Tesco spinners are in for a busy week, with the supermarket group reporting delayed first-half results on Thursday.
They’re already flat out, judging by yesterday’s press. Ousted chief executive Philip Clarke set too demanding targets; those involved were not motivated out of personal gain but a desire to hang on to their jobs; the problem was concentrated on the first half of this year; a whistleblower tried to raise the alarm when Clarke was in charge but was ignored; the Tesco board is considering asking Clarke to return some of his £10 million pay-off.
Got the picture? Clarke, Clarke, Clarke. And anyone who thinks the directors were negligent is mistaken because the manipulation was “carefully concealed and might not have been caught without a tip-off from a whistleblower”.
This is the PR equivalent of conveying the message with a baseball bat, as unsubtle as it gets.
It singularly fails to address why analysts were querying last year how Tesco was able to maintain its profit margin in the face of falling sales and rising costs. It does not explain why suppliers were talking about Tesco’s aggressive behaviour, in demanding extra cash from them, in 2013.
If, as we’re led to believe, the manipulation was “carefully concealed” at the Tesco end that should not stop the investigators at Deloitte and Freshfields from going to the suppliers and asking to see their accounts.
The suggestion is that this was confined to the last months of Clarke’s reign. Of course, one way of stating it was a temporary problem confined to the final throes of a failed regime would be if that was the only period Deloitte and Freshfields had been charged with exploring.
But the Tesco management did not do that, did they? Surely, they will want to get to the bottom of everything that had gone on; even it means examining records and interviewing executives going back years.
I’m going to ignore the spin. You see, I’ve got full faith in Sir Richard Broadbent, the chairman, and Dave Lewis, the new chief executive, doing their utmost to uncover all the facts. I know some people might consider me naïve, but I’m also confident Broadbent and Lewis will not hold back. They won’t, will they?
