John Lewis boss Dame Sharon White came under fresh pressure after an ex-chairman called the possible sale of a stake to an outside investor ‘highly undesirable’.
Sir Stuart Hampson yesterday said the proposal – aimed at raising as much as £2billion – could kill off the ‘spirit’ of the retailer’s partnership model.
It was the latest blow for Dame Sharon amid a chorus of scepticism about the idea of bringing in external funding, which critics say would threaten John Lewis’s cherished employee ownership structure.
Writing on the wall: The John Lewis Partnership – which includes 34 department stores and 332 Waitrose supermarkets – is the largest employee-owned business in the UK
Sir Stuart, who fought off a push by a group of staff to demutualise the organisation in 1999, insisted that John Lewis is a ‘different kind of business’ where service levels are better because ‘the person behind the counter is the owner’.
He brushed off the idea that it might be able to find a supportive investor who shares its ideals.
For the business to sell a minority stake – for the first time in its 159-year history – would be ‘very inappropriate’, he told The Sunday Times. ‘Once you sell a share of the partnership to somebody, they can sell it to somebody else… it would be highly undesirable.’
Sir Stuart said bringing in an external shareholder would mean ‘everybody contributing their ideas and enthusiasm to pay off profits towards a third party’.
The John Lewis Partnership – which includes 34 department stores and 332 Waitrose supermarkets – is the largest employee-owned business in the UK.
Its 80,000 ‘partners’ receive a share of profits via annual bonuses that supplement their basic salary.
John Lewis said that, while it was reviewing the future funding needs of its partnership, ‘nothing is happening in the short term’.
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