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Mike Ashley is to step down from the board of Frasers Group, owner of the Sports Direct chain that the retail billionaire founded 40 years ago.

Mr Ashley had already handed over the running of the group to his son-in-law Michael Murray earlier this year.

Frasers said Mr Ashley would not be standing for re-election as a director, and would leave the board next month.

The company also announced that Mr Ashley will provide the company with £100m worth of funding.

In a statement, the firm also said Mr Ashley would continue to be available to the board and management for advice "when called upon".

Mr Murray, Frasers' chief executive, said Mr Ashley had "built an incredible business over the past 40 years".

Mr Ashley has been one of the High Street's most prominent and colourful figures since founding his business. He first entered the fitness industry as a squash coach before opening his first High Street sports shop in Maidenhead, Berkshire, in 1982.

The Sports Direct business grew as Mr Ashley bought up well-known names such as Dunlop, Slazenger and hat-maker Kangol. It is now the UK's largest sportswear retailer, with more than 400 stores.

In 2007, Mr Ashley floated the business as a public company on the London Stock Exchange in a move which valued it at £2.5bn.

Later that year, his public profile increased when he bought majority control of Newcastle United. However, his tenure was criticised by fans over his ownership style and perceived lack of investment, and he sold his stake in the club in October last year.

As well as buying brands, the Sports Direct group also bought chains such as lingerie firm Agent Provocateur and luxury fashion chain Flannels.

Who is Mike Ashley?

Mike Ashley may be stepping down from the board of Frasers Group but he is by no means out of the picture though. He is still the group's controlling shareholder with a stake of nearly 70% and has agreed to lend the business £100m.

Starting out as a single sportswear shop, his retail empire now includes the likes of Game, Jack Wills, and Evans Cycles.

The move does, however, mark a significant change of the guard and one which may bring major change to the business, of which Mr Ashley built the foundations for 40 years ago.

In 2018, Mr Ashley bought the House of Fraser department store chain for £90m and the following year he changed his company's name from Sports Direct International to Frasers Group.

As his retail empire grew, Mr Ashley frequently courted controversy. His dealings with the City started badly when shares in Sports Direct halved shortly after the company's flotation.

Many investors were unhappy at the way the company was run, but in a Sunday Times interview Mr Ashley called them "cry babies", telling the paper: "Sports Direct should come with a government health warning - this stock is not for the fainthearted."

In 2017, London's High Court heard that the businessman once hosted a management meeting in a pub where he drank 12 pints and vomited into a fireplace.

The company was also accused of building its success by exploiting workers. In 2016, in a hearing before MPs, Mr Ashley admitted workers at its Derbyshire warehouse had been paid below the minimum wage and that its policy of fining staff for being late was unacceptable.

Mr Ashley stepped away from running Frasers Group when he handed over the role of chief executive to Mr Murray in May this year.

Shortly after taking over the role, Mr Murray became Mr Ashley's son-in-law after marrying his daughter, Anna, in a lavish ceremony at Blenheim Palace.

In an interview with the BBC in May, Mr Murray said that Mr Ashley was "not pulling the strings".

"We have vocal debates. We agree, we disagree. But ultimately the decision lies with me on the outcome of where we take the company."

Mr Murray is in line for a £100m pay-out if he can double Frasers' share price to £15 within the next three years.

In order to get the payment, the company's share price needs to reach £15 for 30 trading days in a row before October 2025. The shares are currently trading at about £7.70.

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Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley to quit Frasers' board

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The billionaire will step down from Frasers Group's board and provide the firm with £100m of funding.

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2nd pay rise in a year lifts Lidl to highest-paying supermarket

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This is an interesting look at the competition for labour in the supermarket industry with Lidl offering its workers a second pay rise this year, making it the best paying UK supermarket.

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In the News

It's terrible news for shareholders who look like they'll lose their investment, but the challenges faced by online furniture retailer Made.com provide a superb case study for business students.

You can read about the issues faced by Made.com here in The Guardian.

The sharp downturn in consumer confidence in the UK is hitting Made.com hard as households cut back on demand for high-ticket items such as sofas, beds, chairs and tables.

In short, this recently floated public company which has issued several profits warnings is:

Making a third of its staff redundant

Stopping recruitment of new staff

Looking to refinance its debts

Exploring whether to find a strategic investor or sell itself to another business

Limiting purchases of inventory to conserve cash

Outsourcing customer service

Closing its operations in China

Reducing warehouse capacity to lower fixed costs

Anything else management have missed out?

Jim Riley

Jim co-founded tutor2u alongside his twin brother Geoff! Jim is a well-known Business writer and presenter as well as being one of the UK's leading educational technology entrepreneurs.

