52 2GM Saturday October 17 2020 | the times
Business
5
The chairman of JD Wetherspoon
accused the government of “jumping
from pillar to post” in its response to
coronavirus as the pub company
reported its first annual loss since 1984.
Tim Martin, 65, said that the increas-
ingly erratic strategy of “tightening and
tinkering with regulations” had in
effect pushed the country into quasi-
lockdown. He highlighted the
imposition of a 10pm curfew as the
most damaging of the new restrictions.
Le Shuttle operator looks
for light at end of tunnel
Robert Lea Industrial Editor
Traffic and revenue targets for the
Channel Tunnel are set to be scrapped
next week by its Paris-listed operator as
new management counts the financial
cost of pandemic travel restrictions.
Getlink, formerly known as Euro-
tunnel, is likely to announce that its
bankers will waive lending covenants to
give it breathing space.
The company operates Le Shuttle
trains in two tunnels under the English
Channel between Folkestone in Kent
and Coquelles in the Pas-de-Calais
carrying either lorries or cars and other
passenger vehicles.
It also charges Eurostar, the high-
speed passenger train service into and
out of London St Pancras controlled by
SNCF of France, for use of the tunnels,
as it does other freight train users.
Getlink is constructing what it hopes
will be a lucrative interconnector link
through the tunnels to bring excess
electricity from the French power grid
to Britain.
The group is valued on Euronext
Paris at €6.4 billion even after a 30 per
cent drop in the value of its shares.
Last year the company made under-lying operating profits of €560 million
on revenues of €1.08 billion, carrying
1.6 million lorries and 2.6 million cars.
In July at Getlink’s half-year results,
with six-month revenues down by a
third, the company cut back 2020 profit
forecasts to €350 million.
On Monday it reports its third-quar-
ter trading and, highly unusually for the
company, has called a meeting with
investors and analysts. It will be a first
run-out for the company’s new chief
executive, Yann Leriche, 47, a former
senior executive at the French bus
group Transdev.
With Le Shuttle trains carrying half
as many cars as usual and Eurostar
slashing services to barely 10 per cent of
what they would normally be, analysts
are expecting Mr Leriche to abandon
the group’s profit forecasts.
According to Barclays, the only up-
side could be an increase in freight
traffic as UK companies start stockpil-
ing before departure from the Euro-
pean Union.
Getlink has been reporting better
than expected yields from marketing its
shuttle trains as much more Covid-safe
than the alternative journey on the
Channel ferries.‘Erratic’ curfew putting pubs’
Dominic Walsh
Mr Martin said that in the two months
after July’s reopening it had appeared
that the hospitality industry had been
adapting to the new regime. The gov-
ernment had then, however, intro-
duced “without consultation and under
emergency powers an ever-changing
raft of ill thought-out regulations”.
These were “extraordinarily diffi-
cult” for the public and publicans to
understand and to implement, he said,
and “none appears to have any obvious
basis in science”.
Mr Martin was especially critical of
the curfew. “This has meant that many
thousands of hospitality industry
employees, striving to maintain
hygiene and social-distancing stan-
dards, go off duty at 10pm, leaving
people to socialise in homes and at
private events. which are in reality
impossible to regulate,” he said.
The Wetherspoon boss claimed that
although it was impossible to eliminate
risk completely in pubs, it could be
minimised by sensible social-
distancing and hygiene policies. “The
truth is, you certainly can catch Covidin a pub, but it is not the centre of
transmission,” he said.
Wetherspoon, which was founded by
Mr Martin in 1979, sells cheap ales,
breakfasts, lunches and dinners. It had
44 pubs in 1992 at its flotation and today
has 872 in the UK and Ireland, employ-
ing more than 40,000 staff. The group
is consulting on up to 450 job losses at
its airport pubs and has cut 108 head
office roles.
In the year to July 26 the company
reported a 30.6 per cent slump in rev-
enues to £1.26 billion and swung from a
pre-tax profit of £102.5 million to a loss
of £34.1 million. After exceptionals,
losses expanded to £105.4 million and
there is no dividend.
The announcement led to its shares,
which are down 40 per cent over the
past year, losing 186½p, or 19.4 per cent,
yesterday to close at 773½p.
The group, which in April bolstered
its balance sheet with a £141 million
equity raise, said that like-for-like sales
during the year had fallen by 29.5 per
cent. In the first 11 weeks of the current
financial year like-for-like sales were
down 15 per cent, with strong sales in
the first few weeks helped by the Eat
Out to Help Out scheme, followed by a
marked slowdown since the introduc-
tion of the curfew and other rules.
Mr Martin said: “As a result of recent
changes in regulations, the outlook for
pubs over the remainder of the current
financial year is even more unpredict-
able than hitherto.”
He added: “The current environment
of lockdowns, curfews and constantly
changing regulations and announce-
ments threatens not only pub com-
panies but the entire economy.”
Mr Martin, a consistent critic of the
British tax system, pointed out that the
amount of tax generated by the com-
pany had fallen from £764 million to
£437 million.
He estimated that the total cost to the
UK economy of closing Wetherspoon
pubs for the three months of lockdown,
including falling taxes and the knock-
on effect on third party suppliers and
contractors, was “probably over
£500 million”. Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon founder