Ross Clark

the £200million he had paid for the company. Green’s defence is that the company seemed to be doing well in the early years of his ownership and that he stopped paying dividends when it started making losses.

Yet the pension fund never enjoyed the bonanza of the early years. When Green bought BHS in 2000 it had a surplus of £43million. By 2006, it was in deficit, and by 2015 when Green sold the company to thricebankrupt Dominic Chappell for £1, that deficit had grown to a whopping £345million.

BHS, of course, was not the only company to develop a hole in its pension scheme after 2000, when stock market returns plunged. But as the MPs’ report concludes, Green made little effort either to repair the pension scheme or to invest in the business. What emerges is a picture of a business being feasted upon like hyenas on a carcass.

No less disgraceful than Green’s own behaviour was that of Tony Blair and David Cameron, the first of whom knighted him and the latter of whom appointed him as the government’s “efficiency tsar”.

If Cameron and Osborne were taking advice from Green it might explain why we have public money frittered on vanity projects such as HS2 while productive assets such as Royal Mail were flogged off on the cheap. Blair and Cameron were

AT THE moment that isn’t the case. If you can buy a company for less than the sum of its assets – which often happens when stock markets are depressed – there is nothing to stop you flogging off the assets, paying yourself a big dividend and then letting the company go bust, with creditors losing money and the taxpayer picking up the tab for staff thrown out of work.

What we need is for the courts to be allowed to suspend limited liability in cases where business owners have made no serious attempt to keep a company afloat, or have rewarded themselves excessively. Had Green and Chappell – the latter of whom paid himself £2.6million before BHS went bust – known they could be held liable for the company’s full debts they would not have behaved as they did.

Business is often unfairly maligned, with honest people who create jobs – often at great financial risk to themselves – treated as public enemies.

But when the public image of business is accounted for by the likes of Sir Philip Green you can understand why the hardworking majority are given such a hard time.

‘Far from building up BHS he let it wither’