Rage betrayed of the BHS staff

If Sir Philip Green thinks he’s in for a hard time from MPs today, it’s nothing next to the ...

FOR more than a decade Lin Macmillan worked in BHS stores. For eight of those she was based in Aberdeen and for another two in Lincoln. It was hard work, and the pay wasn’t brilliant, but there was a sense of family that she loved. It meant all the staff pulled together.

Lin worked her way up and became an office manager, and then, in Lincoln, was promoted to assistant store manager.

‘We used to socialise a lot and there was a real sense of camaraderie,’ said Lin, 61. ‘But all of that went when Sir Philip Green bought the company. We used to get a week’s salary as a Christmas bonus, and the staff canteen was heavily subsidised. That’s all gone.’

Lin no longer works at BHS, but her pension with the firm forms a central part of what she will rely on in her retirement – she hasn’t got a fortune, but every single penny counts.

Now though, after BHS entered administration, and like more than 20,000 workers who are part of the company scheme, she faces losing as much as 10pc of the income she worked so hard to build up. It’s another thing she blames Green for. ‘This all could have been avoided if he and his family had invested in the company during the 15 years that they owned it,’ she says. ‘They took a lot of money out and didn’t put any back in and that’s the reason the pension fund now has a £571m deficit.’

Today Green faces a showdown with MPs from the Business and Innovation and Pensions Select Committees about his role in the collapse of BHS. It comes amid calls for the tycoon, who spends a lot of time living on a yacht moored off Monaco, to be stripped of his knighthood.

Lin believes Green should feel compelled to put money back in to the pension fund.

‘He and his family owned BHS for 15 years and didn’t invest in it. I know what it was like when people did invest in it, it was constantly being refurbished and modernised, customers found it a welcoming experience, but it hasn’t been a welcoming experience for over a decade now.’

Lin is just one of many BHS employees, past and present, who are desperate for answers from Green as to why he sold the store for £1 last March to the threetimes bankrupt playboy Dominic Chappell.

But one of the most pressing questions staff will want answered is should Green have done more to rescue the pension scheme and will he pay more into it to save the retirements of workers such as Lin?

It is thought Green had previously offered to pay between £80m and £100m in to the BHS scheme – but more than twice this amount is needed to get it back into the black.

YESTERDAY evidence submitted to MPs by former pensions minister Steve Webb revealed Green had promised in 2012 that if the pension scheme got into trouble he would find cash to set it right.

Stuart Melvin, 31, from Bristol, who was employed by BHS in Reading until 2012, said: ‘People believe that Green has robbed BHS, robbed 11,000 people who work there and he has got away scot-free. The fact he keeps rubbing it in people’s faces with new yachts isn’t making things better and the taxpayer is going to pick up the tab.

‘I think he should lose his knighthood. At the very least he needs to pay up for the entire cost of the pensions deficit.’

It is these growing calls, particu- larly from MPs, for Green to be stripped of his knighthood that seem to have angered the billionaire in recent days. Since Friday, he has been involved in a stand- off with pension committee chairman Frank Field over whether he will attend the hearing because of remarks about whether Green acted properly in the sale of BHS.

Green believes Field is biased and has called for him to stand down. But yesterday it looked increasingly likely Green would attend and was seeking advice. In the back of his mind, though, will be the very recent threats made by the Business Committee chairman Iain Wright to Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley. The tycoon had threatened not to attend a separate committee hearing, but Wright in turn had warned he would use the powers of Parliament to summon Ashley.

The concern is that the complicated web of Green’s companies means it is almost impossible to see how profits are shunted around.

For example, when Green bought BHS in 2000 it was run as a standalone business. But then in 2009 he moved it so that it formed part of his Arcadia empire which included other stores such as Burton, Topshop and Dorothy Perkins.

Arcadia is not a listed company which means that it does not report profits to shareholders and does not have the rigorous accounting rules of FTSE firms.

To further complicate things, Arcadia is owned by Taveta Invest- ments, which is based in the UK but controlled by Green’s wife Tina. Lady Green was estimated to have taken more than £300m in dividends from BHS by 2005 – but as she lives in Monaco, she is unlikely to have paid tax on them.

The Greens argue that there is nothing untoward with this financial structure. But the Insolvency Service is compiling its own investigation in to the way BHS was run and has compiled 200,000 pieces of evidence already. If it were to find wrongdoing by any of the owners or directors of BHS it could strike off and even prosecute the offenders.

Meanwhile, BHS workers are left with an uncertain future.

Dan Richards, 27, has worked at BHS for four years. Working parttime on the shop floor, it helped pay the rent. He still works at the store, but the stock is gradually being sold off. He doesn’t know how many days he has left in his job and he’s already started looking for another job.

Dan says: ‘I’m gutted. I feel like we’ve all been done over. Now we are just working for pride, we have all been putting on a brave face.

‘But the whole team now needs to go out and find work. That’s not easy. Philip Green made money from the company, sold it for a pound and left us all in debt – meanwhile, it’s down to us shop staff to pick up the pieces.’