Lloyds Pharmacy enters voluntary liquidation with almost £300m owed to creditors

It owes £228m to former owner Admenta UK and £50m to Aurelius Crocodile.

After a year-long divestment spree, LloydsPharmacy has entered into liquidation and appointed Turpin Barker Armstrong Accountants to handle the process.

In its statement of affairs report, the liquidators confirmed that the pharmacy group owes £293m to 514 creditors.

This includes £228m owed to the group’s former owner Admenta UK and £50m to Aurelius Crocodile – a holding company that was used to control the pharmacy business.

However, creditors are set to lose out on approximately £255m as only about £8.2m can be recovered for preferential creditors and £800,000 for its unsecured creditors, the liquidators said.

The healthcare chain was acquired by Aurelius when the investment firm took over its parent company, McKesson UK in 2022 for £477m.

Following the acquisition, McKesson UK changed its name to Hallo Healthcare Group, which was made of LloydsPharmacy, AAH Pharmaceuticals ltd, LloydsPharmacy Clinical Homecare, LloydsDirect and Lloyds Online Doctor.

At the time, LloydsPharmacy employed more than 2,500 pharmacists at almost 1,300 pharmacies.

In January 2023, Hallo Healthcare closed all 237 LloydsPharmacy branches inside Sainsbury’s due to “changing market conditions”.

Later in November 2023, the company confirmed that it had sold all of its 1,054 high street and community pharmacies that operated under the LloydsPharmacy brand.

At that time, it said that 6,500 branch workers had secured employment with new owners.

The healthcare chain’s exit from the high street followed the acquisition of online pharmacy LloydsDirect by Pharmacy2U in October 2023.

Hallo Healthcare Group has retained ownership of LloydsPharmacy Healthcare Services as well as LloydsPharmacy Clinical Homecare and LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor.

A spokesperson for the group then said: “Whilst it may have left the high street, the LloydsPharmacy brand name and heritage remains in specialist pharmacy, clinical and digital healthcare.”