THE ex-chief executive of British Home Stores (BHS), Darren Topp, told a parliamentary committee yesterday morning that the former owner of BHS, Dominic Chappell, whom he described as an ex-SAS reservist who bought BHS for £1 from Sir Phillip Green, had threatened to kill him.
Topp alleged that Chappell threatened to kill him when he questioned him over the transfer of £1.5m to Sweden. Chappell was also accused of being ‘a liar’ who had his ‘fingers in the till’ by a number of top BHS managers.
Chappell told MPs that his bid to buy the 163-store chain was very credible. ‘We brought a new pair of eyes, and a strong turnaround team,’ he said. However, earlier, Topp had said that he initially took Chappell’s claim to be a turnaround specialist and property expert at face value. However, when Chappell’s promises ‘unravelled’, rather than ‘putting money in’, he had ‘his fingers in the till’.
Former BHS financial consultant, Michael Hitchcock, told the committee: ‘I think I was duped. I think the technical term is a mythomaniac. The lay person’s term is he was a premier league liar and a Sunday pub league retailer. At best.’
He added: ‘The credibility and ability of the people Dominic surrounded himself with were not fit for purpose … I fundamentally don’t think he understood what was going on. I question his intelligence; he wasn’t a retailer. The motive was purely for his own benefit. There is a big smell test which I adopt in a lot of these situations, and it just did not smell right,’ Hitchcock said.
Chappell, a former racing driver and a three-times bankrupt, with limited retail experience, had promised to put millions of pounds into BHS after he bought it from Sir Philip Green’s Arcadia group for £1.
Meanwhile, Hitchcock said he was forced to change the company’s bank mandate to ‘stop any chance of money flowing outside of the business’. The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee is hearing evidence into how the 163-store group was collapsed, resulting in 11,000 job losses and leaving behind a huge £571m ‘black hole’ in the pension fund after Sir Phillip Greene, now on his third yacht, handed over £400m to his wife as dividends via a Monaco tax haven.
Green owned the high street retailer for 15 years until last year, when he sold the company for £1 to Chappell. BHS was placed in the hands of administrators last month with debts of £1.3 billion and a deficit in the workers’ pension fund of £571 million.
Green pocketed £400 million from BHS before selling it to Chappell, more than enough to pay for the £100 million ‘mega yacht’ he recently purchased. However, this blatant looting of BHS is what capitalism as a whole is all about.
It is about theft, from its very inception, that is from the seizure of surplus value from the working class, to modern capitalism, that is, imperialism, when cartels of banks and major industries loot the planet until the working class once again pays the price when massive financial and industrial collapses erupt, bringing mass unemployment and massive austerity programmes, until the various groups of bankers and industrialists embark on new wars to redivide the planet, with the working class doing the dying!
Now, in the run-up to the EU referendum the crisis of capitalism is once again calling the tune, with the ruling classes and their political servants seeking to frighten the masses that if they do not remain in the EU then wars and disasters of all kinds will result.
Politicians and bankers are even talking down the pound to create a whiff of the crisis, to create fear. In previous times, talking down the pound equalled treason, but not now! When they are trying to frighten workers, anything goes!
The issue is however, that if capitalism is in such a desperate crisis, where the slightest agitation over membership of the EU is enough to set it wobbling, then such a system deserves to perish, and has passed its ‘progressive’ stage a long, long time ago.
This is why workers, including the thousands that are losing their jobs at BHS, must vote to quit the EU on June 23, then bring down the Cameron government to go forward to a workers government and socialism, that will prepare the way to replace the bankers’ and bosses’ EU with the Socialist United States of Europe!
