No More Fruits and Flowers

Terra Firma’s accountants reportedly unearthed a £200,000-a-year EMI slush fund to buy sex and drugs for artists.

The items, which are alleged to have been entered into the company accounts as "fruits and flowers," have now been cut from the budget, along with the £20,000 annual bill for candles and a £5 million company house in Mayfair for the use of senior executives, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Adam Sweeting and Juliette Garside, two of the paper’s media correspondents, teamed to write an article that gave Guy Hands the chance to defend the "slash-and-burn tactics" that have upset a list of acts including Robbie Williams, Coldplay, Radiohead, The Verve and Snow Patrol.

"About a third of the artists who sign with EMI never make an album. We’re going to drop a fair number of them," he told the paper, explaining why he’s cutting 2,000 jobs and dumping hundreds of the company’s 14,000 acts. "You’ve got to get them to a level where you can provide a super service."

The Telegraph also pointed out that some of the bigger acts on the roster aren’t performing to the levels expected, revealing that a million surplus copies of Robbie Williams’s Rudebox album are being shipped to China to be recycled for use in road surfacing.

"It’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life, from a business perspective," Hands admitted, referring to the January 15 presentation to EMI staff.

"People were excited about a new vision for EMI, and a number of people said this should have been done years ago, but clearly they were nervous for their own jobs. They clapped and applauded, which was very nice of them.

"I’ve always been an entrepreneur and I invest my money alongside that of others, rather than being a fund manager. I will continue to use my money to invest in businesses where I can make a positive difference to how they are run."

As more EMI acts rail against the changes at EMI, the more the business pages seem to be sympathetic toward them. According to the Sunday Times, Hands is throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of the music industry to match his much-criticized turnaround plan for the company.

Hands, who is also bidding for the music publisher Chrysalis, hopes to line up a new chief exec for EMI by the end of June.