The situation
A regional public transport authority had run a competitive tender to refurbish eleven stations over four years. The highest-scoring bid came from a construction contractor we refer to as Contractor K. Its submission cited three comparable reference projects, a strong safety record and twelve years of experience. Database screening of the company and its directors returned no sanctions matches, no adverse media and no debarments.
The authority's integrity unit had a policy of enhanced checks on contracts above a value threshold. It asked us to test the bid's claims before the award decision.
The question
Is Contractor K the company it presents itself as, with the history and capability it claims? And is there anything in its record, or that of the people who control it, that the authority would need to consider under its procurement rules?
What we did
A lead due diligence investigator, a records researcher and a construction sector analyst worked the case, with an independent red-team reviewer.
1. Tested the claimed history against the registry
Contractor K claimed twelve years of experience. Its registry record showed incorporation three years earlier. The same registry showed a dissolved company with a near-identical name, registered at the same yard address, with two directors in common. That predecessor had entered insolvency four years earlier. Insolvency notices published in the official gazette, and the liquidator's public report, recorded 31 unpaid creditors, most of them subcontractors.
2. Checked the reference projects
Procurement award notices and the clients' own published project pages showed that two of the three reference projects cited in the bid had been contracted to, and delivered by, the dissolved predecessor. The bid did not mention the predecessor at all.
3. Read the court records
A search of civil court dockets in the region found a claim by a fit-out subcontractor against Contractor K, filed eighteen months earlier and settled before trial. The claim was never reported in the press. Its filings alleged unpaid invoices and, more seriously, that completion certificates for fire-stopping work on a hospital project had been signed before the work was inspected. The exhibits included copies of the certificates, signed by Contractor K's commercial director, and correspondence naming the site managers involved.
4. Searched the printed record
A regional newspaper archive, digitized but not indexed by search engines, held a 2014 court report. The commercial director, then working for a different contractor, had pleaded guilty to false accounting connected to a municipal maintenance contract and been fined. The report gave his name, age and town, all consistent with his current registry entries. We confirmed the outcome against the published court list from the same week.
5. Compared the people
Professional profiles of fourteen staff named on Contractor K's bid listed the predecessor as their previous employer, under the same managers, until the month it entered insolvency. The continuity of people, premises, name and references was complete.
6. Challenged the conclusion
The reviewer made two points. First, replacing a failed company with a new one is common in construction and not unlawful in itself. Second, the fire-stopping allegation was never tested in court. We agreed on both. The report described the phoenix pattern as a fact and the certification allegation as an unproven claim, with the documents attached. The 2014 conviction was reported with its date and context, after the authority's counsel confirmed that it was lawful and relevant to consider under the procurement rules.
What we found
- High confidence: Contractor K is a continuation of a dissolved predecessor that left 31 creditors unpaid, controlled by the same people from the same premises.
- High confidence: two of the three reference projects in the bid were delivered by the predecessor, which the bid did not disclose.
- High confidence: Contractor K's commercial director was convicted of false accounting in connection with a public contract in 2014.
- Moderate confidence: it is likely that completion certificates on at least one recent project were signed before inspection, based on documents filed in a settled civil claim.
Screening databases matched the new company name and found nothing, because the history belonged to a different company. The civil claim settled quietly and was never reported, and the 2014 conviction existed only in a newspaper archive that search engines do not index. Each finding required reading a primary record directly.
The outcome
We delivered the report on day twelve. The authority put the findings to Contractor K through its formal clarification process.
- The bid was excluded under the tender's rules on misrepresentation of experience, and the contract was awarded to the next-ranked bidder.
- The authority's integrity unit referred the certification allegation to the hospital operator concerned, which commissioned an independent inspection.
- The authority changed its standard tender documents to require disclosure of predecessor entities and of the delivering entity for every reference project.
What made the difference
We treated the bid as a set of claims to test, not a profile to screen. The registry gave us the predecessor, the predecessor gave us the references, and the people gave us the court records. None of it was hidden. It was simply filed under a name nobody had thought to search. The method is set out in Reading a company from the outside.