As far as I can make out, the basic situation is that they had a hefty tax bill to pay, and HMRC wasn't prepared to cut them any more slack.
And if a limited liability company gets into a situation like that (i.e. where they can't afford to pay a compulsory bill), they're trading insolvently, and as soon as that becomes an unignorable and unresolvable fact the directors are then required to stop trading immediately on pain of the company losing its limited liability status. And since that would involve the directors becoming personally liable for Network's debts...
...well, they had no choice but to wind the company up.
That's why these collapses are often so sudden.
(I haven't quite been there myself, but thirty-odd years ago I was a company director at a time when we spent months holding formal meetings every Monday morning where the first item on the agenda was "Are we trading insolvently?". The answer was never a firm "yes", and we were eventually bailed out by a local businesswoman so we never got to the winding-up stage, but the sums involved were far less than Network's equivalent would have been.)
 |