Patisserie Valerie boss says £20m black hole in accounts is ‘nightmare’. Luke Johnson has agreed to lend the struggling cake chain £20m of his own money. Luke Johnson, the serial entrepreneur behind Patisserie Holdings (CAKE), described the cake chain’s near-collapse as a nightmare, as he said the company had run up nearly £10m in secret overdrafts. Patisserie Valerie’s finance director was arrested last week, after the company stunned the stock market by revealing it had found “significant, and potentially fraudulent, accounting irregularities”, reported to be more than £20m. Speaking after he agreed to lend £20m of his own money to keep the business afloat, Johnson said he had experienced the “most harrowing week of my life”, which felt like a “nightmare that I’d wake up from”. “There were 2,800 jobs at stake, there was 12 years of effort that I and colleagues had put into the business and the board were determined not to allow the business to go into administration,” he told the Sunday Times.
