Bulb administrators to appoint Lazard to find a buyer

Britain’s seventh biggest supplier - with 1.5 million customers - was placed into special administration in November after regulators deemed it too large to process it through a supplier of last resort. 

According to the Financial Times, Lazard was set to be called back in partly because it was familiar with Bulb as a business. The bank sought to find new investors for the energy supplier last year and sell it to a rival but the process came to nothing. 

Lazard will now seek to rekindle interest in Bulb - with rivals including Centrica, Ovo Energy and Octopus all running the rule of the energy company during last year’s sales process. These efforts were abandoned in November because, according to court documents sent to creditors in January, they were no longer willing to invest in or acquire the company “on a solvent basis”. 

Speaking to creditors in January this year, Teneo told creditors that a sale or rescue of the company “might not be possible until spring 2022” - something industry experts said is optimistic given the conditions in the energy market. 

According to the Financial Times, reports published by Teneo and the administrators for Bulb’s parent company Simple Energy in recent weeks have shown the company owed £254m to customers when it was rescued in November using a taxpayer loan. 

Towards the end of November, the government announced it would set aside £1.69bn in a taxpayer loan to support the company. Court documents filed in November on behalf of Ofgem, however, suggest that this was not the cheapest option available to rescue the company - as transferring the company’s customers to another provider under a supplier of last resort scheme would have cost £1.28bn.

When reached out to by the Financial Times, Teneo and Lazard declined to comment.