Carillion: collapsed Wolverhampton group's powerlines business snapped up

Around 22 Carillion employees will transfer across to Murphy.

Although it only employed a small team, Carillion’s UK power business handled major work for National Grid on overhead electricity lines, substations and underground cable framework contracts.

Murphy will also replace the Wolverhampton-based construction and services group on a joint venture with Finnish group Eltel working on National Grid’s new T-Pylons. No price tag is being revealed for the Murphy acquisition.

Strategic

John Murphy, CEO at Murphy, said: “This represents an excellent strategic fit for the business, allowing us to bring a full range of services across the power sector for our customers both in the UK and internationally.”

Murphy will now take over from Carillion working with National Grid on its planned replacement and refurbishment schemes on the transmission network spanning England and Wales.

The three frameworks include the £38 million 20 kilometre overhead line from Richborough to Canterbury, part of the Nemo Link Interconnector scheme between Belgium and the UK network.

Murphy said Carillion employees would join the company, broadening the energy infrastructure services it offered to its power customers.

This expertise will now include designing and installing overhead power lines, substations and major underground systems, complimenting Murphy’s existing capabilities in civil engineering and tunnelling.

Murphy currently employs around 3,000 people, mostly working in the UK, Ireland and Canada.

More from the collapse of Carillion

• Bosses say 'sorry' to MPs as they are accused of being 'asleep at the wheel'

• Midland Met Hospital deal helped bring Wolverhampton construction giant down

• Another 450 jobs axed at projects nationwide

• Express & Star comment: Carillion bosses must be sanctioned

Meanwhile, executives at Carillion have been branded “delusional” and accused of playing the blame game by MPs, as a damning report revealed how company bosses presided over a string of failures that led to its collapse.

A raft of former board members faced MPs from the Business and Pensions Committees, who pushed bosses to take responsibility over the company’s rapid decline.

MPs Rachel Reeves and Frank Field - who are co-chairs of the joint committee inquiry - said the executives were “a series of delusional characters” who “maintained that everything was hunky dory until it all went suddenly and unforeseeably wrong”.

“We heard variously that this was the fault of the Bank of England, the foreign exchange markets, advisers, Brexit, the snap election, investors, suppliers, the construction industry, the business culture of the Middle East and professional designers of concrete beams.”

Desperate dash for cash

Ms Reeves and Mr Field said everything they had seen “points the finger in another direction - to the people who built a giant company on sand in a desperate dash for cash.”

A freshly released report compiled by Carillion just days before its collapse in January showed the company was well aware of a growing pile of problems at the doomed firm.

“The group had become too complex with an overly short-term focus, weak operational risk management and too many distractions outside of our ‘core’,” the presentation said.

It also highlighted “poor planning of effective contract controls and monitoring”, “insufficient understanding of and adherence to contract requirements”, and a “lack of ownership of issues”.