How-Do apologises to Manchester Confidential - or does it? How-Do and ManCon fallout continues
The fallout from the doomed How-Do and Manchester Confidential merger has taken a further bizarre twist after Confidential was accused of sending out an email to its members masquerading as an apology from How-Do.
The email headlined 'How-Do Apologises to The Confidentials' was sent to Manchester Confidential's database of email subscribers yesterday.
It purported to be an apology from the publisher of How-Do over its recent coverage of Manchester Confidential's parent company, Cpub Ltd, being wound-up in the High Court.
The 'apology' read: "How-do Ltd wishes to make it clear that the article published on our site, How-Do.co.uk last week was not meant to infer that the liquidation of CPub Ltd would impact on the ongoing trading of ManchesterConfidential.co.uk or any of its sister sites and we unreservedly apologise if the article caused concern."
But today the How-Do website carried a statement denying it had made any such apology for its coverage.
In a statement How-Do said: "It has come to How-Do’s attention that an email was sent out to the Manchester Confidential email database without our knowledge and we we would like to distance ourselves from it entirely.
"How-Do is published by Northern Publishing Ltd and no longer has any link whatsoever with Manchester Confidential or any of its various companies.
"That [Confidential publisher] Mark Garner has an operation named How-Do Ltd is a hangover from the failed and short-lived (10 weeks) merger between the two publishers. Since the end of January, How-Do has operated independently once again."
Media site How-Do and lifestyle portal Manchester Confidential announced that they had merged in November 2011 but the deal soon went awry. By March it had emerged that How-Do founder Nick Jaspan and former How-Do directors Jill Taylor and Ben Waterhouse had left the venture.
Garner could not be reached at the time of writing.