The group drawn from the Works and Pensions, and the Business, Innovation & Skills departments to form a committee to investigate the demise of BHS and the deficit in the BHS employee pension fund have found that Sir Philip Green should personally shoulder responsibility for the collapse of the business following the sale to Dominic Chappell which Green himself had “engineered”. MPs accused Green, together with his his team and professional advisors of selling BHS to a wholly unsuitable party which meant that BHS had no realistic hope of survival. Green was also criticised for having failed, during his family’s ownership of the business, to invest sufficient funds to sustain BHS. Many reports also allege that there had been “systematic plunder of BHS by its owners, advisors and hangers on, who all got rich or richer as a result, yet appear to have gone unpunished.
That the Greens have just taken delivery of (yet another) luxury yacht and pay little to no tax in the UK, virtue of a network of offshore holding companies, has also irked MPs from all parties who are now pressing for a review of company law and, specifically, the law governing the management of pension funds. This has come rather too late for the 11,000 BHS employees who have lost their jobs and the 20,000+ whose pensions are now going to be affected. But as all readers know the impact is far greater than that. MP Frank Field is arguing that the buck stops with Sir Philip Green and that he should now act to restore the pension fund from the significant monies and assets his family had extracted from BHS and continue to extract from the Arcadia Group. There are also calls for Sir Philip Green to be stripped of his knighthood and for a major investigation into the tax affairs of the businesses – all operated in his wife’s name – to be undertaken.
We hear weekly of small business owners losing everything when their businesses fail due to the collapse of their large customers, but this case shows that there continues to be a completely different set of rules for the super-rich. Businesses we know of which supplied BHS each lost hundreds of thousands of pounds when BHS failed and are now unlikely ever to see a penny of it back. Some have been forced to appoint administrators themselves and make their staffs redundant while the likes of the Greens and the fat cats surrounding them continue to swan around as though entirely innocent. The fact is that the Green family have destroyed countless businesses and caused thousands more jobs to be lost. We cannot believe that what they have done can be entirely lawful and would hope that the publicity surrounding this case will render it impossible for any other large corporate group ever to descend to such depths. This matter has cast a very nasty stain on UK retailing.
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