Stonegate hails TDR for M&B pubs deal

He revealed the best funding offer from a bank was 40% loan to value.

“Without TDR, we could not have done the deal. Fortunately, they agreed to bridge the entire finance so we didn’t put any bank debt into the deal.”

The former M&B wet-led estate is rumoured to have returned to growth since the start of this year.

On the Stonegate merger with Town & City Pub Company, Payne said: “It was the longest deal on the longest day because it took us seven months of negotiation. It was the hardest deal I have ever done.

“In 2001, when we bought the Whitbread business, we paid £1.6bn, and that deal was nowhere near as difficult as this.”

On the early days for Stonegate, Payne said: “It was a pretty difficult time because we bought the pubs from M&B but had an incredibly small amount of support to go with the pubs — we took only 50 people. Twenty-three of those were area managers and three were operations directors.

“Most of those were not looking after the pubs that we subsequently got them to look after, so they had new patches. A lot of them didn’t know the sites.

“We then took a support team of 23, which was predominantly marketing and HR, and me.

“So we had no senior team — no CEO or COO, no finance director, no commercial director and no IT director.”