Patisserie Share Discussion Threads

[snoopy12] 10/10/2018 19:01

Not going to re-list anytime soon.These investigations are long drawn and these professionals love their gravy trains. By the time they find anything the company will be out of pocket by couple of million. If and when it does re-list you will have the shorters waiting to capitalize by putting pressure on the share price.Not a nice situation for the decent long term share holders.

[john09] 10/10/2018 18:56

I’m not sure 37% of £450m is £50m topvest

[cockneytrader] 10/10/2018 18:25

For any shareholders out there, there will be many of us who know how you feel. Don't blame yourselves for making a bad investment call, because on the face of it it looked like a reasonable growth story with numbers to boot.

The take away I guess is that some people tell wicked lies and try to cover their tracks.

[tomboyb] 10/10/2018 18:06

Sounds quite grave from Johnson himself -

[tomboyb] 10/10/2018 18:05

The owner of Patisserie Valerie has uncovered "significant, and potentially fraudulent, accounting irregularities" and discovered HMRC has filed a winding-up petition against one of its subsidiaries.

HMRC is seeking £1.14m in taxes, the company said.

It said earlier that finance director Chris Marsh had been suspended.

Shares in the company, 37% owned by entrepreneur Luke Johnson, have also been suspended.

Mr Johnson said: "We are all deeply concerned about this news and the potential impact on the business. We are determined to understand the full details of what has happened and will communicate these to investors and stakeholders as soon as possible."

The company said that the board of directors had been notified of the potential fraud on Tuesday and announced it to the stock market just before its shares were due to start trading on Wednesday.

[julcester] 10/10/2018 17:50

Whenever I've been in there, it has been half-full of people handing over Groupon vouchers for discounted deals. Maybe they are getting people through door, but at a discounted rate.

[nico115] 10/10/2018 17:45

Wouldn't trust Luke Johnson as far as one could throw him Look how many companies he took private pretending their was no growth and yet they grew a lot !!HmmmmmKarma I say..karma If I didn't have a friend who holds these I would be only too happy for LJ to lose the lot ..200m qd !!

[cockneytrader] 10/10/2018 17:45

Very fishy. Probably being going on for years, but has now just come to light and kept quiet about the court order. This needs an emergency cash injection asap. A shareholder bailout will take too long. Somebody needs to put his hand in his pocket and fast.

[alex1621] 10/10/2018 17:44

I noticed in the accounts report the CFO was a tax specialist as well as being a regular accountant. So if this is a tax issue he has no excuses ... £20 m doesn't feel like a recent issue, more like something built up over a long period of time. Luke Johnson has a hard earned reputation, so this is a shock.

[bookbroker] 10/10/2018 17:40

Silverdell written all over it, the illusion of being cash rich, however this company has a very wealthy backer who can and most likely will pump capital in via a placing of some sort, tough on outside shareholders. In the case of SID., it was apparent some months before of a winding up petition, and the red flag was mentioned on its own BB., however we took little notice until the banks pulled the plug!

[opodio] 10/10/2018 17:32

yes he should announce tomorrow at 7am that he is putting up the £20m loan to the company

[cyberbub] 10/10/2018 17:30

Just heard about this and looking in. Unless there is clarity by the end of tgis week (which seems unlikely), the real risk is of suppliers abandoning them and the shelves emptying leading to administration. While it's unlikely to have been his fault (at least not directly), if LJ cares about the company's staff and shareholders (including himself) he should stump up a £20M loan to the company to cover the alleged "hole" in the accounts and allow the company to keep trading, until they sort out the mess? Although a shocking state of affairs, unless the last several years of accounts have all been cooked and the company has been losing money for years, this "hole" must be a recent development and therefore probably fixable IMO (albeit at great loss of face, and shareholder value probably).Just my view, no advice intended etc.

[danny baker] 10/10/2018 16:57

Pugugly, I think you are probably close to the truth when talking about suppliers' invoicing. Somehow the illusion has been created that the company had a lot more cash than it really did have. I looked at another company recently which had an unconsolidated subsidiary in which the debts were deliberately piled up eventually collapsing the parent company but when looking at the parent company's accounts everything looked fine as the debts were all hidden in the off-balance sheet subsidiary. I'm not suggesting that the same thing has happened here but the sudden revelation that the company has run out of cash despite the perfectly sound looking annual and interim accounts suggests to me that cash balances previously announced were somehow negated by unpaid invoices, debts, borrowings etc somewhere else in the group structure which were not revealed to the board or auditors. The likely outcome from this assuming CAKE doesn't enter administration must be for at least the previous year's accounts to be restated. This is a totally appalling state of affairs for a quoted company and much worse than Carillion or Conviviality which might have been cavalier with their finances but there was no suggestion of false accounting.

[sandy133] 10/10/2018 16:56

I know of one retail entrepreneur who had a FD who falsified the VAT returns for all the companies for 2 years.The cash shown as paid to the Revenue went in his own pocket.It wasn't until the Revenue asked why a profitable High street chain never paid any VAT and sent an investigator round that the balloon went up.
However I suspect that this is not the case here I just think the FC managed to show profits when there were none and also showed good cash flow when cash was leaking.

[tomboyb] 10/10/2018 16:55

Tongue n cheek -

If they have no cash it is possible for either an emergency loan from current shareholders ( depending on size of the black hole) or a massively discounted placing -

There is a brand here and me and my wife like going here too -

So we shall see what the possible outcome is -

[johnwise] 10/10/2018 16:50

Its not that they did not have the cash to pay the Tax demand etc. The accountant who has been suspended will probably have not been paying them, leaving the final demands in the pending tray ?

[cockneytrader] 10/10/2018 16:42

I certainly don't want it to fold. What have you got against their strawberry slice?

[pugugly] 10/10/2018 16:42

RED5 Remember the old saying "Never look a gift horse in the mouth" I suspect when the dust settles this may prove to have lost most of its teeth and instead of being cash flow positive might prove to have been cash flow negative (or maybe very slightly positive)

[red5] 10/10/2018 16:35

I am glad I sold these when a profit at 20% looks like could be absolute bargain in the next few months

[pugugly] 10/10/2018 16:14

Interesting timeline:-

Somewone must have known about this for some time - As HMRC, suggests it may relate either to VAT, PAYE, or Social security.

[this_time_its_different] 10/10/2018 16:14

Let the company fold I say, we have enough bakers as it is. Just go to Paul Bakers instead.

[cockneytrader] 10/10/2018 16:04

But we were too busy spending all our hard earned proceeds from the sale of share options Your Honour.

[owenski] 10/10/2018 16:02

Perhaps Luke Johnson could spend more time examining the company's he's actually involved in rather than writing about how clever he is and how everyone else needs to follow his example in his Sunday Times Column.