New offer for struggling retail chain Wilko – BBC News

A new bailout bid from Wilko has emerged as efforts to save the retail chain continue.

Private equity firm M2 Capital has confirmed it has made a £90million offer for the company and has pledged to keep all its employees in jobs for two years.

Wilko fell into administration earlier this month, putting 12,500 jobs and 400 stores at risk.

Wilko’s administrators, PwC, set a bid deadline for the chain on Friday last week and are expected to review offers over the weekend.

M2 chief executive Robert Mantse told the BBC that if the company’s bailout offer was accepted, M2 would “guarantee employment for all employees for two years”.

In response to the news, GMB union national secretary Andy Prendergast said that while “the devil is always in the details…any offer securing jobs must take priority”.

However, it is unclear exactly how many stores or jobs would be saved if Mr Putman’s bid were successful.

Administrators will evaluate all offers for a business, but will ultimately have a legal duty to act in the best interest of the business’s creditors.

Wilko, well known for its affordable everyday items, is struggling with heavy losses and a lack of cash.

It has also been criticized for falling behind rivals such as B&M, Poundland, The Range and Home Bargains as the high cost of living has caused shoppers to seek bargains.

Wilko had already borrowed £40million from restructuring specialist Hilco, cut jobs, reorganized his management team and sold a distribution center as he faced cash flow difficulties.

Shoppers had also noticed gaps in shelves after Wilko struggled to pay suppliers and at least one credit insurer withdrew trade cover, prompting some businesses to suspend deliveries.

However, Lisa Wilkinson, the retailer’s chairman until January this year and granddaughter of the company’s founder, said “everyone pulled out all the stops” to try to save the business.

The company has come under fire for paying dividends in recent years, but Ms Wilkinson said the business would have collapsed even if it hadn’t made those payments.

“Hindsight goes hand in hand, and I like to think we did everything we needed to do when we paid dividends,” she told the newspaper. “The board checked that we had made profit or reserved profit, that there was sufficient liquidity, that we followed good governance, the auditors checked.”

She added that if they hadn’t paid dividends, “it might have allowed us to survive for a few more months. What we took out really wouldn’t have made a difference.”

But Andy Prendergast, from the GMB union, said: “12,500 workers are threatened with redundancy – through no fault of their own”.

He slammed Ms Wilkinson for her comments, saying she didn’t ‘talk to her workers and deal with their concerns’. He added that his remarks were “in bad taste when the workers do not know how they will make ends meet in a few weeks”.

The company was founded in 1930 when JK Wilkinson opened its first store in Leicester. It first expanded in the Midlands and by the 1990s became one of Britain’s fastest growing retailers.

In 2012, Wilkinson began renaming its stores as Wilko, after its own-brand products marketed under the Wilko name.

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