What was visible, and when
Read the record in order and the collapse was not sudden. The debt concerns were public from 2015. The filings in the years before the end showed a company carrying large liabilities against thin margins in its core contracts, and continuing to pay dividends while it did so. The July 2017 impairment turned a suspicion into a number. By the September warning, the company itself had told the market it would breach its banking covenants.
At no point did a supplier need inside information to tighten terms. The filings, the profit warnings and the covenant disclosure were all public. What was missing was not data but attention to it: the habit of checking the record of a counterparty that looked too big to fail.
The pattern, generalised
Carillion is the largest case of a pattern that repeats at every scale: rising debt visible in the accounts, impairments arriving late, dividends maintained past the point the balance sheet supports them, and finally a covenant breach that converts slow decline into sudden failure. The same signals appear in the filings of much smaller companies, and the same reading applies. The signs of insolvency guide is that reading, in order.
What it means for a credit decision
Size is not a cushion. A large counterparty with public debt problems is a large exposure, and the public record is the place where the problems show first. Checking filings, watching for impairments and covenant language, and treating a second profit warning as the event it is: none of it requires access, only the decision to look.
The same record-reading, applied to any counterparty of any size. Search any England & Wales company free.