When lockdown loomed last year, one of my sons, who works for a City firm, popped into a branch of the men’s clothier TM Lewin at Canary Wharf in London.
He bought a new suit, sports jacket and some of the famous shirts it makes which are popular among workers in the financial community.
He simply could not do that today. For the business which opened its first shop in the capital in 1898 no longer has any stores at all.
It is the victim of a private equity firm that swooped in May last year and bought TM Lewin as it was struggling during the pandemic. Within just two months the new owner announced it was closing all the firm’s 66 stores.
High street firms bought up by private equity tycoons have axed almost 40,000 staff in the pandemic, the Mail can reveal today.
The jobs bloodbath is responsible for a third of all shop, pub and restaurant redundancies reported by big companies.
Low-paid workers bore the brunt of the cuts as private equity’s aggressive business model creaked or failed. The investors themselves emerged relatively unscathed.
The Mail audit found that 26 of the 67 large high street operators to announce job losses in the pandemic are either in private equity hands, or have been.
They have shed 37,609 jobs since March 2020, out of a total of 109,783 lost. Almost 23,000 jobs went at Debenhams and Boots, which were previously in private equity ownership.