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Sir Philip Green’s Knighthood Under Review

Sir Philip then rushed to sell the chain to Mr Chappell, riding roughshod over regulatory concerns about the suitability of the new owner.

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However, speaking to the Press Association, Mr Field said he was not going to seek his own legal representation and urged to Sir Philip to “stop this displacement and get on with signing a cheque”.

When Green appeared at the Business and the Work and Pensions select committee meeting, he pointed out that he’d invested £800 million in BHS, in a bid to get the business moving in the right direction.

“[He] hurriedly sold to a manifestly unsuitable buyer”, the report said of Green’s conduct when flogging BHS off to Chappell for a nominal £1 previous year.

Lawmakers said the collapse created many “losers” – chief among them the 11,000 workers whose jobs are now in danger.

“(Green’s) rush to drive through the sale of BHS – a chain that had become a financial millstone and threatened his reputation – was the culmination of a sorry litany of failures of corporate governance and greed”, said the Work and Pensions and Business Committees in a statement today.

The department store, which has a unit in The Meadows Shopping Centre, fell into liquidation in April and announced that 50 of its shops would be forced to close in July due to low stock levels a pension deficit valued at £571 million.

He referred to Green as “the Napoleon figure who orchestrated all this” and should suffer punishment “way beyond losing his knighthood” and even called on action from Prime Minister Theresa May as the Arcadia Group tycoon had been “plundering” BHS.

MPs said the evidence they received over the course of this inquiry “has at times resembled a circular firing squad”.

The worst example was Sir Philip Green, despite his protestations to the contrary. “His description of £2.6m that he personally took, in addition to an outstanding £1.5m family loan, as “a drip in the ocean” is an insult to the employees and pensioners of BHS that he let down”.

A Government spokesman said it highlighted the need “to tackle corporate irresponsibility and reform capitalism”.

Field told the BBC he would not apologise. And those calling for Sir Philip, 64, to be stripped of his title were told there could be “a case to be answered”. The Arcadia group of companies; their pension scheme is now also in deficit.

The inquiry found that boards were expected to defer to Sir Philip’s wishes rather than provide effective scrutiny of decisions.

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Sir Philip – labelled the “unacceptable face of capitalism” – is facing mounting pressure to rectify the pension fund black hole and lose his knighthood after an excoriating joint report by Mr Field’s committee with the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee. When the music stopped, he had no money.

Sir Philip Green 'could be stripped of knighthood' amid criticism surrounding BHS collapse