The UK’s biggest printer Polestar is in administration, with at least some of plants unlikely to open today and the rest dependent on the doubtful emergence of a buyer.

The move into administration and the almost certain likelihood of the printer being broken up comes a month after the business went through a pre-pack sale which failed.

Pre-pack is a tactic not too far removed from a Phoenix play, in pre-pack a business is effectively sold without the debts in a pre-arranged deal between the owners and administrators.

ProPrint readers may remember the US financiers KKR who bought the crumbling Geon tried a similar tactic, only to be thwarted by the paper merchants who refused supply, once they heard Stephen Anstice – then CEO of IPMG – tell them that if any of them supplied the pre-packed Geon they would never supply his business again.

In this instance Polestar’s major customer DMG Media has refused to come to the party, and is now switching its printing to Europe. UK printers fear that at least $200m worth of print will immediately move to the continent. DMG’s move has thrown the whole business into doubt.

The once mighty Polestar had been printing some 50 million magazines a week with both gravure and offset plants, it also prints books, journals and is the country’s largest newspaper supplement printer.

Once owned by the infamous publisher and pension thief Robert Maxwell when it was known as British Printing Company, the business has been through numerous restructures over the past 20 years as it has continually bled money for its owners.

A Gulf consortium took it over in 1998 and eight years later lost the entire value of their investment, lenders then took control before selling it to a US private equity firm five years later also in a pre-pack deal.

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