Jones the Grocer's Singapore stores not hit by restructuring of Australian ops: executive

THE Singapore operations of food chain Jones the Grocer, which has gone bust in Australia where it originates, have not been hit by the restructuring Down Under, a senior executive of its majority shareholder L Capital Asia on Wednesday told The Business Times.

"The Singapore business will be fine," said chairman and managing partner Ravi Thakran at L Capital Asia, the private equity arm of luxury conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. "The prognosis is good."

Jones the Grocer has four stores in Melbourne and Sydney and several stores in New Zealand, Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. It has three stores in Singapore alone.

The Sydney Morning Herald said in a Dec 16 report that control of the Australian operations was handed over to PKF Lawler, an Australian firm that handles insolvency cases, that week.

A partner in the recovery & insolvency unit at PKF Lawler Jason Stone told the Australian newspaper that the collapse was to do with "some issues with internal management", with the amount of debt held by the company possibly less than tens of millions.

"I think L Capital's looking to take a stronger sense of control over the business, and they want to use this administration as a formal process of restructuring the business and cleaning it up," Mr Stone told the newspaper.