See the subsequent story we published once the accounts were generally available for inspection.
It seems that Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) is finally getting around to filing its 2007 accounts, only a few months late. Correction: it seems that GRH has got around to filing its accounts with financial news service Bloomberg.com, and hopes to get around to filing them with Companies House some time real soon.
Quite why GRH thought it appropriate to ‘file’ its accounts, already overdue, with a news organisation when they have still apparently not been filed at Companies House is not clear.
With the previous accounts, to 31 August 2006, GRH was 16 months late in complying with its legal duty. For 2007, it looks as if the period of delinquency is set to be much shorter, which is progress of a sort.
As to the sales figures for 2007 themselves, as reported by Bloomberg, they are a lot less impressive that they were said to be as recently as last October. Just four months ago, Chris Hutcheson – CEO of, and 31% shareholder in, GRH – told the Evening Standard that “turnover grew strongly again in [the year to 31 August] 2007 to reach £46 million”.
This would have represented growth of 20.7% from the £38.1m reported for 2006. Sounded pretty impressive, especially in the context that the 2006 accounts themselves (signed on 24 October 2008) presaged the announcement of a “dramatic strengthening of the Group” in 2007.
Odd, then, that Bloomberg – with its unique privilege of having been told the content of the 2007 accounts – reports that “sales advanced 9.2 percent from a year earlier to 41.6 million pounds”.
What has happened to that 20.7% growth? Why, it now seems, was the sales growth for 2007 less than half what was reported as recently as October? How is it – more than 12 months after the year end – that the CEO of GRH found himself stating the turnover for 2007 to be more than a tenth higher than it is now said to be?
Our efforts to obtain any explanation from GRH for the inconsistency between 2007 sales as stated in October, and now, had, at the time of writing, been unsuccessful.
We’ll update this story if we hear anything.
PS (3 March) The Companies House record now shows that the GRH accounts have been filed, but they are not yet available for inspection.
Re our query about apparent inconsistency, we’ve had a reply from GRH, which rambles about “decisions to include or exclude intellectual property streams when involving what can now total millions of pounds” and “the difference between the publicly available view of corporate earnings and the private earnings of an individual which are aligned to the intellectual property of the brand bearer”.
None of this, however, directly answers our simple question about the accounts of GRH, so we’ve re-phrased it in the most direct terms – “Why, in the Evening Standard last October, did Mr Hutcheson say that the 2007 GRH turnover was going to be £46 million, when it is now reported as being £41.6 million?”.
We’re still waiting for an answer.
While we’re waiting for that response, we should note that there is no sign in the 2006 accounts (of which we do have a copy) that GRH is anything other than a holding company for the restaurant operations associated with Gordon Ramsay.
That remains our assumption. (If it really were the case that the turnover and profit figures for GRH were being flattered by the inclusion of significant “intellectual property streams”, it would imply that the actual restaurant operations were probably loss-making in both 2006 and 2007, and possibly quiet seriously so: we don’t think that that is an inference which GRH wants anyone to draw.)
PPS (3 March) GRH has indicated that it does not intend to offer any explanation of its undershooting its turnover estimate. Nor has it felt able to share with us the accounts it was apparently happy to send to Bloomberg and the Evening Standard. Guess we’ll just have to wait for the accounts to be publicly available. Shouldn’t be long.
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