Southampton superclub Oceana has been temporarily closed after it was yesterday repossessed by landlords.
Administrators said the club was among those that they would continue to operate while a buyer is sought as 11 of Luminar’s loss-making clubs, including the Lava & Ignite club in Northampton where a 22-year-old student was last month killed, are closed with 300 job losses.
But staff arriving for work at Oceana Southampton in West Quay Road, were yesterday greeted by a notice from bailiffs saying the premises had been repossessed and the lease with the Rank Group had been terminated.
Rank said its tenant, Strobe 6, a former Luminar company now in liquidation, had failed to pay its rent and it had so far been unable to agree terms with their occupier, Luminar Leisure, to allow them to continue trading as Oceana nightclub.
A spokesman for administrators Ernst & Young said last night they had reached a deal with landlords to reopen the club “in due course”.
Luminar, which has 76 venues, went into administration when it said it could not meet agreements with banks on around £85m of debt, despite a period of leniency to allow the business time to turn itself around.
It recorded losses of £198m in the year to the end of February.
The group has suffered amid the financial gloom as its core market of 18 to 24-year-olds has been hit by high levels of youth unemployment.
Oceana Southampton opened in 2008 as one of the biggest clubs in Europe, with a capacity of 4,000.
The group had been trying to drum up more business by diversifying its offer, including holding Jongleurs comedy nights and introducing WooWoo cocktail bars next to its clubs.
Ernst & Young said the closures represented an acceleration of a turnaround plan for the business and the clubs being closed had already been identified as “non-core”.
Joint administrator Alan Hudson said in a statement: “The core estate of clubs that were open this weekend delivered excellent trading results over what was a very busy Hallowe’en trading period for the business.
He added: “To date we have received a large number of enquiries in the business as a whole and individual sites, and are actively engaged in discussions with these parties.”
The Milton Keynes-based group recently put itself up for sale in an attempt to secure its future. But it only received offers for part of the business and said these were not sufficient to generate returns for shareholders.
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