Owner of local Dorothy Perkins and Burton concessions Arcadia enters administration

Arcadia, the owner of high street fashion brands Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins has gone into administration.

Arcadia also owns Outfit ‘out of town’ stores which brings the Group’s eight high-street and fashion retail brands together under one roof.

Locally the brands can be found as concessions inside Debenhams on Eagles Meadow.

Owned by billionaire Sir Philip Green the entity is thought to have a pension fund deficit of anything up to £350m. Mr Green broken records when he paid himself a £1.2 billion dividend.

Administrators Deloitte have been  appointed to the Arcadia Group Ltd and various subsidiary companies. The group, which operates from approximately 444 leased sites in the UK and 22 overseas, employs 13,000 people.

A total of 9,294 employees were on furlough at the time of the Joint Administrators’ appointment.

“No redundancies are being announced today as a result of the appointment and stores will continue to trade.” Deloitte has said.

In a statement, Deloitte said joint administrators Matt Smith and Dan Butters “are assessing all options available to the Group.”

“The administrators will be honouring all online orders made over the Black Friday weekend and will continue to be operating all the existing sale channels of the business.”

Ian Grabiner, CEO of Arcadia, commented: “This is an incredibly sad day for all of our colleagues as well as our suppliers and our many other stakeholders.”

“The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic including the forced closure of our stores for prolonged periods has severely impacted on trading across all of our brands.”

“Throughout this immensely challenging time our priority has been to protect jobs and preserve the financial stability of the Group in the hope that we could ride out the pandemic and come out fighting on the other side.”

“Ultimately, however, in the face of the most difficult trading conditions we have ever experienced, the obstacles we encountered were far too severe.”

“Our priority now is to work closely with the administrators to deliver the best possible outcome for all our stakeholders, in particular our hard-working employees across the Group.”

“Throughout this process, trading will continue across all of our brands. Our stores will remain open or reopen when permitted under the Government COVID-19 restrictions, our online platforms will be fully operational and supplies to all of our partners will continue.”