Gloucester MP Richard Graham has grilled the former owner of BHS Sir Philip Green over the collapse of the company.
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In an extraordinary exchange, Sir Philip stopped mid-sentence to rebuke the Tory MP.
Sir Philip said his friend had asked that Mr Chappell never call him again and he denied resisting a deal – angrily rejecting a suggestion his ego could not have allowed another sale for £1. We will sort it, we will find a solution and I want to give my assurances to the 20,000 pensioners that I am here to sort this’. “It’s uncomfortable that’s all”.
When Sir Philip is told other companies moved with the times, he tells Fuller:”Without wishing to be rude, maybe in your next career you should try retail”.
As the lengthy hearing twisted and turned, the business magnate was unapologetic about the £400 million in dividends he took out of BHS during his 15 year ownership, claiming he had pumped more than that in.
Former BHS Owner Sir Philip Green offered a formal apology to BHS staff in his parliamentary hearing today, adding that he will “sort” the firm’s pension scheme which has left behind a £571m black hole.
It emerged that Green had little to do with BHS’s pension trustees, but took the blame for the state of the pension scheme.
“Having given long and hard thought to the matter however, I have decided I will attend tomorrow morning, hoping and trusting that the committee will give me a fair hearing”, he said.
“There’s certainly no intent at all on my part for anything to be like this and it didn’t need to be like this and I just want to apologise to all of the BHS people who have been involved in this and are involved”, he said.
On Wednesday, Mr Chappell claimed to MPs that Sir Philip blocked a rescue attempt for BHS from Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley, favouring instead to plunge BHS into administration. Post-2009 Arcadia lent BHS £256 million on an unsecured and interest-free basis which is highly unusual. “They have been working on it for the past two or three weeks”. In total, he said, Arcadia ploughed £600m into BHS in the years between taking out £400m in dividends and selling to Dominic Chappell in 2015.
“We will consider any credible and reasonable proposals that are put to us but we have not received details of any new proposal from Sir Philip Green or his advisers”. We did not leverage excessive bank debt against profitability, ‘ Green said.
However, Green claimed that he had very limited dealings with the trustees and was not involved in the pensions on a day-to-day basis, and there was a clear “disconnect” between him and the people who ran the pensions. The actual deficit of the scheme is estimated to be around £275 million but the so-called “buyout” value, which calculates how much and insurance firm would charge to buy the scheme, is £571 million.
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Green apologised for the collapse of the retailer saying, “What happened is beyond awful and sad and there was zero intention”.
