The great and the good breakfasting at the Wolseley this morning can rest easy - it emerged yesterday that the leading London restaurant is not among the sprawling web of interests to be put up for sale by Dawnay Day.

The financial conglomerate run by Guy Naggar and Peter Klimt, his former tax lawyer, has been working with Ernst & Young (E&Y) since the weekend on possible disposals after being hit by heavy losses on financial investments.

It will be one of E&Y's trickier tasks. Dawnay Day seemingly has a finger in everything, from a German department store chain to AIM-listed property investment groups. Mr Naggar is listed at Companies House as having 256 directorships.

Confusing the picture still further is the fact that some assets, such as the Wolseley and Austin Reed, the retail chain, are held outside the Dawnay Day portfolio. Indeed yesterday was notable not only for Mr Naggar's silence but also the statements from companies insisting that they were not among those likely to be caught up in the problems, such as Dawnay Shore Hotels, which owns the Carlton Hotel in Edinburgh and the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds.

Dawnay Day's difficulties will embarrass the French-born financier who set out with Mr Klimt 20 years ago to find the “hidden value” in forgotten or unfashionable property assets. “The second building we ever bought together was the Iceland on Brixton Road, not long after the riots. Twenty five years ago you couldn't borrow money on it,” he said last year.

Until the credit crunch, Mr Naggar, 67, was lauded for having turned a UK property company into a £5 billion global concern. Three years ago, he began to concentrate on expansion in Europe, Asia and the US. Dawnay Day also became far more aggressive in private equity-style deals. “People say they don't understand us, as we're buying a portfolio in Harlem one minute, and Austin Reed the next. There are two guiding principles we've had all the way through. One is back talent. Two is buy hard assets with deep value. It's our way. We also like to have our own money in funds. We like to feel we're at risk,” he once said.

These comments may have come back to haunt him.

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