Punch Taverns, the embattled pubs company, dismissed growing fears over its future yesterday, insisting that despite the grim trading outlook it would be able to meet its debt repayment obligations.

Giles Thorley, the chief executive, announced one-off writedowns totalling £342.5 million but said that the company was well placed to weather the financial and economic storms ahead. “Despite rumours of our demise, we are still alive. It’s business as usual,” he said.

Mr Thorley said that one of the biggest problems over the summer had been trying to hold back the wave of negative sentiment, much of it exacerbated by short-sellers. “The market perception has been the biggest issue,” he said. “It’s not the nicest time to be running a public company at the moment. You do feel the weight of expectations, especially negative ones.”

Mr Thorley, who scrapped the final dividend in September to preserve cash resources, said that the company had taken advantage of market turmoil to buy back several chunks of its debt at low levels. He was confident that the company could repay the £275 million of convertible bonds by the due date of December 2010 without an equity issue.

Punch, which has seen its share price drop by 80 per cent in the past year, reported a fall in pretax profits from £282 million to £262 million in the year to August 23. The figures exclude pretax exceptional losses of £342.5 million, mostly due to writedowns on the value of its pubs.

There was an impairment loss of £139.9 million against the value of its managed pub estate and £154.8 million against its leased estate. The leased losses were largely taken against 491 pubs “considered unlikely to generate long-term sustainable growth” and these would be sold.

However, Mr Thorley said that, despite the writedowns, which pushed Punch £80.2 million into the red, its 8,424 pubs - 7,560 of them leased - were still worth £6.5 billion, about £2 billion above the net debt of £4.5 billion. He said that the company had significant headroom against its debt covenants and would continue to use any spare cash to pay down debt.

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