Pres­tige Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (PHL) is dis­tanc­ing it­self from the neg­a­tive so­cial me­dia posts com­ing from a pro­file bear­ing the name Alex Mout­tet, over the KFC price in­crease, which took ef­fect last Thurs­day.  

The post which has been cir­cu­lat­ed wide­ly by a per­son claim­ing to be Alex Mout­tet said: “At least KFC in­vests in in­fra­struc­ture. The dou­bles man who sets up a $200 MDF board box with ice cream buck­ets of chana un­der a tent, next to a dirty drain saves the mon­ey for a bot­tle of pun­cheon or who knows what.”

This caused great anger by many Face­book users who lashed out against this com­ment, in­clud­ing econ­o­mist Pro­fes­sor In­dera Sage­wan who crit­i­cised Alex Mout­tet for his com­ments about the un­san­i­tary con­di­tions of dou­bles ven­dors as op­posed to KFC out­lets and how much foriegn ex­change is utilised by the fast food out­let.

In a news re­lease yes­ter­day, PHL said this pro­file is in no way af­fil­i­at­ed with Pres­tige Hold­ings and the re­marks be­ing post­ed un­der it are not re­flec­tive of Pres­tige Hold­ings or its val­ues.  

“We can con­firm that no one bear­ing that name is in­volved in the man­age­ment or own­er­ship of Pres­tige Hold­ings. The Mout­tet Fam­i­ly, like Pres­tige Hold­ings, re­spects and cel­e­brates the ef­forts of all in­di­vid­u­als to gen­er­ate a bet­ter life for them­selves and their fam­i­lies,” the re­lease out­lined.

It went on to state that “The en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it is the foun­da­tion stone up­on which all com­pa­nies with­in Pres­tige Hold­ings op­er­ate. We be­lieve in the prin­ci­ples of com­pe­ti­tion and re­spect for all in­di­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es with­in our in­dus­try. We em­phat­i­cal­ly re­ject all state­ments that are in­tend­ed to di­min­ish the in­dus­tri­ous ef­forts of any­one in our coun­try. These sen­ti­ments al­so re­flect the views held by our chair­man, Chris­t­ian Mout­tet, and the wider fam­i­ly.”

On Tues­day, we con­firmed that some price ad­just­ments of be­tween three to five per cent were im­ple­ment­ed.

Pres­tige Hold­ings chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Si­mon Hardy ex­plained that the price in­crease was due to the in­crease in min­i­mum wage, which took ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 1, as well as price in­creas­es from sup­pli­ers.