Boss of Tesco Bank spent £18k on taxis as 5,000 jobs cut
THE boss of Tesco Bank claimed lavish London trips on his expenses while the supermarket was cutting thousands of jobs, it emerged yesterday.
Benny Higgins spent more than £18,000 on taxis in just eight months alone, leaked receipts reveal.
He racked up the sum – roughly the amount a typical Tesco shop worker earns in a year – going to the opera, restaurants, five-star hotels and on trips to the airport for himself and his daughters.
One MP described the behaviour as ‘extraordinary’ and said it would infuriate shareholders.
Details of Mr Higgins’ taxi receipts were leaked to The Guardian by a disgruntled worker at Tesco, which owns Tesco Bank and slashed nearly 5,000 posts last year as part of efforts to turn the business around.
They show how the 56-year-old multi-millionaire enjoyed the high life on his weekly visits to London from Tesco Bank’s Edinburgh headquarters.
The bills, claimed by Mr Higgins and his PA on his behalf last year, include journeys to the Royal Opera House, private members’ clubs and restaurants including The Ivy, Japanese restaurant Roka and Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen.
The receipts also suggest that Mr Higgins may even have asked drivers to keep the meter running so he would not have to hail another cab. On one trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum he ran up a £389.85 taxi bill.
The museum is several stops on the Tube from the Soho Hotel – where Mr Higgins held many Spending: Benny Higgins business meetings – and would have cost less than £5 on public transport. He also spent more than £170 on trips to and from the Royal Opera House from the hotel – a 15-minute walk.
And he billed the supermarket £2,000 for trips to Tesco’s corporate offices in Cheshunt, Welwyn Garden City and the City of London. On visits to Hertfordshire, he took a cab to a fivestar hotel and country club and
‘These bills are extraordinary’
a Georgian country house hotel spa. Last night a Tesco spokesman said all staff are allowed to claim travel and other expenses for business reasons. But some of the trips seem unlikely to be linked to running a bank.
They include a £217.56 return trip to his literary agent and visits to a skin clinic, an antiques dealer and a designer furniture store. Mr Higgins has worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS – which were both bailed out by taxpayers. Backbench Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘Tesco’s shareholders will have some questions. These bills are extraordinary.’
The largesse is likely to infuriate the chief executive of Tesco Davis Lewis who has striven to rein in excessive behaviour since he took the helm in October 2014. One of his first acts was selling the supermarket’s fleet of corporate aircraft and declaring he take the train rather than a company car into London from Tesco’s head office in Hertfordshire.
But the lavish behaviour of top executives is also said to have upset some Tesco staff – both at the bank and the supermarket.
The grocery chain slashed nearly 5,000 head office and store management jobs last year. Another 2,500 jobs were lost when 43 stores were shut down. The firm lurched to a £6.4billion loss in the year to the end of February 2015 – the worst in its history.