Hands To Try Green Fingers

Former EMI chief Guy Hands may discover whether he has green fingers if he buys the UK’s biggest chain of garden centres.

According to The Sunday Times, he spent Feb. 11-12 finalising a £300 million ($475 million) deal for Garden Centre Group, which owns 128 outlets through its Blooms and Wyevale chains.

It belongs to Lloyds Bank, which took over GCG’s account when it bought HBOS, the holding company for Bank of Scotland and Halifax building society.

The credit crunch did for the garden centre chain the same it did for EMI.

Lloyds stepped in with a debt-for-equity swap that left former owner Tom Hunter, the Scottish businessman who’d bought it in 2006 with the help of a £370 million loan from HBOS, with less than 20 percent.

Buying GCG would be the first major deal that Terra Firma, Hands’ private equity firm, has done since its £4.2 billion purchase of EMI.

Hands is appealing a New York court ruling that Citigroup, the U.S. investment bank that lent Terra Firma most of the money, did not commit fraud when selling the music company to him in 2007.

He’s also unhappy about the reasons that Citi gave for taking control of the company last February.

Citi has since hived off EMI’s recorded music business to Universal and its publishing to a consortium led by Sony ATV – two deals which will soon be the subject of scrutiny from monopolies regulators.