Andrew Woosnam spent three decades building a recruitment career that let him bank millions and buy a six-acre Berkshire property once owned by Dawn French and Lenny Henry. The machinery that generated that wealth has now entered insolvency twice since September 2025 — and a third company bearing unmistakable resemblance to the first two has already surfaced. The sequence is textbook phoenix operation. Premier Group Recruitment, 99% owned by Woosnam, went into administration in September 2025 owing £2.9m, including £647,000 to HMRC. Three days later, a new entity called PGGBR Ltd — also owned by Woosnam — acquired Premier's assets for a £10,000 upfront payment and a promise of £600,000 more in monthly instalments over two years. That promise beat a competing cash bid of £321,000 on paper, but only because deferred consideration was counted at face value. The promised payments never materialised. PGGBR then ran up an additional £400,000 in HMRC debt before itself entering liquidation last month. During its brief existence, Woosnam appears to have drawn a further £200,000 director's loan from the company. Combined with the £1.2m director's loan and nearly £2m in dividends he took from Premier Group since 2022, Woosnam personally extracted roughly £3.4m from entities that collectively owed creditors over £3m. The structure that enabled this — the pre-pack administration — has been repeatedly flagged in studies as producing worse outcomes for creditors. It allows connected parties to buy back a failing business on deferred terms, effectively shedding debts while retaining the trading operation. When the deferred payments default, as they did here, creditors are left with less than a competing cash bid would have delivered. The administrator at KRE Corporate Recovery did not return the Guardian's calls. Now a third entity has appeared. Xpertis Talent was created in July 2026 and employs at least eight former Premier Group staff. The resemblance is so close that one consultant attributed a 2022 Premier Group industry award to Xpertis in LinkedIn marketing materials. Another employee posted that he started working for the company before it was even registered at Companies House. Woosnam is not listed as a shareholder — the company is wholly owned by an individual based in Thailand, a country where Woosnam is understood to have family connections. The architecture of extraction here is simple but effective: incorporate, trade, extract via loans and dividends, allow debts to accumulate (particularly to HMRC, which moves slowly), enter insolvency, buy back the assets cheaply through a connected party, repeat. Each cycle transfers value from creditors — and ultimately from the public purse — to the individual operator. The £1m-plus owed to HMRC across both insolvencies is money that would otherwise fund public services. The regulatory environment permits this. Pre-pack administrations remain legal. Director's loans from companies approaching insolvency are technically recoverable but in practice difficult to claw back. The Insolvency Service can investigate and potentially disqualify directors, but enforcement is slow and resource-constrained. Until the structural incentives change, the playbook Woosnam appears to have followed will remain available to anyone willing to run it.
