Creditors of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s failed Italian restaurant chain will lose most of the £80m (R1.5bn) they are owed after its collapse in May 2019, according to administrator KPMG.
Unsecured creditors of Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain are unlikely to recover most of the R1,5 billion they are owed.
HSBC, Oliver’s holding company, which owned £57.7m of the company’s secured debt, would also “suffer a significant shortfall”, KPMG said in a progress report.
Oliver became one of the first million-pound celebrity chefs when he launched his Naked Chef series of cookbooks.
Unsecured creditors include the shareholders of which Oliver was the largest with 47%, and 288 trade creditors. Town councils are owed collectively about £1.2m in business rates and other levies.
Jamie’s Italian was launched in 2008 shortly before a private equity-fuelled boom in the sector that propelled expansion among rivals.
The 22-strong restaurant chain went into administration in May 2019 despite repeated attempts by Oliver to save it, including a £26m cash injection and a proposed deal with Aurelius Group, a German investment group.
According to a report in the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) published last week, the collapse was the most high-profile among a number of restaurant closures in 2019, with 11,280 job losses across the sector, up 8% from 2018. Oliver’s Italian chain accounted for about 1,000 of those lost jobs.
The CRR said it expected a further 12,000 job losses in the sector this year but most would come from independent restaurants that lacked financial firepower to reinvest in their businesses.
Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR, said the failure of Jamie’s Italian had been “inevitable” and that the chain had suffered from “poor quality control”.
Undeterred, Oliver has continued to expand abroad.