the dailymash

The frozen food giant is understood to have offered around £2.20 a kilo in a deal worth £12.5 million.

Citigroup insisted the sale was an excellent result for shareholders and would help to offset redundancy payments to the workers' families.

Meanwhile Findus said the wholesale purchase of such a large number of redundancies could lead to a slight change in the flavour of the company's famous minced beef Crispy Pancakes.

A spokesman said: "Once the sale is finalised we will be able to process them very quickly.

"There will be nothing left that you could use for a funeral, as such, but the families can always buy a box of Crispy Pancakes and bury it in the back garden as a sort of symbolic gesture."

CITIGROUP REDUNDO-FACTFILE

• If all 75,000 workers were laid end to end the line would stretch from Mansfield to Redditch via the M1 and M42.
  
  

• Together they would fill one Old Trafford, one-and-a-half White Hart Lanes or seven-and-a-half Glanford Parks (Scunthorpe United).
  
  

• Their total weight is 5700 metric tonnes, bone-in.
  
  

• This would produce enough meat for 10.9 million packets of sausages.
  
  

• The 33 acres of leftover skin would cover an area slightly larger than the Arndale Centre in Manchester.