Is this illegal?

[Deleted User]

DullGreyGuy said:

Deleted_User said:

As above though, doing an S75 on the company might be possible depending on the ticket price and terms but it is a bit dodgy to try and take the money off the bank, which might take many many months, and then pay it back to what could well be a phoenix company

The buying company is making money from their customers. The customer's of the old company are being protected by their credit providers. Those offering credit facilities are aware of their S75 obligations when creating products and price it into the model. 

Clearly phoenix companies do exist but there is no evidence in that this is the case here and there are specific laws and actions to prevent them.

born_again said:
Seems odd that the "New" company would call people if they had not taken over the companies liabilities. Or how else would they know your details?

Customer lists are a valuable asset if they have the appropriate marketing permissions to enable them to be sold. Certainly worth an outbound call if someone has attended every year for two decades to tell them its back on via a new company if they want to continue attending. 

You would be surprised how wrong you are, it's a very common thing particularly to avoid tax debt or to get out of liabilities and then relaunch doing the same festival, same venue, same contractors etc. Try reading Private Eye and you'll see how often this happens even with big firms.