Carillion bosses’ personal greed and recklessness led to downfall

LONDON: Bosses of the collapsed construction firm Carillion should face an inquiry into their fitness to serve as directors after they masked the company’s financial ill-health with accounting tricks before its failure, Members of Parliament said yesterday.

Carillion, which employed 43,000 people to provide services in defence, education, health and transport, collapsed in January, becoming the largest construction bankruptcy in British history.

It left creditors and the firm’s pensioners facing steep losses and put thousands of jobs at risk.

The executives were more concerned with protecting bonuses than finding problems at the firm and presided over a “rotten corporate culture” that led to its costly demise, an investigation by two parliamentary committees found.

The failure of Carillion was a story of “recklessness, hubris and greed” and could happen again, a 101-page report by the Work and Pensions committee and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy select committee said.

“Same old story. Same old greed. A board of directors too busy stuffing their mouths with gold to show any concern for the welfare of their workforce or their pensioners,” said Frank Field, who chairs the Work and Pensions select committee.

“British industry is too important to be left in the hands of the likes of the shysters at the top of Carillion,” he added.

The Insolvency Service, which is carrying out an investigation into potential misconduct by former directors at Carillion, should carefully consider whether the executives should be banned, the report said. — Reuters