Carillion Collapse Could Lead to Thousands of Job Losses in U.K.<br />Mrs. May replied that if the government had withheld business from Carillion, “that<br />would be the best way to ensure that companies failed and jobs were lost.”<br />“We ensured that all but one of those contracts was a joint venture,” she added, meaning<br />that “there is another company available to step in and take over the contract.”<br />The Insolvency Service, a government agency, said on Wednesday that it had halted bonus and severance payments to former Carillion executives.<br />LONDON — The fate of thousands of workers hung in the balance on Wednesday after the collapse of Carillion, a major construction and services company<br />that has a vast network of subcontractors and reaches deep into many facets of British life.<br />But Interserve, business analysts and the government all said<br />that concerns about the company were overstated; in a statement, the Cabinet Office said, “We do not believe that any of our strategic suppliers are in a comparable position to Carillion.”<br />Carillion, with about 20,000 employees in Britain, touched myriad sectors of British life, as well as operating overseas.<br />But the government has said that it could not ensure<br />that thousands of the company’s employees working on private-sector projects would be paid past Wednesday.<br />“It looks like the government was handing Carillion public contracts either to keep the company afloat, which clearly hasn’t worked, or it was just deeply negligent of the crisis<br />that was coming down the line,” Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said in Parliament on Wednesday.
