Financial statements for the year ending December 31 2024 have revealed Jhoots Chemist Limited’s tumbling funds ahead of a year of bumper debt.
Published yesterday (March 4), the unaudited accounts showed that between December 31 2023 and the same date in 2024, shareholders’ funds dipped to -£1,588,373.
The new figures reflect a £1,855,914 year-on-year drop in funds.
Read more: Jhooty and the GPs: Employee pins miscarriage on pay stress as staff owed thousands
Meanwhile, the papers showed that the company is due to pay creditors back an increasing amount of cash over the next year.
The document said that while Jhoots Chemist Ltd was due to pay £2,637,632 within the year at the end of 2023, a year on, it was scheduled to settle some £4,650,511 – an increase of over £2m.
Despite this, the report added that “directors have not identified any material uncertainties…that may cast significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern”.
Jhoots latest
In January, its sister company Jhoots Pharmacy Limited’s annual report for the year ending December 31 2023 reported a mammoth annual post-tax loss of £5m, after making a profit of £1.6m the previous year.
And in September, another of the chain’s sister companies Jhoots Healthcare Limited revealed that it had suffered a loss of £355,799 in 2023 but that directors were “confident of [its] future prospects” and had paid their other businesses thousands of pounds in “management fees”.
Read more: Staff struggle to feed their kids after Jhoots missed January wages
Meanwhile last month, C+D revealed that Jhoots Chemist Limited’s sole owner Sarbjit Singh Jhooty was embroiled in a pay dispute, the stress of which led one pharmacy staff member to miscarry, she claimed.
A group of 14 locum pharmacists working for Blackbrook, Somerset Bridge and Victoria Park pharmacy told C+D that the branches in question were run by SD Pharmacy - a company owned by “a group of doctors” - when they stopped receiving payment in July 2024.
Jhoots director Sarbjit Jhooty took over SD Pharmacy on September 26 2024.
Read more: ‘Deeply troubled’: Town mayor demands Jhoots sorts pay ‘issues’
Since then, another four employees at the pharmacies began to have issues receiving wages, sick pay and maternity pay.
At the time, Jhoots said that Jhooty took over the company to secure “the longevity of the pharmacies”.
But the “full scale of the debts was not clear” and “the monies owed to pharmacists by SD Pharmacy were for shifts completed prior to [his] ownership”.
Read more: P2U, Jhoots, Enimed: Who made the biggest profits and losses?
The issues came after C+D revealed in January that Jhoots pharmacy staff in Hull handed in their notice after a missed January pay-day left them facing eviction and unable to “afford school lunches”.
A week on from pay-day, an anonymous staff member told C+D that they knew of “four stores minimum” in their area that hadn’t received any payment since before Christmas.
Read more: Jhoots Pharmacy disposing of ‘existing branches’ amid £350k annual loss
And last month, a Devon town mayor raised the alarm on the “latest issues” at the local Jhoots pharmacy branch, which have seen the town left without its pharmacy services.
The mayor said that the problems included “late payment of wages to staff and no onsite pharmacist”.
