WHEN Antony Worrall Thompson pulled the plug on his restaurant empire in February, he painted himself as another hapless victim of greedy bankers.

The celebrity chef told a depressing tale of Lloyds Banking Group demanding he put up his family home in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, as security on a loan or forfeit his six restaurants and axe up to 100 staff. “I am furious that the banks did not support me,” he said then.

Now the publication of the administrator’s report into the business has revealed a rather different picture, indicating that the restaurants’ demise was largely the result of some poor management decisions.

It states that the chef’s company, AWT Restaurants, overstretched itself and was too slow in reacting to the economic downturn.

The administrator said the decision to take on two new sites in Windsor, along with the money spent on refurbishing those premises, “put an inordinate strain on the company’s borrowing facilities”.

It also said the company “had not responded sufficiently quickly to the downturn in the sector arising from the credit crisis”, adding that “the combined effects of increased raw-material prices and overstaffing in certain outlets meant declining margins”.

This, coupled with a fall in demand, ultimately led to a squeeze on its financial resources, leaving the business with “insufficient cash and overdraft facilities to pay creditors by the end of January 2009”.

The report, by BHG, the accountancy firm appointed as administrator in February, confirms that Worrall Thompson was asked to put up his house as security in exchange for Lloyds extending an overdraft by £200,000. The chef, however, was not prepared to risk losing his home and was forced to call in administrators instead.

This was despite the fact that AWT Restaurants prepared forecasts for Lloyds showing that it would be viable in the long term, especially if it cut its costs.

Immediately after the business collapsed, Worrall Thompson bought back two of the restaurants as well as the Windsor Larder, a delicatessen, for a total of £210,000.

This weekend Worrall Thompson admitted he had made big mistakes. “I am not blaming anyone,” he said. “I am at the top of the tree and I have to take the blame. We should have reacted quicker [to the downturn].”

He said he had been slow to put up prices when the cost of beef rose sharply last year and said the purchase of the Windsor Larder was “in hindsight, the wrong decision”.

“We should have sat on our money and seen through the recession,” he said.

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