Superphil
Dismember
It's a traditional tactic sadly. Buy a pub as a 'business', then apply to bulldoze it and build houses for mega-profit. Fail, intially in the face of local opposition. Run pub into the ground, with crap management and no spend on maintenance, so that it becomes unviable as a business. Close pub. Apply again to bulldoze it.
#wankers
That explains what happened at the E&C almost perfectly.
On the plus side, the owners of a free house , the White Lion, near to us tried to close the pub and de license it for development, and they were refused. They did get a couple of bungalows in the garden, but they had to reinstate the pub, which they sold, and now is a cracking place with good beer and very good food.