MORE than 100 jobs have gone after one of Hampshire’s largest car sales groups went into administration yesterday.

Dozens of cars were loaded on to transporters to be taken away from the Southgate Group’s Southampton dealership, pictured, which shut yesterday.

The £250,000 dealership at the corner of Winchester Road and Romsey Road, employed around 40 staff.

The forecourts of the group’s other two Peugeot dealerships in Winchester and Andover were also cleared.

Southgate’s Mitsubishi franchises in Romsey, Poole and Bridport and a joint Subaru and Peugeot site in Blandford, Dorset, ceased trading the previous week with the loss of 43 jobs.

The family-run Southgate Group, founded in 1996, employed 111 staff who are now redundant.

The collapse of the business comes after Autoplanet, which had a dealership at Second Avenue, Millbrook among seven owned by Waters Retail Limited, went into administration last month with the loss of nearly 200 jobs.

Cashflow difficulties and poor trading, due mainly to the current economic climate, were blamed.

Administrators Begbies Traynor, who had been trying to put together a rescue buy-out deal for the company, were formally appointed yesterday.

Julie Palmer, a partner at Begbies Traynor said there had been some parties interested in purchasing the business, but had decided to wait for the administration to go through to set up fresh dealerships on the Southgate sites. She said some staff could be rehired.

Southgate Group operations director Garry Rowles was unavailable for comment.

Southgate's plight comes on the back of falling new car sales across Britain.

In September, when the new '61' plate arrived, national sales were 0.8 per cent down on the same month in 2010.