HLG reportedly makes 25 senior-level executives redundant
Contractor reported to owe more than $1.1bn to its Australian minority shareholder, Leighton Group
Habtoor Leighton Group has reportedly made 25 senior level executives redundant, a source has said.
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The Habtoor Leighton Group is reported to have made a number of senior redundancies according to a source who declined to be named.
Speaking to Big Project ME, the source intimated that more than twenty five senior positions had been terminated.
Although Chris Gordon, general manager of Performance and People at Habtoor Leighton Group, agreed that some people had been let go recently, he insisted that the moves were ‘nothing out of the ordinary’.
“We’re no different to any other contractor – we adjust our workforce in line with the location, volume and type of our workload. This is something we manage in the normal course of our business. Our work is moving into new geographies – such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq – and is increasingly infrastructure-related. We have to adjust our workforce in line with this,” he asserted.
The troubled contractor is reported to owe more than $1.1bn to its Australian minority shareholder, Leighton Group, according to financial records lodged with the Australian Stock Exchange.
The debt includes $835 million in loans, letters of credit, interest and receivables, and $312.9 million in carrying value. Leighton Group owns 45% of Habtoor Leighton Group (HLG), with the remaining shares held equally by Khalaf Al Habtoor, chairman of Al Habtoor Group, and Riad Sadik, HLG chairman.
HLG was a co-contractor for the Burj Al Arab and is involved in the construction of the much-delayed Dubai Pearl, a 20 million square foot project, which is expected to be the largest single building in the world, catering for 20,000 people. The $2.4bn project is due to be completed in 2016.
