HMV owner Doug Putman has said his bid to rescue Wilko failed because is suppliers and landlords “got a little bit greedy”.
The Canadian billionaire, who has succeeded in a turnaround of HMV, was close to securing a deal to take over more than 200 of the discount chain’s 408 stores in September, which would have saved over 12,000 employees.
Speaking on Tuesday’ BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Putman said: “I thought we did have a deal.We thought we would get that over the line.”
He said he would have needed to use Wilko’s IT systems for about four months before transitioning to a new system, but that an agreement could not be reached on the financial terms.
“They were super inflexible,” he explained, speaking on the retailer’s landlords and suppliers.
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“For those four months, the amount of money that the companies wanted to charge made the Wilko deal literally impossible to do. And that was something that was found out really late in the game.”
Putman said one of the landlords, who hosted Wilko’s servers in a tiny room, wanted to charge rent on the 1m sq ft facility for him to keep the computers.
“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,” he said.
“PwC really wanted the deal, we wanted the deal, we had a deal.
“We had an agreement and these things kind of came out of the woodwork for both of us where we were both a bit stunned.
“So that was kind of the most unfortunate piece of the whole thing. Sometimes big companies just don’t think an awful lot about the impacts to individuals.”
His comments came the day that former Wilko directors including Lisa Wilkinson were grilled by MPs over the chain’s collapse.
Wilkinson said she was “devastated” over the collapse and blamed the fallout from Liz Truss’ mini-budget for one of the reasons of the retailer’s collapse.
“We were about to enter into secured lending arrangements with Macquarie when the 2022 mini budget happened,” she explained.
“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.”
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