© 2002-2022 Tutor2u Limited. Company Reg no: 04489574. VAT reg no 816865400.

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Retrenchment and Cash Flow Management | Made.com Struggles with the Economic Downturn

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In the News It's terrible news for shareholders who look like they'll lose their investment, but the challenges faced by online furniture retailer Made.com provide a superb case study for business students. You can read about the issues faced by Made.com here in The Guardian.

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The John Lewis Partnership says it is "forgoing profit" to help customers, partners and suppliers navigate the challenges of the cost of living crisis.

The employee-owned company, comprising the eponymous department store chain and Waitrose supermarkets, reported a loss of £99m for the half-year to 30 July compared to a red figure of £29m a year earlier.

It said the heightened loss reflected its decision to shield shoppers from some of its rising costs during the period.

The statement revealed a one-off cost of living support payment for its staff, known as partners, with full-time workers securing £500.

Those on part-time hours would receive less.

Entry level pay for employees would also increase by 4%, it said, while all partners would receive free at-work meals over winter.

The cost of the overall package was put at £50m.

The partnership admitted at the time of its last results statement in March that it had passed on "small" hikes to prices across its operations, reflecting the growing cost of food and manufacturing linked to record energy prices.

It said on Thursday that the outlook for the rest of its financial year, including the key Christmas period, was "highly uncertain" due to the subsequent impact on consumers' discretionary spending.

John Lewis said there would be a strong focus on value to help maintain sales, with £500m to be invested in its pricing across the 2022/23 financial year.
Read more:
'Urgent, substantial action' needed to keep firms afloat, chancellor told
There are five big unknowns about Liz Truss's energy plan - and they could determine her political future

It reported a 3% increase in comparable sales at the department store chain over the first half to £2.1bn.

At Waitrose, on the same basis, sales were 5% lower at £3.6bn reflecting the impact of high COVID lockdown demand over the first half in 2021.

Dame Sharon White, the partnership's chairman, told an analysts' call she expected the government's energy price guarantee to be a "game-changer" in terms of consumer spending power ahead.

But she earlier cautioned: "No one could have predicted the scale of the cost-of-living crisis that has materialised, with energy prices and inflation rising ahead of anyone's expectations.

"As a business, we have faced unprecedented cost inflation across grocery and general merchandise."

She added: "We are responding to the cost of living crisis by supporting those who need it and by stepping up our efficiency programme.

"We are forgoing profit by making choices based on the sort of business we are, led by our Purpose - Working In Partnership For A Happier World - by helping our Partners, customers, communities and suppliers."

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John Lewis Partnership 'forgoing profit' to help customers and partners through cost of living crisis

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The John Lewis Partnership says it is "forgoing profit" to help customers, partners and suppliers navigate the challenges of the cost of living crisis. The employee-owned company, comprising the eponymous department store chain and Waitrose supermarkets, reported a loss of £99m for the half-year to 30 July compared to a red figure of £29m a year earlier.

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"Just shut up and make the Oreos."

Daryl Brewster is recounting a discussion about children's nutrition and the safe use of ingredients at a board meeting of the US food giant Nabisco. It was back in 2004 and as president he was trying to make the biscuits, and other products, healthier.

However, one of the directors wanted him to keep the company focused solely on making biscuits, and making money for shareholders. Ultimately changes were made, including the removal of trans fatty acids and the introduction of more transparent labelling.

In the near-two decades since, the nature of business leadership has changed and companies are increasingly speaking out on social and political issues, from nutrition to climate change and diversity.

Just making money is "not the opportunity anymore", says Mr Brewster, who now runs Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose, which helps many of the world's biggest companies craft their messages on these issues.

"Companies need to think through those issues that are relevant to them... how they're going to respond and maybe even take action before these become major issues.

"Companies realise that to increase profits over time, they need to be good citizens of the world."

One of the leading voices in that response was the online business review platform, Yelp.

"Not only did we want to protect and safeguard our own employees by creating a travel reimbursement," explains Yelp's chief diversity officer Miriam Warren, "we also recognise that our employees, our consumers and our customers were looking for us to be vocal on this issue."

"After the reversal of Roe v Wade several weeks ago, we have recognised the need to become even more vocal on this issue. And from that we hear very frequently not only from our employees with notes of gratitude, but also from people around the country and now even the world, on the stance," says Ms Warren.

Yelp, which has more than 244 million reviews of businesses from more than 30 countries, has also spoken out on issues including transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as US gun reforms and free speech.

