Owner Regent Inns goes into administration

Five Jongleurs Comedy Club have closed with immediate effect after their parent company went into administration.

The affected venues – a third of all the Jongleurs sites – are in Southampton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford and Bow.

Owner Regent Inns – which boasted it was the biggest employer of comedians outside the BBC. - collapsed after attempts to renegotiate the most onerous leases on some of the company’s sites failed.

However the slimmed-down group was immediately brought out of administration by a team headed by Regent’s former chief executive, John Leslie.

The company – which also owns the Old Orleans and Walkabout chains - owed almost £80million to its banks, but they are believed to have written off more than 40 per cent of that for majority control of the new company, called iNTERTAIN, which will run the business.

Other sites to be dropped from the Regent portfolio include 12 Old Orleans restaurants, which revert back to previous owner Punch Taverns, and three Walkabout bars, including one in Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End. Around 160 of Regent’s 1,960 staff, will lose their jobs.

Leslie told trade newspaper The Publican: ‘The process we have undertaken is in the best interests of both the creditors and the staff.’

With the debt write-off and fewer venues, it’s hoped the new company will have a better chance of success.

Troubled Regent had delisted from the stock exchange in June, making it more difficult to trade in shares but freeing it from the costs of being in the market. The Cardiff Jongleurs closed earlier this year with the loss of 50 jobs.

Published: 21 Oct 2009