Rolls-Royce: The 1971 Bankruptcy, a £671M Bribery Fine and a Moon Reactor

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Rolls-Royce Holdings traces back to 1904, when engineer Henry Royce, who made dynamos and electric cranes, built a car that Charles Rolls wanted to sell; the pair incorporated in 1906. In 1971 runaway development costs on the RB211 jet engine pushed the company into voluntary liquidation, and Edward Heath's government nationalized it. The car division was split off in 1973, and the aerospace business stayed under state control until Margaret Thatcher's government privatized it in 1987. In 1994 it bought the American Allison Engine Company for $525 million, and the U.S. Department of Defense required a proxy board over classified F-35 work. Between 2003 and 2015 it sold engines under TotalCare, a "power by the hour" model that charged airlines a flat fee based on hours flown.

Then came the dark years. The IFRS 15 accounting standard barred booking future service revenue upfront, and restated 2015 profits would have been £900 million lower. In 2016 investigators uncovered a bribery network that used middlemen in Brazil, India, China, Angola and Indonesia from 1989 to 2013, and in 2017 the company posted a record £4.6 billion pre-tax loss that included a £671 million settlement with the Serious Fraud Office. Trent 1000 turbine blades on the Boeing 787 cracked prematurely, and the 2020 pandemic grounded the fleets that paid by the hour, leading to about 9,000 job cuts. Under CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç from January 2023, shares rose from £1 to £11 by July 2025 and the company reached a £90 billion valuation, fifth largest on the FTSE 100.

• Under the old rules, profit from a 20-year service contract offset the loss on building the engine itself; IFRS 15 forced the two apart.
• Faulty Trent 1000 engines needed inspection every 300 hours instead of thousands of flight hours between major checks.
• To survive 2020, Rolls-Royce sold its commercial marine unit to Kongsberg, its energy gas turbines to Siemens and ITP Aero to Bain Capital.
• Testbed 80, a £90 million facility opened in Derby in 2021 with 30-centimeter lead walls, X-rays engines running at 140,000 pounds of thrust.
• The company plans up to 16 small modular reactors in the UK, supplies PWR-3 reactors for SSN-AUKUS submarines, and took $3.52 million from the UK Space Agency in 2023 to design a lunar reactor.