Radar Radio and Sports Direct
In November 2016, The Guardian ran a piece about Radar Radio. The station, founded by Londoner Ollie Ashley, is, according to the article, “at the centre of a DIY online radio revival.”
Radar is an online-only London-based radio station, run out of a studio in Clerkenwell. Its programming puts it at the cutting edge of London’s underground: its schedule for the last couple of weeks includes shows from Crack Stevens, Spooky, BCB AZN Network, Girl Unit, and more. At the end of 2016 it ran a series of workshops aimed at young people wanting to break into the music industry, whether as DJs, presenters, or writers. According to The Guardian, Radar’s studio has a slogan written on the wall: “Tune in or fuck off.”
Radar came at a pivotal time for London radio, hot on the heels of NTS’s expansion and a resurgent Rinse. In a December 2014 piece, FACT said the station was “far from wet behind the ears”, with a studio full of top-of-the-line equipment and a founder with experience at NTS. Much has been written about London’s radio renaissance, at the helm of which you’ll find the Dalston station. Ashley reportedly cut his teeth as a studio manager there.
Radar quickly established itself at the heart of London’s underground. It began with regular shows presented by acts like Riz La Teef and Moleskin, but at the end of last month it continued its ascendancy in a coup de grace fabric co-promotion in association with Resident Advisor. Today, Radar is an unassailable part of the capital’s club culture. It was a meteoric rise, facilitated in great part by the shining Clerkenwell studio. But bootstrapped, DIY operations don’t work like that – few young London entrepreneurs have the capital to fit out a fully functioning radio facility on their own. Where was the money coming from?
It’s an open secret that Ollie Ashley is the son of Mike Ashley, the billionaire majority shareholder in Sports Direct and the owner of Newcastle United. Ashley senior, who placed at number 45 in the 2016 Sunday Times Rich List, never gives interviews and rarely appears in public. In 2006, long before the founding of Radar, The Times compared him to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. At the time of writing, Sports Direct had a market cap of £1.72 billion.
On 1 February, Companies House published Radar's latest accounts. As has been the case since May 2016, their company secretary is a firm called Eacotts, also the secretary for MASH Holdings, the company through which Mike Ashley holds his stakes in Sports Direct and Newcastle. The auditors are professional services giant Grant Thornton, also the auditors for Sports Direct – and, coincidentally, as of November 2016, under investigation by the Financial Reporting Council for signing off on a deal between Sports Direct and a company owned by Mike Ashley’s brother, whose firm made £300,000 a year from the arrangement while based in a registered address in a cul-de-sac in the Lincolnshire town of Cleethorpes.
In the year to April 2016, Radar Radio Ltd made a pre-tax loss of £826,337. At the end of April 2015, Radar had £1.2 million in debts coming due within the year. By April 2016, that figure had risen to £2.2 million.
The accounts state that Radar Radio “has financed its operations via loans from its parent company, MASH Holdings Limited.”
After the accounts were published, I emailed Ollie Ashley with a series of questions. In response, I received a letter from Radar’s lawyers threatening legal action in the event of defamatory material being published. Dean Dunham, the solicitor who sent the letter, was listed in the 2013 Thompson Reuters Super Lawyers list. He is currently the UK’s Retail Ombudsman Chief Ombudsman. Ashley declined to comment for this piece.
Despite his publicity-shy better nature, Mike Ashley has rarely been out of the public eye in the last two years. In December 2015 The Guardian, the same publication that ran the gushing Radar feature just a year later, published a comprehensive investigation into labour practices at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse. Their findings included:
Staff being forced to undergo compulsory searches at the beginning and end of every shift, for which they are not paid
The use of zero hours contracts for around 80% of staff
Reports of staff “jeopardising their health” for fear of being dismissed
So-called ‘strikes’ for taking sickness leave or what managers deem to be excessive toilet breaks
Staff being verbally “harangued by tannoy” for not working fast enough
Union reps reporting staff members refusing to speak out about working conditions for fear of losing their jobs.
In the same investigation, The Guardian found that many staff were being paid an effective rate of £6.50 an hour once forced searches had been taken into account. At the time, the National Minimum Wage was £6.70.
Mike Ashley was asked to appear before a Parliamentary Committee in 2016, but prevaricated. In June of that year he finally turned up, in an appearance that covered the front pages. During the hearing, MPs delivered evidence including:
Transline, one of the labour agencies Sports Direct contracts with, had already been banned from operating in the food sector by the Gangmaster Licensing Authority
At least one worker was asked for sexual favours in return for an employment contract
Workers without bank accounts are offered their wages on a pre-paid debit card. “Workers are charged a £10 one-off fee, a monthly management fee of £10 per month for this facility, 75p for cash withdrawals, 10p for texts to the card holder of any transactions, and £1.50 of a paper statement. Unite estimates that several hundred workers could be using the cards.”
In the three years to June 2016, ambulances were called to the Shirebrook warehouse some 110 times. There were five births during that period. One woman delivered her child in the staff toilet, reportedly because she was too scared of losing her job to take time off.
Last month, the Financial Times reported on a case in which two men were jailed under the Modern Slavery Act for the exploitation of Polish workers in Sports Direct’s Shirebrook facility. The Crown Prosecution Service found that the pair had housed the workers in “squalid accommodation” in Nottingham, and had then secured them work at Sports Direct through Transline.
MASH Holdings has, according to Radar’s accounts, pledged to finance the station for at least another 12 months. Ollie Ashley or his lawyers are still yet to respond to questions for this piece.
