Cognia EU leaves staff unpaid gives databases a questionable name
The US parent company Cognia Corporation, which filed for bankruptcy there, does not implicate Cognia EU, which extracted information from databases and was involved in a £5.3m project with Edinburgh University, funded by the Scottish Government Intermediate Technology Institute for Life Sciences . Now some 30 employees of the Gyle-based Cognia EU awarded pay and compensation by tribunal, after being made redundant in November last year, seem likely to never see the money.
And as Cognia EU has slipped through the net and is not legally insolvent, the former staff cannot apply to the government-run scheme which ensures employees made redundant when companies go into liquidation receive that to which they are entitled.
Edinburgh South Labour MP Nigel Griffiths has now asked Business Secretary John Hutton to investigate. "Clearly when a company takes public funding it's got a duty to apply high standards in its dealings with staff and that has not been done here."
Dr Julie Nixon, one of the redundant scientists said the workforce received no pay for that month, no money in lieu of notice and no redundancy. "Our one route to receive compensation has been blocked, the redundancy service will not pay us until Cognia EU is officially insolvent, and as the US lawyers will not contact us, this seems unlikely to happen.
Last year, Cognia was awarded £850,000 in Regional Selective Assistance by the Scottish Government for a planned expansion, although the Government said that the money was never handed out. The company is listed as a supplier still on the Life Sciences Scotland page.
Cognia Bioinformatics Inc and BIOBASE Biological Databases/Biologische Datenbanken GmbH announced a partnership in 1998 when Cognia became the exclusive distributor of the TRANSFAC database in the US and Canada.
TRANSFAC was then an annotated database of transcription regulation, an essential field for the understanding of disease and included functional annotations on approximately 2,500 transcription factors and 8,000 corresponding binding sites.
Source: http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com
Web listing:http://tinyurl.com/5rmbh2
http://www.biobase-international.com/pages/