The collapse of Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant chain has left creditors facing losses of £83m. According to the joint administrators’ report for Jamie’s Italian, the biggest loser is HSBC, which had provided £39.4m to the company in the form of secured debt against the chain’s 23 restaurants across the country (The Times £). The collapse of Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant chain has burnt an eye-watering £25m hole in the celebrity chef’s pockets, it has been revealed. Creditors have also suffered £83m of losses after stumping up funds to try to keep the flagging business afloat. (The Daily Mail)
In the last two weeks, Tesco has hiked the price of 1,000 products across its supermarkets, including bananas, cheese, pasta and jam (The Daily Mail). Tesco has raised the price of more than 1,000 items in two weeks, including household staples such as pasta, rice and cheese (The Telegraph). Tesco says it held off raising prices for as long as it could, and insists it is still competitive when compared to Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons (The BBC).
The march of the discounters across the retail landscape is continuing apace, with cut-price chains planning to open three times as many shops as their traditional rivals next year. Discount chains including Lidl, Aldi, B&M Bargains, The Range, Wilko, Home Bargains, Poundland and Jack’s, Tesco’s cheaper offering, have planning permission for 190 new stores next year, according to analysis by Barbour ABI. (The Times £)
Spending spree has turned Euro Garages into one of Britain’s biggest private companies. Zuber and Mohsin Issa, who opened their first site in Bury in 2001, embarked on a dramatic expansion of their company Euro Garages last year, recently filed accounts reveal. (The Telegraph)
Starbucks’ loss-making UK chain has closed dozens of outlets in London, marking a retreat from a city where it once dominated the coffee shop scene. The US giant, which became synonymous with the Friends-style cafe culture in the late 1990s, has shuttered as many as 35 stores across the capital in the past 18 months. (The Daily Mail)
The world’s biggest brewer will make a small dent in its $106 billion debt pile after agreeing the sale of its Australian operations to Asahi of Japan in a deal worth $11.3 billion. (The Times £)
Shares in Asahi were on track for their biggest one day fall in over three years following the Japanese company’s decision to acquire Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Australian operations, significantly increasing its debt load in the process. (The Financial Times £)
Marks & Spencer has recruited a key executive from McDonald’s as part of chairman Archie Norman’s efforts to overhaul the company’s culture and break from the past. (The Daily Mail)
Consumer confidence fell deeper into negative territory in the second quarter of the year as uncertainty about the economic outlook weighed heavily on households, according to a report. (The Times £)
The price of confectionery could rise as Ivory Coast and Ghana, the west African countries that account for almost two-thirds of the world’s cocoa, join forces to push up prices. Inspired by Opec, the oil producers’ cartel, the two nations announced this month a fixed price premium of $400 a tonne over the benchmark cocoa futures price, for every contract sold by either country for the 2020/21 season. (The Financial Times £)
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