Tesco denies delaying OFT probe
Supermarket giant dragged its feet, say insiders
Tesco has strongly denied that it delayed an Office of Fair Trading enquiry into the way the code of practice governing supermarkets and suppliers is working.
A report in the Financial Times quotes industry insiders as saying that the UK’s biggest retailer group dragged its feet and was partly responsible for delays to the report.
Tesco spokesman John Church said: “It took us longer than other, smaller retailers to get some of the information. This was because of the complexities in our system of record-keeping, things are kept at different sites. We are bigger than some of the others involved in this review and we have worked transparently with the auditors. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
The OFT has been reviewing the Competition Commission code for more than a year, and was due to have reported by the end of 2004. At an early stage of the enquiry, it said that up to 85 per cent of suppliers and trade associations which had responded believe the code has failed to change supermarkets’ behaviour when it comes to extracting favourable terms from suppliers.