"Fundamentally we've taken stances on issues that are issues of human rights," says Ms Warren. "[Those affected] are our colleagues, they're our customers, they're our consumers. And if we don't take a stance with the massive platform that we have available to us, it's really an incredibly missed opportunity on a moral level [and] on a social level."

However, 52% of respondents said capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.

Ms Warren says anecdotal evidence suggests this activism is good for business but that boosting profits at a company that made nearly $40m (£34m) last year is not a motive.

"Many corporate actors are silent and potentially attempting to remain neutral. Frankly, I think neutrality is not going to be looked on favourably, particularly from a historic-looking lens."

However, even if a company wants to be vocal on a particular issue, it might not always be wise to do so.

"Sometimes it's best just to say absolutely nothing, you cannot win," says Paul Argenti, who is professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth University in the US.

As a consultant to major companies, including Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs and Japanese conglomerate Mitsui, he has developed a framework for working out when and why companies should speak up.

The first thing he asks is: "Is this connected in some way to the overall strategy, the business or the core context of what they do?"

He goes on: "The second thing that I look for is: can you actually do something about this incident or this issue?

"And then the last piece of it is how are your constituencies going to respond? Will most be positive about your decision, or will a significant and important constituent weigh in against you that might cause you more harm than good?"

There was disagreement between shareholders, with Norway's biggest pension fund, KLP Asset Management, among those against the deal, saying Unilever was "putting profits over human rights".

Unilever said it was a "complex and sensitive matter" and it has never supported a boycott of the territory.

While shareholders may disagree with a company's decision or stance on a particular matter, even if they can't get them to change it, they can still wield influence.

However, they do regard an increase in support for their plan as positive progress and a "strong message towards management". Their pressure led to one of the three, Moderna, to link executive bonuses to vaccine distribution.

CECP's Daryl Brewster expects companies to speak out more on social and political issues in a world that is becoming increasingly politically divided.

"Business has an opportunity, if not to find common ground, but to find a higher ground that society can move towards.

"Things like climate change and social justice are really critical issues where I think business can play a leading role in partnership with other businesses, in partnership with governments as well.

"But I think there is a void that we've seen in so many places, and businesses which are really serving the vast majority of our population really do have an opportunity and a need to really kind of step in on those key topics."

For more on this story, watch Talking Business on BBC iPlayer (available to UK viewers only).

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Why do companies get involved in social issues?

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"Just shut up and make the Oreos." Daryl Brewster is recounting a discussion about children's nutrition and the safe use of ingredients at a board meeting of the US food giant Nabisco. It was back in 2004 and as president he was trying to make the biscuits, and other products, healthier.

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Mike Ashley's Frasers Group has banned staff from working from home on Fridays after claiming social media posts showed they were relaxing during working time.

The retailer, which owns Sports Direct and House of Fraser, has asked staff to be in the office all week, ending a flexible working policy introduced during the pandemic.

An internal memo, sent by the company's chief operating officer, said "Frasers Friday" had become "an unproductive day of the week", according to a report in the Sun.

David Al-Mudallal reportedly wrote in the memo "too many examples of people or teams not being contactable when they need to be ... and colleagues who via their social media profiles are demonstrating they're not treating Friday as a working day".

The "Frasers Friday" policy was introduced at the end of 2020 as government edicts to limit the spread of Covid-19 forced millions of people to work from home.

The company - which employs over 25,000 people across its stores and two head office locations in Oxford Street, London and Shirebrook, Derbyshire - is understood to have unwound the new way of working after monitoring productivity and reaching the conclusion that office attendance was more effective.

A Frasers Group spokesperson said: "We have an incredible workforce of dedicated colleagues, and in-person collaboration is key to how we deliver value together. We believe that we are all at our best when we work together in an office environment."

The retail group's insistence on office working comes as the government tries to force civil servants back to their desks and city centre businesses and transport networks struggle to cope with lower commuter numbers.

Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk

Between October to December 2019 and January to March 2022, home working in the UK more than doubled from 4.7 million to 9.9 million people, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The City of London has announced plans to "repurpose" office buildings left empty by the pandemic into at least 1,500 new homes by 2030.

Almost a third of the UK's office-based workforce are still working from home at least part of the time, according to the ONS.

Fewer than one in 10 say they want to return to their desks five days a week and hybrid working is now considered normal, according to government's statisticians.

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House of Fraser owner scraps 'unproductive' Friday home working

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Internal memo reportedly points to social media as evidence staff at Frasers Group are abusing scheme

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Vue International, Britain's third-biggest cinema chain, is close to bringing the curtain up on a £1bn recapitalisation that will see its lenders take ownership of the business and put it back on a sustainable financial footing.

