Thursday, June 16, 2016

Phillip Green Vows To Resolve BHS Pensions Black Hole

Former BHS owner Philip Green appeared today before the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and Work and Pensions Committee to answer questions surrounding the demise of the high-street retailer. The company is currently in "wind down", making 11,000 employees redundant and many more without a pension. 

In the six-hour-long exchange, Green - who owned the chain for 15 years before he sold it to Dominic Chappell last year for a token £1 - said he would not take responsibility for the store's closure, but apologised to his former employees and vowed to help resolve the pension deficit which amounts to £571 million. "I want to give an assurance to the 20,000 BHS pensioners that I am there to sort this, in the correct way."

"There certainly was no intent at all on my part for anything to be like this. It didn't need to be like this and I just want to apologise to all the BHS people who have been involved in this."
Green would not take responsibility for the BHS pension deficit but pledged to resolve it: "There have been some stupid, stupid, idiotic mistakes made."

"You have my commitment that I am planning, ASAP, to sit with the regulator. I have a team while we're here working and I want to get this over with, trust me sooner than you do. I'm not running away. It will get my best shot to find a solution as quickly as we can. It has my commitment. In the last four weeks, I could be a murderer for the way they write about me."


"I've become used to getting attacked over the last four weeks, I'm used to it. I haven't been able to visit my shops for weeks. It's wholly unbalanced and unfair. I wanted to come here so that people can see for themselves if I'm honest, dishonest."

When questioned about his reasons for residing in Monaco, a well-known tax haven, Green revealed that he originally moved to there in 1998 for health reasons before he owned any businesses.

"For everything that was legitimately made in the UK, tax was paid in the UK. We've paid many, many, many hundreds of millions pounds of tax and if we were trying to find a system that was specific to doing that, we wouldn't have done that."

"As far as I'm concerned I've got a very clear conscience. We've run these companies properly. We paid everything that was due... we could have taken the brands off shore and charged a royalty - we didn't."


"I can't be judge and jury - other people will or won't believe me. People will make up their mind based on what I've said in the last six hours. There's nothing that I've said that I can't prove or support. It's easy to see now that it wasn't the right buyer. There's lots of reasons for that but I don't want to get into those as it's not where I want to go. 

Green concluded that ultimately his mistake was selling the business to the wrong person. "I picked the wrong guy. I didn't do it intentionally."

"It was a very sad episode that everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. I'm not here to cast the blame, but some people that took up certain roles in this have something to account for. I think I'm sad, that Chappell was given a great opportunity, more than an opportunity. If he had been bankrupt previously and got a chance, for it to end up here is unnecessary on many, many levels."

"I checked Google and I found that Walt Disney and HJ Heinz were made bankrupt. Businessmen go bankrupt from time to time. Entrepreneurs do bad deals. That doesn't mean they can't go back into business."

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