TCG Acquisitions to split five ways

TCG Acquisitions, the managed company owned by Alchemy Partners, is preparing to split itself into as many as five different legal entities.

The move is expected to take place at the start of the company's financial year on 1 September. A fragmentation of TCG Acquisitions, which runs around 155 pubs, is understood to make an eventual sale of the business much easier.

Alchemy Partners boss Jon Molton is known to regard the TCG Acqusitions estate as "heterogeneous" in the extreme.

He said in April: "It's a mixed estate scattered around the UK. We are gaining coherence, grouping it into types of pubs."

A source said: "This will just take estate segmentation in a sensible direction by reflecting it in four or five different legal entities. If there is going to be a sale of parts of the business, this will make for a much more sensible operating structure."

TCG, formerly called Tattershall Castle Group, was formed with the £177m acquisition of 178 managed pubs from Spirit Group in 2005.

About 20 sites have been sold on, leaving a mixed estate of high street bars such as Henry's cafe bars and community pubs.

David Ford, the former head of Regus UK, the serviced office space provider, currently runs the business.

The move to fragment TCG Acquisitions will be viewed as as an indication of how choosy buyers of pubs have become - the company might be hard to sell as a whole.

Its fragmentation also allows it to isolate any segment of the business that occupies a particularly poor market position.

TCG Acquisitions is understood to have around ten pubs on the market.