Wilko rescue deal failed because of greed, claims HMV boss

The owner of HMV has claimed greed prevented his rescue bid for Wilko from going ahead, which could have potentially saved thousands of jobs.

Canadian billionaire Doug Putman said firms, including some landlords, had been "super inflexible" and made a deal "literally impossible".

Wilko collapsed in August leaving 12,000 workers facing redundancy.

Lisa Wilkinson, Wilko's former chair and granddaughter of the founder, will face MPs on Tuesday over its demise.

The Business and Trade Committee will question Ms Wilkinson over the family's decision to take millions of pounds worth of dividends out of Wilko.

She and Wilko's former chief executive, Mark Jackson, will also be asked about what attempts were made to save the retailer and whether crucial advice was ignored.

Mr Putman, who rescued HMV UK in 2019, told the BBC's Today programme that when saving businesses it is important to be given access to their IT system for around four months to allow a transition to a new system.

"But for those four months, the amount of money that the companies want to charge made the Wilko deal literally impossible to do and that was something that was found out really late in the game," he said.

"One of the landlords where the servers were stored, I think the facility was a million square feet and the servers were in this tiny little room and they wanted rent on the whole million square feet for us to be able to keep the servers.

"So I would say 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."