Kingfisher: 20-year saga ends with DIY accident

"This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but a whimper."

So said TS Eliot in The Hollow Men. And few men can have had more of a hollow feeling than Sir Geoff Mulcahy when he found that the final chapter in the 20-year Kingfisher saga will end not with a bang, not a whimper, but an almighty row and a DIY accident.

The story started with the buyout of the UK arm of the mighty FW Woolworth by a team led by Mr Mulcahy and backed by Victor Black at Charterhouse. The deal made fortunes for both and a few years later both picked up knighthoods. Woolworth – later renamed Kingfisher– gradually diversified, buying the Comet and Darty electrical chains and the B&Q DIY business. It also fended off a bid by Dixons and, in what appeared to be an act of petulance, unsuccessfully bid for the electricals group in turn. It then tried to merge with Asda.

Finally, and controversially, it bought 55 per cent of the French DIY business Castorama. The deal, struck four years ago, gave Kingfisher only 50 per cent of the voting rights but did give it terms for a buyout of the remainder.

In the last couple of years Sir Geoff, stunned by a lacklustre share price and an unhappy investment community, has been dismantling the empire he created. As with almost everything he does, the process has been crawled all over by management consultants and executed in a way that seems designed to create maximum disruption. The man Sir Geoff was grooming as his successor, Roger Holmes, became disenchanted with the process and scuttled off to Marks & Spencer, where he appears to be forever one step from being chief executive.

The original Woolworth business was at first going to be sold to a management buyout, then demerged as a public company. The uncertainty led to the departures of the people running the business. And when Sir Geoff finally plumped for demerger, he appeared to imperil the process by trying to undermine the new chairman of Woolies, former Railtrack boss Gerald Corbett.

On Wednesday, after weeks of rumours about a deal for Castorama, Kingfisher announced the terms under the enthralling headline "Kingfisher Initiates Strategic Transformation". Sir Geoff would pay £3.2bn for the rest of Castorama, raising £2bn from the stock market to do so, and demerge the electrical retailing side to leave Kingfisher as a pure DIY business (soon to be joined on the market by Focus Wickes and Homebase).

But, seemingly, Sir Geoff hadn't squared this with the French. Castorama said the €67 (£42) a share offer was too low and Kingfisher should pay at least €70 a share, a further £140m. Castorama's chief, Jean-Hughes Loyez, said the offer "doesn't represent a sufficient valuation for the company".

Sir Geoff's enemies, and he has quite a few, seized on this. How could he not have sorted things out with the French first? Will he now have to up the offer? Will it make raising the money harder?

If Sir Geoff hadn't already announced he was retiring at the end of this year, there might be renewed calls for his departure. As it is, he has not named a successor. Who would want to step into this wasteland?