In October 2006 Fare Pak Hampers went to joint administrators. Martha H Thompson and Shagun Dubey. A staggering 150 million families saving up for Christmas lost a lot of money. What made this even worse was the fact that a lot of people knew that this company was in so much trouble even down to the banks, yet they still kept taking money from people. I am one of those people who lost money on this. At the start of the year I had a good Christmas to look forward to and now it has turned my world up side down. I had to tell my children that Santa wouldn’t be able to leave them much this year and to not hope for too much.

I started having hampers so that I didn’t get into debt, after finally getting myself out of it. To be fair it worked well for a few years.

However, now because of what has happened, I have had to get loans to pay for Christmas for my children. I don’t think they should lose out because these people didn’t seem to care what happened to all their customers. My agent has tried so hard to get some money back for us but there is only so much she can do. Some companies and individuals have given donations to a stand-alone charity (Joint administrators are not part of this). The closing date for the donations was 29^th November 2006. Good Will payments in the form of vouchers will be distributed directly to agents by no later than the 18^th December 2006. Which doesn’t give us much time to give our kids a good Christmas.

It is better than nothing though and it will really help people who haven’t been able to get loans and who like me even got turned down by the DHSS for a loan. Which to me is wrong, you would think that the government would put something in to the DHSS to help these people. Then they don’t have to get loans with high interest rates and get into so much debt. The total of Donations received is at £6.000.000. Which is nothing compared to the millions lost but even the smallest amount helps these people to have a better Christmas.