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S&NPC have been trying to evict me - had me in court in late June on a 28 day possession order over £109,000 back rent and legal fees I owe them, which I cannot pay because my pub doesn't make a profit, from my 2005 rent review (there's actually even more debt with them but it's in a different legal package somehow :). Six years ago, as the rent review fight was taking off proper, I had no doubt, whatsoever, the review would end up by my being made bankrupt because the rent WOULD go up - as it ALWAYS did - and the business could barely pay current rent. So, I borrowed £20K from various places to fight the review, went to arbitration which unbelievably took three years - and hoped beyond hope that with a strong argument on my side that rationality would win through and rent would stay the same or go down, had a nervous breakdown along the way, recovered with medication and therapy, pulled together the reserves to help get the Fair Pint Campaign off the ground, and somehow survived through it all to the point that I owed the pubco a vast amount of money which is when the debt became their problem as much as it had always been mine. Anyway the judge heard my argument which was that S&NPC created the debt through their own stupidity and ordered that they give me a chance to come to an agreement that would not result in my being evicted in the 28 days - of course the only agreement they would accept was my repaying the debt in full. Over three years (£704.94 a week) which is completely surreal since not being able to pay it is why I was in court in the first place; So I won in court, sort of, because they didn't get the 28 day order and I was given some grace. Anyway, I couldn't keep up with the payments - especially following the 'disturbances' in Brixton and Peckham (we're slap between the two) and our summer turnover has dropped 10% against last year. Well I WILL be evicted now - and it will be a relief.

OH! And I know for sure that S&NPC are as totally in the shit as Enterprise and Punch because I know lessees who aren't paying rent or buying beer from them and who they aren't coming down on. Someone told me 'for every lessee who's paying rent there's three who are defaulting'. On the other hand I know of lessees who are being totally bullied by them - in the up north division - where S&NPC are routinely tearing up their COPs and directly intimidating tenants face to face to sign surrender documents etc. S&NPC is in utter disarray - no one in that company REALLY knows what the hell they are doing. Their staffing structure is in seemingly constant upheaval, there's no one steering at the helm of this sinking ship. Their most recent hiring in the south is some total beer tie junkie craphead who worked for Punch for eight years. I could run their business better than they do with my head in a bucket of cat shite.

OH! And RBS, the failed financially crippled bank WE the Family Tax Credit income earners own, who in turn own getting on for three quarters of S&NPC's failing estate, have publicly announced they want to sell ALL their pubs (presumably because collectively these 'assets' are a massive liability they wish they'd never been STOOPID enough to get into owning) and the management agreement S&NPC and RBS have over the estate comes to an end inside the next year or so - S&NPC has 1,400 pubs. 900 are RBS and about 400 are the rump end of the failed Globe estate that the brilliant financial genius Reboot Tchenguiz 'owned'. So, basically, it is plain to see, S&NPC is a wraith of a company, existing by 'managing' what is pretty much a Virtual property estate, in as much as the company actually doesn't OWN anything - it just offers a service to RBS and the other lot to take in rent and administer the tie on their behalf in return for a fat annual fee for doing nothing, badly. Great business model - NO WONDER the whole of S&NPC's staff is SHITTING BRICKS.