urgent help

Not an answer, but take advice now.

To stop the winding up petition pay the supplier! I am assuming you owe them money and have no dispute with the goods? No reason not to pay.

I am not an expert in this area, but get it in writing that they will not seek to continue with the winding up if you agree payment terms.

IMO the Court will take a VERY dim view of a winding up application when you have offered 75% up front - the idea is to avoid Court at any cost until it is unavoidable. Any Judge seeing that they've turned down your offer COULD easily deny the petition.

I'm surprised that the court would take a dim view if someone owed a lot of money and they had not accepted the 75%. No expert though! If they turned up at court and the person still owed the 100% then I would say it had been a delaying tactic.

IMHO the debtor should make the payment anyway reducing the debt to 25% which would probably help rather than just offer. That way the creditor can then take the decision on the 25% of the debt and see if it is worth talking to come up with new payment terms or continuing with the petition. At the end of the day you can raise a petition for any debt over £750 although it will cost around £880 in court fees plus legal costs on top. You are not going to raise a petition for a small debt and it is a quicker way to find out if you are going to be paid! I believe that as soon as the petition is approved which takes around 2 weeks it has to be served and then it can be advertised in the Gazette which all the banks have to read. Once they see the petition I understand that they are likely to freeze bank accounts which is probably not a good position to be in.

From my experience, we have a client doing a similar thing offering to pay invoices over 90 days in the next 3 months. We have not agreed these terms and refuse to accept them as I'm sure that they are using this to delay payment. If they paid 75% now we are still owed a lot of money so there seems no point in ending the petition. If I was only owed say £1K then I'd probably end the petition and come up with a suitable payment plan.