DF Explains Misleading Results

Scotland’s DF Concerts Ltd. has posted a trading loss of £1.5 million ($2.48 million) and its auditors have warned that it owes £2.5 million ($4.13 million) more than its assets are worth.

DF chief Geoff Ellis said a story about the figures, which appeared in the Scottish edition of The Sun, was no more than “mischievous journalism,” as it focuses on one section of the company’s business and takes no account of the success of other sectors including T In The Park Festival and its King Tut’s venue in Glasgow.

This year’s T In The Park was an 85,000-capacity sellout and the company has already shifted more than 40,000 tickets for the 2010 event.

“Overall we didn’t make a loss at all but purely through DF Concerts Ltd. we did,” he explained.

A company spokesman told the paper that the latest DF Concerts Ltd. accounts – which were for the first eight months of 2008 and filed at Companies House last month – reflected the investment it made in the 2007 and 2008 editions of Connect Festival.

This year’s Connect, which would again have been held in the grounds of Inveraray Castle, was canceled because of the credit crunch.

Ellis, who once described the site as being “the most beautiful in the U.K.,” blamed the “very high infrastructure and servicing costs” involved in producing a festival in Argyll.