Philip Green must now be stripped of his knighthood
SIR Philip Green is renowned in the business world for doing his own public relations rather than employing a company to speak on his behalf. But what an incredible job he made of it for so many years.
Who else could have helped him acquire a knighthood and the unofficial accolade of “king of retail” when, as the Commons’ business and pensions committees laid bare in a joint report yesterday, he was running one of Britain’s bestknown retailers – British Home Stores – into the ground?
Green is a good deal more accomplished at self-promotion than in running a retail empire. Over the next four weeks, BHS’s remaining 114 stores will close, throwing 5,000 employees out of work.
By the end – taking into account stores which have already closed – a total of 11,000 workers will have lost their jobs. Former employees under the age of 65 will see their accrued pension pots shrink by 10 per cent. Were it not for the Pension Protection Fund, ultimately funded out of the pension contributions of other company schemes, they would lose even more.
Meanwhile, Green and his family have taken delivery of a third yacht – costing a reported £100million and incorporating a helipad and swimming pool.
How can you go so quickly from being an apparent retail genius feted by prime ministers, to being what the MPs describe in their report as the “unacceptable face of capitalism”? Work and Pensions Committee chairman Frank Field yesterday went even further, suggesting that he is “worse than Robert Maxwell” – that other yacht-owning tycoon who went overboard in 1991, taking with him the retirement plans of many Mirror pensioners.
IT IS hard to escape the conclusion that Green never was the retail genius he was made out to be. Far from building up BHS he let it wither while his family received fantastic dividends.
Between 2002 and 2004 BHS paid out £414million in dividends, £307million of which went to the Green family. Yet over the same period the company made only £208million in post-tax profits.
The dividends received by Green’s family were more than