As discussed elsewhere on other threads, it is established that the "sandalwood" error was a combination of Yasmina and Paula .... and Paula had to bite the bullet in the boardroom for being project manager.

But does anyone else think (like me) that Yasmina actually very gently, subtly and underhandedly led Paula down to the path of destruction ...?


The edited highlights I remember include:

Paula + Yasmina standing next to the perfume chap with the bottles of Sandalwood and Cedarwood and Yasmina saying "that one" (or indicating in some way)

THEN when they sat down to do costings it was YASMINA who said that the cost would only be pennies, that they had only used a few grams and that Paula could put down £5 for the cost.


To me it looked like all the way through Yasmina was trying to make Paula feel *sure* there was no problem ....

I also think this is why Nick piped up during the production status and mentioned the cost of Sandalwood and said "I leave it with you" .... even though Yasmina then looked mock amazed / shocked, I think she actually knew she had misled Paula and ensured that their team would not be profitable.

Not really because you want to win the task not lose it.

SAS said that Yasmina had practically gone from being top dog to going down in his opinion and nearly got sacked for it if it wasn't for her previous tasks. I think it was a genuine mistake about Cedarwood and Sandalwood and % and grams.

Paula showed she didn't understand as Debra pointed this out....Paula said that they used "only half a gram of it [sandalwood]"

Why would Yasmina risk getting fired just to test whether Paula goes or not? The thing is, Paula put her in charge of costings so SAS could have easily just as well fired her and she must have realised that.

I personally don't think there was ANY mix up between Cedarwood and Sandalwood, because from the very moment they chose it, they KNEW it was the expensive one they had picked.
The mix-up came (IMO) from misunderstanding 3% is NOT 3g.
Going by that assumation, £1200 per kilo = £3.60 for 3g. "About a fiver".

I don't think Yasmina was "in on the plan" to stitch her up, because as Pieface says, surely the best way to play the game is to WIN, then there is no chance of getting taken into the boardroom and having someone to blame it on.

What i would like to know is the difference between all the different costs.

Nick said (when he interrupted) that they had so far spent £700 on essential oils.
450g of Sandalwood is £540
What did they spend the other £160 on?

Then when the full costs were read out, it was over £1,000.
Now I appreciate that Lush didn't work for free, and there was packing, printing, designers, etc etc to pay for.
So what OTHER essential oils did they use that cost £160???

I'm not all that keen on Yasmina but I did think she was genuinely shocked when she realised the mistake. I suppose she could have sussed it out when she was actually pouring the oil into the mixture

I agree with this post.


If you win the task, you are automatically safe and don't have to go into the boardroom.


Candidates sometimes sabotage other candidates to cover their own backs, but to make such a huge task-breaking error can't be intentional.

Definately not.

This was mooted about a task in the last series.

It would be an absurd ploy to put yourself in the firing line just on the off-chance that Sugar would sack the PM instead of the person who made the mistake. Especially as he is so fickle and seems to change what he thinks is the most egregious fault on a week to week basis.

If he'd used the same basis this week as he did when he fired Anita it would have been Ben who got sacked without a doubt. H sacked Anita for not doing something she was asked to do and then let Ben off despiet the fact that he made no attempt to do what he had been asked to do.

Sugar is little more than a joke, now.

I think it was all the other ingredients to make soap and bubble bath.

Didn't they have lavender in there too?

I would have thought as a chef, Yasmina is used to weighing out ingredients... I can't think of many recipes that call for weights as low as 3g... when you get that small, you are in teaspoon territory.

I weighed out 100g of rice last night, and that wasn't more than a small heap.

Surely when they were adding the stuff, they should have realised that is way more than 3g!

I thought the sandlewood was over £1400 per kilo which would pretty much explain the figures.

Well, quite. If she is used to 'executing' food preparation every day in her restaurant as she claimed the other week there is now way she could have thought she was only using 5 g of the oil when she was shown mixing it. Leaving aside her glossing over the mix up between % and actual volume given she was so hot on costs when her own neck was on the line as PM. Having said that she did look surprised and I think she is probably just much more careless when working for someone else. But Paula should have gunned for her not the loathesome little pipsqueak.

