PROVIDENCE – A total of 250 employees of The Colibri Group Inc. in Rhode Island have lost their jobs, at least for the time being, after a Manhattan private equity firm successfully petitioned R.I. Superior Court to force the company into receivership.

Providence lawyer Allan M. Shine, of Winograd, Shine & Zacks P.C., today was named by Superior Court Judge Michael A. Silverstein to serve as temporary receiver for the company.

Besides its corporate headquarters in East Providence, the company has plants in Cranston and Smithfield. Those three facilities comprise all Colibri’s assets, Shine said, so all company operations have been shut down.

Shine told Providence Business News that his first priority is to make certain those facilities are secured – with adequate heat, for instance – to protect company assets.

He said he also will be talking to the Colibri management – and “possibly the banks” – to see whether some workers could be brought back and the company reopened “on a limited basis.”

Attempts to reach Founders Equity SBIC, which filed the receivership petition, were not immediately successful.

Colibri – a manufacturer of cigarette lighters, jewelry and clocks for the global market – closed its plants yesterday without warning, posting a notice on its East Providence headquarters to alert employees. The workers reportedly are to be paid through yesterday.

“I think it surprised everybody,” John J. Grady, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association, said of the closing. Colibri was not a member of his group. Grady said he had heard “no rumblings” of a possible Colibri closure.

“These are hard times,” Grady said. “Hopefully with a new [Obama] administration coming in, they can get an economic stimulus package up and running, and get these banks to lend more money.”

Founded in 1928, with the invention of the world’s first automatic cigarette lighter, the Colibri Group is a privately held company that was acquired in 2005 by a trio of investments firms, Founders Equity, Main Street Resources and Citic Provident, the U.S. arm of a major Chinese corporation, according to AllBusiness.com Inc., a Dun & Bradstreet company. Long-time CEO Frederick Levinger arranged the 2005 sale. The company laid off employees on a temporary basis before Christmas, according to published reports, a relatively common occurrence among the state’s manufacturers.

The company at one time sold through as many as 20,000 retailers in the United States, according to information compiled by Dun & Bradstreet Inc. Colibri International has 46 offices across the globe, according to its Web site. The firm is perhaps best known for its “eternal-flame warranty,” whereby Colibri will replace any recently purchased cigarette lighter with manufacturing defects with a new lighter of equal or greater value.

According to Dun & Bradstreet data, The Colibri Group had 433 employees and an estimated $31.9 million in annual sales in 2007.

The Colibri Group Inc. (formerly Kreisler Lighters) – a Delaware corporation with its headquarters in Providence – is a designer and maker of jewelry, lighters, timepieces and other luxury accessories. Its subsidiaries include Colibri, Daring Diamonds, Dolan Bullock, Krementz Jewelry and the Seth Thomas Clock Co. Additional information is available at www.thecolibrigroup.com.

Information about the R.I. Superior Court, including recent court orders and decisions, is available from the R.I. Administrative Office of State Courts at www.courts.state.ri.us.