Comet's last remaining stores will trade for the final time today as the curtain comes down on another famous high street name.
The closure of the final group of 49 stores, which includes a number in Scotland, comes seven weeks after Deloitte was appointed as administrator.
The collapse marks one of the biggest high-street casualties since the demise of Woolworths in 2008.
Deloitte has so far failed to find a buyer for the company or any of its shops and plans for it to present a report outlining the position of creditors in the collapse were being delayed.
The report is likely to indicate that insufficient funds have been raised from the winding down of the chain to pay up to £24 million in redundancy payments to 6600 staff.
This means the Government will probably have to step in and ensure workers receive their payments.
The statement will also disclose that unsecured creditors – including HM Revenue & Customs, which is owed £26.1m – will receive nothing.
Secured creditors, such as the backers of Comet's parent company Hailey Acquisitions, are expected to get payments of just less than £50m.
However, this is a shortfall of £95m on the amount owed at the time of the collapse.
The scale of the problems at Comet will also be highlighted in the report, with the chain reportedly racking up losses of £95m in the year to April, followed by a further £31m in the subsequent five months as credit insurers lost confidence and withdrew support for the business.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article