Yasmina doesnt have enough upstairs to have executed such a devious plan. Also, Paula wasnt that strong a candidate, so at this stage in the game there was no need to pick her off as has been suggested.

I think it was a genuine errod made by two rather dumb women paying no attention to the costing sheet.

So did I - if so then 450g would cost £630.
In your head you would halve 1400, know it was under that and round up accordingly to make ample allowance for the other oils.

nick shouldnt have told them their error

if they had managed to win task by increasing their prices it wouldnt have been fair on the other team

Actually Debra should have pushed the point. Any of the team could have, and should have pushed to check the costings. None of them wanted to be on the losing team. I think that Ben knew very well that the other two were making a mess of it. As Nick so rightly said, he was only a few metres away, and it wouldn't have taken him much away from his mixings to say, are you sure you've got the prices for the quantities you are using correct. I think he sold the rest of them down the river, frankly. He's the only one who didn't look surprised at the cost when Nick told them, in fact he was smirking.

I'm sure that quite a lot of people knew what was going down, but didn't tell others. From the helpers, through to some of the team members. Paula had a reasonable strategy in assigning responsibility for costs to Ben and Yasmina, but didn't hold them to those roles, resulting in blame falling on her. If it had been me in charge of the team (and with the benefit of hindsight) I would have assigned Nick (stockbroker and all that) the role of keeping track of costs and asked him to check, double check, and report on costs at regular intervals. Then, the error probably wouldn't have happened. Or if it did, Ben would have been more likely to carry the can for it.

On the contrary, I think Yasmina has too much upstairs to have executed such a stupid plan.

I really can't see why Yasmina would think the plan suggested by the OP worth trying. Clearly, Paula would realise that the error was caused by her and Yasmina; there was no way she wouldn't be taken into the boardroom as she and Ben were the only people Paula could possibly hope to blame. There would be every possibility that she would be fired herself.

No, I don't buy it. It was just a mistake by both of them.

The helpers knew but weren't allowed to say. I don't see any reason to think Debra, Kate or James knew. Several times we seem them query the costs, and each time they are reassured, and they have no reason to doubt that Paula and Yasmina know what they are doing. Plus they, too, wouldn't want to be on a losing team. If they had spotted the mistake, they'd get more kudos for pointing it out.

The only stitch up job in that task was Ben trying to stay teflon by giving it the ' girls know more about beauty products than me I will just do the manual work' line. He is a snake in the grass....another one with a dreadfully over inflated opinion of himself and little actual ability...as the saying goes an empty vessel makes a lot of noise!

No, they both seem to suffer badly from 'math phobia'. Even after the error was pointed out to them, they didn't appear to grasp the enormity of the error.

Yasmina clearly isn't in charge of the 'figures' in her restaurant.

I'm not sure about Yasmina doing it deliberately, but watched the clip on bbc website of the moment Nick told them and the smug look on Ben's face suggested to me that he had a fair idea that a mistake was being made.

Nick isn't a stockbroker. He is one of Alan Sugar's assistants and shouldn't be seen to be helping the team. Which, by advising them of their high production costs when none of them had noticed, he could have been accused of doing that. There are no contestants called Nick - although there was a contestant called Nicholas in series four. He wasn't a stockbroker though - he was a solicitor.

Exactly.

All these idiotic suggestions about some devious plan are ridiculous. Just as idiotic is the incomprehension at why Yashmina didn't appreciate the error when volumes were actually used in the mixture, firstly I am not sure they physically made the mix, I thought Ben did it, and secondly, they simply weren't thinking if they ever encountered the volume that is should be three grams. Basically the error was caused by two girly air-heads who aren't numerate.

But, if the boy air head had done what the TL told him to and kept a check on the costs the problem would have been spotted before it was too late.

It was only Sugar's inept handling of the boardroom that allowed Ben to escape.

Exactly.

The firm reassurance that people like Debrah received from Paula and Yashmina when she queried the recipe ensured that once the error was made it wasn't going to be detected.

I would be interested to know who it was that converted the 3% into the 450g, because whoever it was realised it was 3% and not 3g, but then I suppose that didn't prevent the two air-heads from making the mistake. Presumably Ben did the measuring and made the correct volume calculation and the two air-heads saw the 3 and made the incorrect calculation.