the four seasons group has a complicated structure. in 2019, it was made up of more than 160 companies. including two at the top of the structure based in offshore tax havens in the cayman islands and guernsey. once it goes offshore to one of these jurisdictions, it provides almost a kind of protective cloak for them. it gives them some sort of anonymity, which means that it s harder to follow where the money is going through their accounts. in the 17 years sincejon moulton s firm owned the group, it s been bought and sold three times to different private equity companies. and the structure s become more complex. i can barely follow it. it s had so many transactions, bits put into it, bits split out of it. i really don t even pretend to understand all that s happened. that s quite something to say. you re an expert in this.
rate available at the time. we still don t know the full picture, and the full picture is not knowable because, ultimately, the cayman islands has a zero tax rate and also has very little transparency. it should surely be the case that these structures should be transparent. they should either bring them on shore or else they should be required to disclose the full finances of the entire group. it s as simple as that. hc one says it s a private company delivering an essential public good . it says it consolidated its debt in 2021 with an independent and publicly listed health care investor , reduced debt by £66 million and is cutting the number of companies in the group to 37. as the pandemic took hold,
you invested in four seasons and yet you can t find your way through the company. no, it s not limited to the care home sector. there s plenty of aspects of government and regulation that you can t follow either. the way they re financed is, to a large extent, not very material to somebody going into a care home. that s easy to say, from a financier s point of view, but if i am putting a relative into a care home, i think i m entitled to know where the money is going. to know how much of it is going to front line care. behind this complexity, there are clues as to where some of the money is going, and the trail leads to extraordinary levels of debt. each time four seasons changed hands, the new owners borrowed money to buy it. and some of that debt sits on four seasons books. by 2017, the group owed more than £1 billion.
investors to buy four seasons in 1999, and sold it to another private equity group five years later, making more than £250 million. since then, the world s changed. after the financial crash in 2008, government funding was squeezed as part of austerity. now, it s not so easy to make money. on the whole, they re not making a lot of money. they really aren t. perhaps they were at one stage, but they really aren t now. so, what does this mean for four seasons? we asked two experts to dig into their recent accounts. my name is vivek kotecha. i m a forensic accountant, particularly focused on the companies that operate in the health and social care sector. hiya, my name is- christine colet walker, i m researcher at the university of surrey.
one of the parts of the four seasons story is that they have been struggling now for a while, repaying their debts. 2017, the four seasons group had about £29,000 of debt per care home bed that they operated. and the interest charged per bed per week was £1118. so, at that time, about 20% of the average weekly fee was going on interest payments. if you take that interest payment off, it is a big chunk of money. what do you think about that? i know my dad was funded, but they are taking money out of his pot to pay off their interest. eventually, the four seasons group was unable to pay the interest on some of its debt. in 2019, two key companies in the group were placed in financial administration. part of the debt is unlikely to be paid back, but the group still