THE company which used to run Bournemouth’s popular Flirt Cafe Bar is to be wound up with no money for the vast majority of its creditors who were owed more than £550,000.

Administrators sold the venue to a new business, Flirt Catering Limited, in February 2019.

The cafe bar, which had been credited with driving a transformation at Bournemouth’s Triangle, had been bought from its founders in 2017 by Shaan Hussain.

Mr Hussain lent the business £98,000 from another of his companies as sales fell and losses rose. But it was not able to cover wages and rent by January, 2019.

Administrators for Flirt Cafe Bar Limited said the cafe was days away from closing when they managed to sell it.

Flirt Cafe Bar was 'within days' of closing, administrators say

Thin Cat Loan Syndicates is the only creditor to have received any money – £2,000 on a loan of £159,000 secured against the company’s assets, according to the report by joint administrators James Everist and Andrew Cordon of CFS Restructuring.

Mr Hussain is among the unsecured creditors who will not receive any of the money they are owed. According to previous reports by the administrators, the business owed £98,000 to Jacks for Gents Ltd, of which he was a director until January 2019, and £20,000 to Mr Hussain personally.

Thin Cat Loan Syndicate was owed another £148,633 from an unsecured loan, HMRC was owed £78,000, and Hunt’s Foodservice, owed £2,788, according to previous updates.

Staff were owed £16,904 in wage arrears and were helped to submit claims to the Redundancy Payments Office.

Administrators also found there was a shortfall of £1,712 in pension contributions and calculated a claim to the Redundancy Payments Office.

“During the period, the joint administrators have reported the failure to maintain the pension scheme contribution to the relevant authorities for them to consider," the report said.

The assets of the business were sold for a total of £28,000 to Flirt Catering Limited. Its director Stephen McManus ran Stephen C Associates, the collapsed company behind the Upton House Music Festivals and a cancelled Olly Murs concert at Kings Park.

Bournemouth's Flirt Cafe Bar opens terrace for people waiting for takeaways

Mr McManus told the Daily Echo: “One of the reasons for buying it was that I felt so sorry for the staff and wanted to try and save their jobs.

“We’re still trading despite Covid. We’re lucky that with the outside decking, the business has been going really well. There’s been a move for people to support independents and that’s something we believe. We we use a lot of independent suppliers and small suppliers at the same time as people are using us.

“A lot of customers say ‘We’d much rather come to you than a high street brand’.”