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Laptops containing vital accounts information are missing.

So is £82m.

And there's a paper trail featuring three collapsed travel companies, hundreds of redundancies and the holiday plans of tens of thousands of people.

We're back to talking Globespan and its FlyGlobespan airline, which collapsed together just before Christmas, and about which regular readers of The Ledger will recall some previous unravelling of the story.

This is also the story of E-Clear, the card transaction company that withheld around £34m of payments.

Administrators of both Globespan and E-Clear are laying out a bit more of the story.

Globespan's creditors were told by its administrators on Tuesday that unsecured creditors can expect 5% of the money they are owed.

That comes with a call to government and regulators to speed up the phasing in of the regulation of such transactions company, which is not due to be complete until spring of next year.

Snowbirds

On Wednesday, while the City of London digests the Budget, administrators for E-Clear are setting out their stall to creditors.

It's a big stall, but with nothing much on it.

They say £82m is being claimed by creditors, but there's next to nothing left to distribute.

While Globespan accounts for about £35m of that, the biggest creditor is Sunwing, owed £46.7m.

Slovakian airline Sky Europe is also wanting £4.4m back.

There is confirmation in this that E-Clear's problems stemmed from trying to pay off its exposure to the collapse of XL and Zoom airlines in summer 2008, using the money being generated by its continuing airlines.

So this may just be ineptitude on a very substantial scale.

One of those companies that continued to operate was Go Travel Direct, later renamed Go Travel South, based in Nova Scotia, and set up by Hugh Boyle, one of the Scottish brothers behind Zoom.

That collapsed a month ago, with E-Clear being blamed again.

That left a lot of Canadian 'snowbirds' either stranded in Florida and the Caribbean, or with their future bookings worthless.

Rolls-Royce Phantom

A somewhat smaller creditor was Swimming Nature, whose swimming lesson bookings were handled by E-Clear, and which was left £210,000 out of pocket.

The details from BDO, the E-Clear administrators, hint at a luxurious lifestyle being enjoyed by Elias Elia, boss of the transactions company.

He had a Rolls-Royce Phantom on hire purchase, and used his company loan account to buy a Ferrari F430 Spider, a Mercedes and a Range Rover.

Ahead of his company's collapse, some £50,000 had made its way into the hands of a former E-Clear employee, who had become an employee of E&K Elian Estates, a related Cypriot company "apparently to meet certain expenses in the event that the Royal Bank of Scotland decided to freeze the company's bank accounts".

Half of that has been repaid so far, with the rest spent on those expenses, including the public relations fees for those employed to tell me, among others, that E-Clear was in fine fettle.

But there are other details yet to be uncovered by E-Clear's administrators.

That's because they found vital paperwork and laptops missing.

Only with the help of the landlords of Elias Elia's offices did they pay a visit to his other company office in Mayfair, from which some paperwork was recovered, but not all the laptops.

Stand by for more news from the forensic accounting front, after E-Clear's administrators have talked things over with their creditors.