The cash crisis at Punch Taverns has prompted Britain’s biggest pub company to consider selling some of its most prized houses as it seeks to raise funds to whittle down its £4.5 billion debt pile.

The Times understands that the company has appointed advisers to approach several family brewers – including Fuller’s, Young’s, Charles Wells and Shepherd Neame – to ask them to draw up a list of pubs they would be interested in buying and to put an offer on the table.

None of the parties involved would comment. However, industry sources claim that Punch, which has a total of about 8,400 pubs, has appointed Sapient Corporate Finance, a boutique advisory firm, to make discreet approaches to potential purchasers.

One source said: “Punch has indicated it will not consider silly offers, but it has given the impression that it will consider offers for almost any of its pubs, including some of its classic London pubs, as long as it gets a decent offer.”

Although it appears to have approached only a small group of regional and family brewers, the news that it is a willing seller is bound to excite interest from bigger rivals including Greene King, Marston’s and Mitchells & Butlers (M&B). M&B, in particular, has long coveted Spirit Group, Punch’s estate of about 850 managed pubs. At the beginning of last year, Punch made an approach to M&B, only for the All Bar One operator to turn the tables with a cheeky approach to buy Spirit.

The decision to canvass interest from rivals follows a recent move to put up for sale about 500 pubs from the bottom end of its leased estate. It has offered its tenants first refusal on the pubs, and it has had interest in about a third of them.

Roger Whiteside, boss of the 7,500-strong leased estate, said last month that the process had resulted in approaches from tenants of another 400 pubs outside the formal sale process. “We will sell pubs at the right price given the company’s aim of raising capital to pay debt,” he said.

Punch’s borrowings are principally held in the form of three tranches of securitised debt taken out against its pub assets. Since the beginning of the financial year, it has taken advantage of the diminishing value of its debt to repurchase and cancel £180 million of debt at a cash cost of £145 million.

In January, Giles Thorley, Punch’s chief executive, said the measures he had taken, including scrapping dividends, had put the group in a strong position to pay off the convertible bond that matures in 2010. However, many anlaysts believe that it will struggle to meet its repayment obligations thereafter without some form of painful financial restructuring.

Punch, like the wider pub and brewing industry, has been pounded by a cocktail of woes in the past 18 months or so, including the smoking ban, the consumer spending crisis, the credit crunch, cheap beer sales by super-markets and big rises in duty. About 39 pubs a week close in Britain as beer volumes suffer a double-digit decline.

The Punch share price has lost almost 95 per cent of its value in the past 12 months amid growing fears over its ability to avoid defaulting on its debt and yesterday they lost a further 10 per cent, losing 4¼p to 35p, valuing the company at just £93 million.

Yesterday’s fall was partly sparked by reaction to comments made by ministers at a parliamentary meeting on the pub crisis. Angela Eagle, the Treasury Minister, and Gerry Sutcliffe, the Licensing Minister, both appeared to put part of the blame for the industry’s woes on the beer tie, under which tenants of big pub companies such as Punch and Enterprise Inns are contractually obliged to buy their beer at sometimes high prices.

Mr Sutcliffe said the tie “needed to be looked at”, while Ms Eagle added: “People have hit on something and these business models do have an impact.”

Observers said the comments implied that the Government could launch a fresh inquiry into the issue, although pub bosses said that the comments were an attempt by ministers to shift blame away from the beer duty regime.

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