A MOTORCYCLE company which crashed with debts of £10million has been brought back to life - by the man who founded it more than 30 years ago.

Alan Clews has led a family buy-out of Blackburn's CCM Motorcycles from the receivers and plans to resume trading from his home town of Bolton.

Michaela Fogarty, wife of Blackburn's former World Superbike champion Carl, was among investors who lost out in July when the banks pulled the plug on the company, which employed around 50 people at its Shadsworth headquarters.

CCM will be retaining links with East Lancs by locating its spare parts operation in Darwen, which it hopes will be up and running in the next few weeks.

Alan's son Austin said the rent being demanded for its old factory at Shadsworth was just too expensive to enable CCM to keep production of its award-winning bikes in Blackburn.

"We'll build the company step-by-step and make CCM big, but do it slowly," he said. "We can't run the company like it was before - the overheads were too high. Relaunching CCM is a challenge, but it's something we have done before and I am sure we can do it again."

CCM - Clews Competition Machines - has had a chequered history since it was first set up by Alan in Bolton in 1971.

While its bikes have won industry plaudits over the past 20 years, it has lurched from one cash crisis to another after it relocated to Shadsworth in the late 1970s.

Alan sold the business to engineering company Armstrong in 1980 and bought it back seven years later. In 1998, a new management team took over and attracted more than £10million of investment.

CCM launched its 400 series last year to critical acclaim and had planned to increase annual production to 5,000 bikes.

But in July, the management announced CCM would be closing, blaming the decision "intense foreign competition" and the failure to attract any additional funding.