THE owner of a restaurant which shut unexpectedly before Christmas leaving customers out of pocket has said he is “truly sorry” for what happened and has lost hundreds of thousands of pounds himself.

Giovanni Baffa Scinelli, aged 42, said he was heartbroken by the closure of his restaurant and that any payments made by customers were now out of his hands and with liquidators.

Mr Baffa Scinelli said: “We didn’t know that we were closing, there was an agreement ­— negotiation and agreement ­— and we were assured that we would carry on after Christmas.”

He said: “We had a phone call from our lawyer that the place was no longer ours.”

Mr Baffa Scinelli said: “We are truly, truly sorry for all our customers, which most of them were more than customers, because we created a kind of relationship and we feel sorry for the way it happened.”

However, Mr Baffa Scinelli refused to tell The Bolton News which firm was dealing with the liquidation and declined to explain why the restaurant had had to close saying it would not change anything.

The most recent statements available for La Scala show that at the end of September 2017 the company owed creditors £285,767.

La Scala in Chorley Road, Westhoughton shut up shop suddenly in mid November. Customers who had paid deposits were left in the dark, some contacted The Bolton News and had put as much as £185 down for a table.

A former member of staff also got in touch to say staff had been left without redundancy payments and on occasion wages were late.

Mr Baffa Scinelli was clear that he fully intended to open throughout the Christmas period and had not taken the deposits knowing what would happen.

He added that he had booked a singer for New Year’s Eve and was out of pocket for that.

Mr Baffa Scinelli said he was a good relationship with his staff, calling them more like a “family”, saying he had been in contact with some of them.

He said he intended to tell staff about problems on December 1 and give them the option to stay to the end of the month.

When asked about redundancy payments he said: "No, no, no, the staff are all sorted. The people that are dealing with liquidating the company ­— all the staff are well looked after."

He said all of them were now in employment.

Mr Baffa Scinelli said: "Unfortunately, the company now is in the process of liquidation so it’s out of my hands and there’s nothing I can do.

"Customers have lost but me and my family have lost our life investment. We lost more than £200,000 on it in three years. We haven’t seen a penny back."

Mr Baffa Scinelli said he had been a chef since he was 14 and had had La Scala for three years before it closed.

He was emotional talking about the closure and said: "I’ve lost everything, literally everything, not just money I’ve lost my pride, I lost my energy to get up in the morning and go and find a job."

He said after working as a chef for about 25 years it was a "dream" to open his own restaurant.

Adding: "You don't do it because you want to make money, you do it for you. Because making money is really hard."

He said cheffing was something "you have to have in your heart", calling it a "passion".

Mr Baffa Scinelli said: "The last thing I wanted was to end it like this."

He did not know what the next step was for him but that La Scala would remain closed.