Sir Philip Green has pledged to resolve the problems facing the BHS pension scheme and apologised for the collapse of the department store chain.
In a fiery session with MPs, Green said the pension problems the company faced were resolvable, and promised that beneficiaries would get a better deal than if the scheme entered the pension protection fund. The BHS scheme has a deficit of £571m.
“We will solve it. We will find a solution,” Green said, without providing details.
There were some extraordinary exchanges between Green and MPs during the joint hearing of the business, innovation and skills committee, and the work and pensions committee. Green asked Richard Fuller, the Conservative MP, to stop looking at him. “Sir, do you mind not looking at me like that all the time? It’s really disturbing,” he said.
He also appealed to Frank Field, the work and pensions committee chairman, saying that the Tory MP Richard Graham was “beating me up”. Green asked Graham: “Are we in the same room?” during questions about the BHS pension scheme.
“Which bit of ‘I don’t remember’ is not clear to you?” Green asked another MP.
BHS is being wound down after administrators failed to secure a rescue deal, putting 11,000 jobs at risk. Green controlled BHS for 15 years until March 2015, when he sold it to Dominic Chappell’s consortium, Retail Acquisitions, for £1.
The tycoon and other investors collected more than £580m in dividends, rent and interest payments during his tenure at BHS. Green apologised for the collapse of the 88-year-old chain and insisted the dividends he took out of the company were not excessive.
The billionaire said he should have sold BHS earlier and that “stupid, idiotic mistakes” had been made about the pension scheme. “Nothing is more sad than how this has ended,” he said.
In response to questions from MPs, Green said the financing of BHS was “not an aggressive finance strategy” and not excessive. He said that as much as £800m had been pumped into the business between 2004 and 2015. “We put all that back into the business and more,” he said.
Green also said he left the UK in 1998 because of a heart scare, and moved to Monaco because “someone suggested it” and it had good schools for his children. “I had never spent a day there previously,” he said. Green’s business interests, including Arcadia, his retail business, are owned by his wife, who is also based in Monaco.
The tycoon told MPs he did not accept claims he was avoiding tax. “There are competitors of ours who don’t pay tax as a normal course of business,” he said.
Chappell and senior managers at BHS made a series of explosive allegations when they faced MPs last week. Chappell was accused of being a “mythomaniac”, a “Premier League liar” and of having his “fingers in the till” at BHS. In his own evidence, Chappell said Green had blocked a rescue deal for BHS with Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct after going “insane” when he found out about the talks.
MPs have called for Green to be stripped of his knighthood. He was accused of being an “unscrupulous chancer” and overseeing “wealth extraction rather than wealth creation” during a parliamentary debate into the collapse of BHS.
