Deals

The UK parent company of Joe.co.uk has entered administration.

Administrators from KPMG are seeking a buyer for London-registered Joe Media Limited, which owns Joe.co.uk, the social news website for male millennials with millions of monthly visitors.

They told BusinessCloud that there are no plans for redundancies.

Joe Media Ltd entered the UK market in 2015 as a subsidiary of Irish firm Maximum Media Network, and originally carried that same name.

Ireland-based Maximum Media is the owner of Joe.ie – the original Joe website – and sister sites SportsJoe, Her and HerFamily.

Last week a court in Ireland appointed an examiner to Ireland’s MMN at the request of creditor BPC Lending Ireland DAC.

BPC claimed it had advanced just over €6 million to the firm under a 2018 loan agreement, with monthly repayments of €68,000 due. The balance due has grown slightly to €6.1m, it said, while MMN failed to pay interest on its loan in March and April and requested ‘a capital and interest moratorium’, which was subsequently declined.

On May 12th it also declined a request from the company’s principal Niall McGarry for a temporary “standstill”, according to the Irish Times, as ‘it could either pay salaries or BPC but not both’.

UK-based Joe Media Ltd was a guarantor for the €6.1m loan.

Overall traffic on the Joe family’s websites is around 42m a month.

Joe Media Ltd’s joint administrators Stuart Irwin and Ian Leonard, of KPMG, stated to BusinessCloud: “The administrators are continuing to trade the company and intend to undertake a marketing process with a view to selling the business as a going concern.

“At this time there are no plans for any redundancies. The joint administrators conducted a staff briefing [on Wednesday] outlining their plans.”