Punch Taverns plots another way out of £3bn debt and a pub empire in crisis

A decade of relentlessly spending billions has produced a staggering monolith, spiralling debt and slumping sharesThere's no logo above the door of its pubs. No branding, no advertising, not the slightest sign of corporate identity. But an eighth of Britain's licensed houses are quietly owned by Punch Taverns, a sprawling, anonymous empire of neighbourhood drinking establishments disintegrating under a mountain of £3bn in debt.Punch owns 6,770 of Britain's 52,000 pubs, an estate built over a decade of frenetic multibillion-pound purchases, sales, mergers and demergers at the height of Britain's leveraged buyout boom. Its empire stretches from the Quayside Inn in Falmouth, Cornwall, to the Chieftain, in Inverness.But after slashing the balance sheet value of hundreds of struggling pubs,

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