Moves by Irish firm McCambridge to buy debt-ridden cake company Inter Link are on a knife edge.

Inter Link chairman Jeremy Hamer said he was reluctant to comment while talks were ongoing but there were other firms interested in purchasing Inter Link if the prospect of a deal with McCambridge fell through.

Inter Link, which has nine UK bakeries and one in Poland, has run up a £63m bank debt. Earlier McCambridge made an initial offer based on the condition that Barclays wrote off some of the debt. But the bank said it was unacceptable that it should lose out while sharehol-ders profited from the deal.

Now, McCambridge has come back with a revised offer under which the shareholders will get nothing. Discussions on this are still in progress. Hamer said: "If it doesn’t happen soon, it won’t happen. Business is very much as usual. The issue is our balance sheet not our business. We’ve got to adjust our balance sheet because we borrowed too much."

He added the future of the 1,700 Inter Link staff was assured.