It was a long time coming-- Kesa manages to find a willing Comet buyer in the shape of "Hailey," a group of companies headed by retailer turnaround specialists OpCapita.
The price of sale? "An aggregate consideration of £2."
Only two pounds? That's not even 1 pound per letter for this famous UK brand, but the deal gets worse...
Kesa also had to give the new owners a dowry worth £50M. And it gets to keep the liability of paying out on the Comet Benefit Pension Scheme.
Kesa chariman David Newlands puts it bluntly-- "We had to pay £50m to get the business away. We will write it off as having no value." That's £10M for each letter in the Comet brand...and further evidence (as if any was needed) of a UK retail sector best described as "dire."
Kesa will only get something out of "investing" £50M if OpCapita manages to "flip" Comet to a new owner for more than £70M.
In H1 2011, Comet sales fell by 18.6% on a like-for-like. OpCapita claims it has "no intention to make redundancies" nor will it implement "a significant store closure programme." Yet everyone expects some of Comet's 248 retail outlets to close...
Meanwhile, KESA group is expected to deliver a first half retail loss of around €11m, including a retail loss of around €26m at Comet.
