Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Raises the Cash to Fight Tesco
Advantage Hugh!
Just an update on the Hugh vs Tesco saga. As you may have read in my previous post Hugh had to find £86,888.00 in a matter of days to pay Tesco to issue a postal resolution to all its shareholders for a say on the company’s policy on animal welfare in its forthcoming AGM.
Hugh put up £30,000 of his own and the charity ‘Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) have generously donated a further £42,500. According to Hugh if all of those who have bid on his special money raising auction honour their payments then he will surpass the amount required. Any surplus would be paid back to the CIWF.
Interesting times ahead, this could be a real thorn in Tesco’s side. Congratulations to Hugh and his team.
Miles,
In last night’s River Cottage Spring, Hugh encouraged a community smallholding project. The team decided to include chickens so they rescued a dozen or so from a battery environment…. it was moving to see how sad they were that they couldn’t have ’saved’ more … a bit like the chicken equivalent of Schindler’s List.
This could have been a (pardon the expression) feather in the Tesco cap if only they’d have collaborated with Hugh and the public. History would have placed them in poll position for actually doing something about this desperate situation… instead history will note that they dragged their heels and put up every barrier possible to halt the process of ‘free range’.
Battery hens, may they roost in peace…. lord knows they never did in life.
Cid
June 12, 2008 @ 8:37 am
MIles
as Cid alludes to this is a missed opportunity for the supermarket chain.
They could have played along with Hugh, got plenty of free publicity, showed themselves to be caring etc and still carried on just the same.
Customers will still buy what they buy and Tesco will cater to them but they could have paid lip service to this and in doing so took the sting out of HFW’s tail, got a bucket load of good publicity and free advertising all for a £86k that would have been tax deductable anyway.
They deserve the bad publicity for stupidity if nothing else !
Rod
June 12, 2008 @ 10:05 am
I agree, the money is nothing to Tesco and who is to say the shareholders are going to go along with Hugh’s resolution? Very strange.
Miles
June 12, 2008 @ 4:11 pm