Overview

• Simmons owed £5.7 million to OakNorth, £900,000 to HMRC, £850,000 to Camden, Westminster, Hackney and City of London councils and £400,000 to supplier Venus Wine & Spirit Merchants.
• Kroll has closed the Putney, London Bridge, Bond Street and Temple venues in a bid to streamline the chain’s remaining 16 bars.
• Administrators have made at least 30 redundancies while negotiations continue on final funding for the proposed pre-pack acquisition.
• The £6 million pre-pack deal would roll existing bank debt into a new lending facility and requires creditor approval and refinancing agreements.
• Sector experts say Simmons’s collapse underscores widespread hospitality distress driven by post-Covid consumer shifts, inflationary headwinds and rising overheads.