Sky News has learnt that Vue, which was founded and is run by Tim Richards, one of the industry's most prominent figures, is on the brink of an agreement that will reset its balance sheet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

City sources said on Wednesday night that Vue had been in talks for weeks about a comprehensive agreement that would see £465m of existing debt converted into equity.

The debt-for-equity swap will see the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) and Omers, the Canadian pension funds, relinquish their shareholdings.

They took control of Vue in 2013 in a deal worth close to £1bn and subsequently presided over a string of acquisitions which helped turn the group into Europe's largest cinema operator.

In 2019 - a record year for Vue - they began to explore a sale but did not conclude a deal before the COVID-19 crisis brought the leisure industry to its knees.

Sources said the financial restructuring would give the company, which employs more than 8,000 people, access to an additional £75m of liquidity, and enable it to resume its role as a consolidator of a still-fragmented global industry.

Mr Richards, who also chairs the British Film Institute, has talked about the post-pandemic era becoming "the second golden age of cinema" as audiences flock back to entertainment destinations.

Since its pandemic-induced troubles, Vue's performance has rebounded strongly.

One source said that every one of its markets exceeded the three-year average for admissions in the last week, while it also marked the first time that Vue had recorded consecutive weeks over 1.8m customers since reopening.

Performance has been buoyed by the arrival of films such as Top Gun: Maverick, starring Tom Cruise, and Minions: The Rise of Gru.

Over the last four weeks, it has seen an 18% increase in admissions versus the three-year average.

Vue trades from 228 sites, operating nearly 2000 screens in nine European markets, including Germany, Italy and Poland.

The company was forced to furlough thousands of UK-based employees during the pandemic, with its sites shut for months.

Mr Richards was also forced into a brief skirmish with Vue's UK landlords as he sought rent reductions during the period of closures.

Two of the top three biggest films in UK history have, however, been released in the last year - Daniel Craig's final appearance as James Bond in No Time to Die, and Spiderman: No Way Home.

In the UK, Vue ranks behind only Cineworld and Odeon by number of sites.
Insiders said the restructuring, which is expected to complete later this year, would not affect landlords, suppliers or employees.

It was unclear how long Vue's new owners - its current lenders - would seek to retain control before selling or floating the company.

Vue declined to comment on Wednesday night.

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Cinema giant Vue International close to agreeing £1bn takeover by lenders

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Britain's third-biggest cinema operator is on the brink of an agreement that will see its lenders take ownership of the company as it rebuilds its balance sheet after the pandemic, Sky News learns.

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Dutch companies C&A, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Calvin Klein still import and sell clothing made by Uyghur forced laborers in Chinese concentration camps, Nederlands Dagblad reported based on the companies' commercial shipment data.

Nike Europe, head office in Hilversum, is the biggest culprit. Between January 2021 and March 2022, a staggering 97 percent of its cotton deliveries came from factories that use forced labor, according to reports and international observers.

More than half of Tommy Hilfiger's cotton shipments came from Chinese concentration camps and about a third of Calvin Klein's. Both these companies' headquarters are in Amsterdam.

Dutch company C&A profits from the Uguyr people's mistreatment to a smaller extent, according to the newspaper. Five percent of the company's cotton deliveries to the Netherlands and Germany came from factories suspected of forced labor.

In December, the European human rights organization ECCHR filed a complaint with the Public Prosecution Service against these and other companies, accusing them of slave labor due to their cotton imports. In February last year, the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, officially labeled China's treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide.

The Uyghurs are the original inhabitants of China's Xingjiang region. Many thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims are held in what China calls "re-education camps" in the area and are forced to work there.

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Dutch shops selling clothes made by Uyghurs in concentration camps

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Dutch companies C&A, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Calvin Klein still import and sell clothing made by Uyghur forced laborers in Chinese concentration camps, Nederlands Dagblad reported based on the companies' commercial shipment data. Nike Europe, head office in Hilversum, is the biggest culprit.

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Ged Futter, analyst for The Retail Mind consultancy and a former buyer at Asda, told the BBC's Today programme that competition between supermarkets had prompted Tesco and Sainsbury's to raise their wages this week - with an "Aldi match" being one factor.

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Sainsbury's lifts pay after shareholder pressure

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Ged Futter, analyst for The Retail Mind consultancy and a former buyer at Asda, told the BBC's Today programme that competition between supermarkets had prompted Tesco and Sainsbury's to raise their wages this week - with an "Aldi match" being one factor.

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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/sep/16/living-space-invaders-ikea-launches-gaming-furniture-range

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Living-space invaders: Ikea launches gaming furniture range

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The interiors giant promises more than 30 new products including gaming desks, chairs and accessories