Wilko: Lisa Wilkinson ‘devastated’ over the failure of firm

November 28, 2023

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By Dearbail Jordan
Business reporter, BBC News

28 November 2023, 09:00 GMT

Updated 1 minute ago

Wilko’s chair and granddaughter of the founder has said she is “devastated” for letting down workers, suppliers and customers of the collapsed retailer.

Lisa Wilkinson told MPs: “I am devastated that we have let each and every one of those people down with the insolvency that Wilko has done.”

Wilko collapsed in August leaving 12,000 workers facing redundancy.

Ms Wilkinson is being questioned over the demise of the business that her grandfather started 93 years ago.

In a terse exchange, Liam Byrne, chair of the Business and Trade Committee, asked Ms Wilkinson to apologise for the failure of the Wilko.

“I don’t know how to put into words how sad I am that we have let down all our customers, all our team members, our suppliers, our advisers genuinely, ” she said, adding: “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Mr Byrne replied: “Sorry was the one word I was looking for.”

Ms Wilkinson said: “You can have the word sorry, of course I’m sorry, if you wish me to say the word sorry – I thought devastated covered it. I apologise, I wasn’t trying to be clever.”

Quizzed over why Wilko collapsed, Ms Wilkinson pointed to a number of reasons including last year’s mini budget which she claimed significantly increased the interest rate on a loan with Australia’s Macquarie that Wilko was trying to secure.

“We were about to enter into secured lending arrangements with Macquarie when the 2022 mini-budget happened,” she said.

“Literally we were in the midst of that, and at that point the interest terms on that loan were hiked massively and that became infeasible. So, that was a contributor.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the owner of HMV detailed how he wanted to rescue most of Wilko’s 400 shops but “greed” stood in his way.

Canadian billionaire Doug Putman said firms, including some landlords, had been “super inflexible” and made a deal “literally impossible”.

Mr Putman, who rescued HMV UK in 2019, told the BBC’s Today programme that when saving businesses it is important to be given access to their IT system for around four months to allow a transition to a new system.

“But for those four months, the amount of money that the companies want to charge made the Wilko deal literally impossible to do and that was something that was found out really late in the game,” he said.

“One of the landlords where the servers were stored, I think the facility was a million square feet and the servers were in this tiny little room and they wanted rent on the whole million square feet for us to be able to keep the servers.

“So I would say everyone just got a little bit greedy and unfortunately weren’t thinking about the 10,000-plus jobs that would have been saved and were only thinking about their little piece of it.”

Mr Putman had originally hoped to take over 300 of Wilko’s 400 shops. But that number later dropped to 100 before he walked away.

Eventually, the owner of Poundland took over the leases of 71 Wilko stores and rebranded them, while discount chain B&M also took over more than 50 shops.

But thousands of workers ended up losing their jobs.

Wilko was founded in 1930 by James Kemsey Wilkinson, who opened the first shop in Leicester.

By the 1990s, it had become one of Britain’s fastest-growing retailers.

But the chain struggled against cheaper rivals as customers, grappling with higher inflation, sought out cheaper goods.

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