THOUSANDS of pounds are owed to Herefordshire Council by The Body Shop, which collapsed into administration earlier this year.

Documents published to Companies House by administrators show the company owes money to creditors all over the UK and abroad.

These include Herefordshire Council, which the documents show is owed a total of £4,888 by The Body Shop.

But the amount owed in Herefordshire is small change compared to some company creditors on the 652-strong list, with the total owed amounting to £44,626,414.43.

Hereford's Body Shop has long been based at the corner of Gomond Street and Commercial Street.

The Body Shop fell into administration in early February after previous forecasts for how much funding it would need to keep going proved too low.

In the weeks that followed, administrators said that hundreds of jobs would be lost and dozens of shops closed.

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The business had previously expected that its peak funding requirement would be £63 million, but it later had to revise this forecast to “in excess of £100 million”, a report sent from the administrators to creditors showed.

That difference, combined with the Body shop’s “poor trading performance” meant shareholders “could not commit to the required level of funding,” a report from FRP Advisory said.

The Body Shop was founded by Dame Anita Roddick in 1976, trading out of a small shop in Brighton originally and made its name selling cruelty-free fairtrade products.

But, administrators said, in the late 1990s, the company was “no longer offering a distinctive product” at an “agreeable” price as other brands adopted similar policies and stricter laws came into force.

In 2006, the company was sold to cosmetics giant L’Oreal “who deviated from the core values that drove the brand’s earlier success,” FRP said.

Natura bought the business in 2017 and “attempted to return … to its founding principles”.

That effort was “ultimately unsuccessful” in getting consumers interested again.

By the time it was bought by Aurelius, shortly before Christmas, the business had 197 shops in the UK, directly operated in 20 other countries and had franchises in another 68 countries.