Bradley Wiggins at risk of bankruptcy as near £1m claim remains unpaid
Liquidators of Wiggins’s company are selling the rights to the Bradley Wiggins name
BY VERN PITT
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 09, 2023
Sir Bradley Wiggins is at risk of facing bankruptcy proceedings as the liquidators of his company reveal a claim against him for nearly £1m has
still not been paid.
Plus, the rights to the trademarks of his own name, “Wiggins” and “Wiggo”
are being put up for sale.
Wiggins has been in an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), a financial agreement designed to help people pay off creditors and avoid bankruptcy,
since July 2020.
Wiggins Rights Limited, the company that ran much of Bradley Wiggins’s affairs during his career and which was the parent of the now defunct Team Wiggins, entered liquidation in September 2020.
In an update on the liquidation, filed at Companies House this week, liquidators revealed they have yet to be paid any of the £979,953 they
claimed from Wiggins in 2022 in part to pay off an outstanding director's
loan. Wiggins has previously said he disputes the claim.
They said they had anticipated getting just £600,695 from Wiggins’s IVA, mostly from the sale of a property in Spain.
But they also revealed that the supervisor of Wiggins’s IVA has said the
Tour de France winner has been issued with a “notice of breach” of the conditions of his arrangement.
In the liquidators report dated 19 September they said: “Unfortunately the joint supervisor has informed creditors… if the breach is not remedied then the IVA may be terminated. In the event the IVA is terminated the director
may become subject to bankruptcy proceedings and this would potentially substantially increase the expected timeframe for recovery of the
outstanding directors loan account.”
They added: “I expect that the termination of the IVA should be confirmed within the next few months.”
Liquidators also said that they had instructed Axia Valuation Services to market and sell the rights to the trademarks “Bradley Wiggins”, “Wiggins”
and “Wiggo” ,all of which are held by the company in liquidation.
When asked for comment Wiggins said his financial woes had “gone on for a
few years now with no apparent end in sight”.
He added: “It’s a very historical matter that involves professional negligence from [others] that has left a s**t pile with my name at the
front of it to deal with!
“Happens to a lot of sportsmen while they’re doing the grafting and on that there'll be a number of legal claims from my lawyers left right and center
as a result.”
He added that his legal representatives had experienced “a fair amount of difficulty” in accessing documents.
The liquidators also detailed increased claims from creditors to Wiggins
Rights Limited. While the original directors estimate of money owed to the taxman was £272,360, liquidators said they had received a claim for
£313,447.
Plus, the claims from non-preferential creditors have risen from the
£382,297 estimate at the time of entering liquidation to £425,795. Though they added that one creditor owed an estimated sum over £26,000, thought to
be law firm Harbottle and Lewis, had yet to submit a claim.
Taken together the total claims outlined by liquidators amount to nearly
three quarters of a million pounds.
In December 2020, not long after his companies entered liquidation, a spokesperson said that Wiggins’s involvement in the companies was “not day to day,” and that “this in no way affects Bradley's personal solvency.”
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