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by Our News Desk
SHOPWORKERS will dismantle the final 22 BHS stores this weekend after administrators announced yesterday that they would lock up for good on Sunday.
It is the end of the high street stalwart’s 88-year run, having been bled dry by tax-dodging billionaire Sir Philip Green.
Mr Green sold what was left of the firm for £1 in March 2015 to thrice-bankrupt ex-racing driver Dominic Chappell, whose consortium took £17 million out of the company before it finally went under.
Mr Green and other investors were paid a whopping £586m in dividends, rent and interest during his 15-year ownership of BHS. At the end the BHS workers’ pension fund was left with a gaping £571m hole.
Shopworkers’ union Usdaw general secretary John Hannett said that staff had paid “a high price for corporate decisions that have led us to where we are today.”
He called on Mr Green to “honour the two promises he made to BHS staff and pensioners” — to offer jobs within his Arcadia Group retail empire to workers headed for the dole, and “to ‘sort’ the pension scheme.”
However Mr Hannett said workers were “still waiting to hear the details of what he proposes.
“The 11,000 loyal staff have been totally let down. There remains some very serious questions that need to be answered, by former owners of the business, about how a company with decades of history and experience in retail has now come to this very sorry end,” Mr Hannett said.
Mr Green’s Arcadia Group includes chains such as Topshop and Burton and he had been dubbed the “king of retail.”
But MPs savaged his conduct in a joint committee report earlier this summer, accruing “incredible wealth” and leaving the BHS pension fund with a “substantial and unsustainable deficit.”
Work and pensions committee chairman Frank Field said that Mr Green had amassed “a fortune beyond the dreams of avarice.”
Mr Green’s lawyers threatened to sue Mr Field after he compared the yacht-owning fat cat with litigious Mirror Group pensions thief Robert Maxwell in a radio interview.
