Potters Bar maintenance firm makes record profit

Jarvis, the maintenance company at the centre of the Potters Bar rail crash investigation, reported a near- doubling of profits yesterday and said its workers could not conceivably be responsible for the accident.

The company hit out at "innuendo" that had already blamed a failure of maintenance on the line, which had been contracted out to Jarvis, for the fatal derailment last month.

Paris Moayedi, the chief executive of Jarvis, said the company, which has seen its shares plunge by 40 per cent since the accident, had been the victim of "rumourmongering" that had blamed it unfairly. He said that an independent investigation commissioned by Jarvis had shown that the company's employees had followed all the correct procedures, and that multiple interviews with the workers involved had produced a consistent story. Kevin Hyde, the chief operating officer at Jarvis, said: "What was done to these points was the reverse of our procedures. It is inconceivable that our people would be involved."

Investigators discovered immediately after the accident that, at the points that caused the derailment, two sets of nuts were missing, while a third set had been tightened too far.

Mr Moayedi said: "All the evidence points to the fact that maintenance was carried out correctly ... The findings [of the official investigation] will demonstrate that our people were not to blame."

Jarvis announced that its profits for the 12 months to 31 March had jumped to £45.8m, up from £24.8m for the same period a year earlier. The engineering giant saw its turnover soar 31 per cent to £949m, while the dividend payout to shareholders increased from £14m to £16m. Profit from rail activities increased from £24.5m to £35.4m.

The company works almost exclusively for the public sector. As well as its rail operations, Jarvis builds roads, schools and hospitals, mainly under the Private Finance Initiative. Its order book for such work now stands at £10bn, and it is bidding for a further £12bn of business.

Mr Moayedi admitted that he could not categorically rule out a maintenance failure as the cause of the disaster. "We are not saying what the cause was, but that all the options, including sabotage, should be investigated. We don't believe our people did anything wrong, but we are not judge and jury. It is not for the media or casual observers to say it was this or that."

The Railtrack inquiry still has up to 12 weeks to run. Mr Moayedi added that, should the investigation somehow find Jarvis guilty, he would not consider resigning. The company said its legal advice had been that, because all procedures had been followed, it could not face corporate manslaughter charges, even if maintenance were found to be at fault. Jarvis has £155m of insurance cover, which would pay out even in the event of "gross negligence". As a result of the Potters Bar tragedy, Jarvis said it would be introducing digital cameras to take an electronic record of all its rail work.

Mr Moayedi said that Potters Bar differed fundamentally from the two other recent rail disasters at Hatfield and Ladbroke Grove. In those other cases there were "clear decisions" by management to disregard certain defects that had come to light.

"That type of accident is totally different to an accident with no prior knowledge of anything wrong."

Rail maintenance and track renewal makes up a third of Jarvis' turnover. Mr Moayedi said rail was an "integral" part of the business and the company had no intention of quitting this work.

"There are 50,000 people working in the rail industry, under harsh conditions, in the dead of night often. All they get is abuse from people whose motives are not honourable," Mr Moayedi said. "We are pleading to the media, for God's sake, give the industry a chance."

Separately, the novelist Nina Bawden, whose husband was killed in the derailment, said that a public inquiry was the "only honest" way to uncover the cause of the Potters Bar rail crash.