"Come the New Year, we will be in the black on a consistent basis." So said Goodhead Group chief executive David Holland in a story about the company's results last November.

The group's owner Sir John Madejski, ever the optimist that the business would come good eventually (and the person putting his hand in his own pocket in the meantime), must be fervently hoping he's right.

Over Christmas I was thinking about BGP and imagining how busy things must be down in Bicester, given that the company now prints circa 60 weekly titles. With new work on the production board from Bauer, DC Thomson, and Northern & Shell (among others) that's a lot of time-sensitive production to assimilate in a short period. Sir John has already extended further backing to the business by supporting the purchase of a high-speed stitching line from Ferag to allow the firm to finish it all.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Madejski empire he has ceded control of his high-profile Station Hill redevelopment of Reading town centre to a consortium made up of US private equity real estate firm Benson Elliott and UK developer Stanhope, after banking covenants were breached last year. This must be a painful outcome for the man dubbed "Mr Reading".

PrintWeek quizzed Sir John about other cash-consuming aspects of his empire in a wide-ranging interview last summer. Here's a refresher:

PrintWeek: It does seem to be a critical period though. You're in breach of banking covenants at some of your companies and at Sackville there are covenants coming up at the beginning of July that you have to renegotiate.
Sir John: Anybody in property is in the same boat. We're talking about a large portfolio of property that is producing very good income. It's not a basket case, it's just a question of renegotiating that covenant which is standard procedure. It's not as if we've got a load of sheds that are empty and losing value. We're servicing the debt so it's not a problem.

PW: So you can carry on funding the businesses that need funding?
SJM: Absolutely, yes. We've got many assets that are still producing revenue.

Records filed at Companies House show that Sir John injected £5m into Sackville Developments (Reading) Ltd just four weeks ago. As my man with the propelling pencil puts it: "he's had to put another £5m in just to get out."

Of course, Sir John is not the only investor who has issues with their property portfolio at the moment. Nevertheless, interesting times indeed for anyone like myself who's an avid watcher of Madejski and his empire.