Former darlings of the NTI newsroom, the Issa brothers, who own the Asda supermarket chain, as well as Leon restaurants, allegedly borrowed millions of pounds from their petrol forecourt company to repay the debt taken on to buy two private jets.
Their EG Group was used by Mohsin and Zuber Issa to lend £5.6m to two private jet companies they owned in 2022.
The FT claims that more than £4m was given to one of their companies, which controls a Bombardier Global 6000 plane, while the other £1.6m went to another of their companies which owns a smaller Bombardier plane. Both of these companies are registered in the Isle of Man.
EG Group had issued a £33m unsecured loan to the companies to buy back the jets in 2018. The jet companies also borrowed money from the Bank of America, which apparently has security over the two planes.
Their takeover of Asda in 2020 has come under scrutiny in recent months, with politicians taking some interest in the structure of the company’s ownership. The takeover was bought by the brothers, alongside TDR Capital, a private equity group, in a deal worth £6.8bn. The brothers only put in £100m of their own cash, matched by another £100m from TDR, with the balance being funded by what Bloomberg claims is the largest sterling corporate bond sale on record, and a loan from the parent company of EG Group.
The FT reported that $7m of new loans made in 2022 would be enough to cover all but $1m of the amount EG reported it received in interest payments from the two companies that year. However, a source claims the money was actually used to pay interest and make repayments on external debt owed to third parties.
Sounds like “Asda Price” to us…
