TORONTO -- Canadian Admiral Corp. Ltd. has announced it would shut down its three Canadian plants and lay off its work force of about 2,400 employees.
Employees at the company's Mississauga Ont. plant were notified by letter Wednesday that the plant would close its doors today and that its bank accounts, inventories and accounts receivables had been taken over by a Toronto chartered accounting firm, Coopers and Lybrand Ltd.
An Admiral plant in Cambridge, Ont. and another plant in Montmagny, Que. were expected to be closed by the weekend, Admiral vice president Phil Coupey said today.
'To the best of our knowledge and belief the company is not in a position to meet present payrolls,' said the accounting firm's letter to employees.
The chartered accountants were appointed agents of the Mercantile Bank of Canada and the National Bank of Canada, after the banks called loans to Admiral totalling $40 million, said Andre Giroux, a Montreal partner in Coopers and Lybrand.
Erwin Hoenigmann, president of local 545 of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, said he was unsure if the laid off workers in Mississauga would be given severance pay.
'We've been assured that we'll get our salaries but we still don't know about the severance pay,' Hoenigmann said.
He said employees had been asked to sign a form in order to be paid for their final week's work, but the union was advising workers not to sign until its lawyers had examined it.
Coupey last week complained that interest rates were 'killing' the manufacturer of household appliances.
'People are not buying big-ticket items,' he said.
Canadian Admiral is a subsidiary of York Lambton Inc. of Montreal, which suffered a 1980 loss of $10.4 million on revenues of $243.1 million. During the first half of 1981, the company lost $2.3 million on sales of $132 million.
Canadian Admiral, which has been in operation for 32 years, accounts for about 70 percent of York Lambton's revenue. York Lambton purchased the subsidiary two years ago from a division of the Rockwell International Corp. for $34 million.
