finding company information

[gucciman]

is there any way of finding information on a company i.e. if they are making a profit or a loss and how much they pay their directors etc?
ive looked at the companies house website and they charge a fortune. are there any free reports you can get?

[buildersmate]

"charge a fortune"?
You should be able to source information on a company for about �20. Is this a fortune?

[fredpuli47]

Public companies: yes. There are sites which give you a basic breakdown of the annual report.

Private limited companies' information is at Companies House. It's cheap enough!

There are credit agencies that will give you a report on how the company ranks for financial soundness, creditworthiness, in the context of its type of business and also e-mail you as soon as the company tells Companies House of any notifiable change in its affairs. However, if you think Companies House is expensive then these certainly will be.

[gucciman]

well when i was looking thru the companies house website an annual report is �34 and if you look at the list of seperate notifications then they are �6 each and theres hundreds of them.
ive been made redundant and my ex company is up to no good with our pension so im trying to find out what there up to. with no income at the moment i do not want to fork out 34 here and 34 there for different reports

[fredpuli47]

Companies House is the only source for the full returns , reports and accounts filed by law. On the other hand, it's not obvious what you'd get from there which would help you .How is the company 'up to no good' with your pension, in your opinion? What do you think is going on, or might be going on, now or in the future?

[buildersmate]

The trustees of any pension fund are supposed to be independent of the company. Some of them may well be executives linked to the company, but not all of them, I trust. have you tried contacting the independents.

[gucciman]

this is a 100 yr old family owned firm, most of the trustees work at the company still.

they recently sold the factory and land and moved to a smaller site. they claimed this was necessary to pay off a pension fund deficit of 3 million. since then i have had a letter from the pension fund saying the debt is now 4 million and that the company as suspended all payments into it.
i would like to know what happened to the 5 million they sold the land for, why the pension fund is now even worse off than before and why they arent paying into it if its still in deficit.
my old work colleagues who are still at the company tell me it is on the verge of closing as they are losing money and cant even afford raw materials.
before i was made redundant we had no pay rise at all for 6 yrs and yet the chairman was taking a �250,000 yearly salary out of the place.
something stinks!

[Oneeyedvic]

I wouldn't waste your money on accounts - the accounts on there are for a fixed point in time around 18 months ago. Things sound like they have changed since then.

Sorry, haven't any suggestion as to what you can do