GORDON RAMSAY, the foul-mouthed television chef, has publicly admitted for the first time that his restaurant empire came close to collapse earlier this year.

His accountants drew up plans to put the business into administration and at one point Ramsay owed the tax-man more than £7m.

“It was the worst bollocking ever . . . They told me I was f*****,” he said.

The desperate move came in January when auditors from KPMG found that Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) was losing millions of pounds after botching an ambitious overseas expansion plan.

“They said we should plan for administration. That it would be smoother for everyone,” Ramsay said in his first interview since his business was plunged into chaos and his family-man image was tarnished by claims that he had had a seven-year affair.

Auditors wanted to take control of his global restaurant group, comprising 21 restaurants and pubs in London, New York, Los Angeles, Florida, Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, Ireland and Prague, to “cherry-pick the winners and say goodbye to the losers”, Ramsay said. Three of his restaurants have now closed.

The crisis came after GRH breached covenants – promises made to lenders to secure a loan – on its £500,000 overdraft and £10m of loans with Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

“We went over our overdraft limit and we did not hit revenue targets,” Ramsay said. The bank sent in KPMG to go over GRH’s books. A separate investigation by HM Revenue & Customs found that the company owed £7.2m in taxes.

Ramsay concedes that his ego got the better of him and the company expanded too far, too fast, opening 10 restaurants in 10 months last year, many of them overseas: “Tenacity and ambition overtook me. We thought we could do anything, that we could not fail. We flew too high, too fast.” He was so concerned about the prospect of administration that he considered selling up to 20% of the company and his £6m home in Wandsworth, south London, to save the business. “I did not think I could get through. The hurdles were coming faster and higher all the time,” he said.

He did sell his Ferrari but Chris Hutcheson, his father-in-law, with whom he runs GRH, talked him out of further sales.

The pair managed to stave off administration by hiving off GRH’s operations in Paris, Los Angeles and Prague, reducing the number of covers in other restaurants, sacking a quarter of the staff at their London head office and sinking £5m of their own money into the company. They used the cash to pay off debt and most of the £7.2m in outstanding taxes.

“It’s been very painful. It’s taken several million pounds of my own money but I’m still standing,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay expects KPMG, which is finalising its report for RBS, to give the company a clean bill of health any day now. He hopes it will mark the end of what he calls “the worst year of my life”.

While he has been battling the downturn at his restaurants, he has also been fending off allegations that he had a seven-year affair. In addition he has seen his three-Michelin-star Gordon Ramsay restaurant kicked off the list of Restaurant magazine’s 100 best eateries in the world and endured claims that he had embellished his history as a Glasgow Rangers footballer.

“It’s been very, very hard,” he said. “At times it felt like a witch hunt. I’ve put my hands over my face and taken the blows.”

He and Tana, his wife, who writes bestselling family cookery books, have put on a public display of togetherness. As for Rangers, he blames any confusion about his record (he played in testimonials, not the Scottish Premier League side) on “the passage of time”.

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