists got close but, in the end, the working capital needed for a unit turning over half a billion euro a year would have strained its credit lines to breaking point.

“We took two or three through due diligence, but KP became a realistic offer in October,” says Mark.

“They were the only one offering to buy both plants - the only ones that could have afforded it were existing trade partners who already had a substantial presence.”

Ironically, although painful at the time, La Seda - which has since restructured its debt and is planning to press ahead with building another PTA production unit in Portugal employing a handful of former Artenius staff based at Stokesley’s Tanton Technology as consultants - did the Wilton plant a favour.

Cut adrift from the Spanish corporate, the management team was, for the first time, fully in charge of the business. For Mark and close colleague, site director Gary Conroy, who had spent a lifetime peddling the wheels in UK divisions of much larger organisations, it was a scary, but illuminating experience.

“We all learned an enormous amount about the business that we never knew,” admits Mark. “Everyone who stayed did a fantastic job, but they’ll probably all do things very differently when it starts up again.”