BHS fiasco rumbles on as Goldman Sachs and The Pensions Regulator due to reappear in front of the committees next week
The BHS saga starts a new chapter next week, with two more evidence hearings due to take place in parliament.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Work and Pensions committee and Business, Innovation and Skills committee are set to hear from Alex Dellal, Allied Commercial Exporters, Paul Sutton, Lesley Titcomb, chief executive of The Pensions Regulator and Neville Kahn, managing partner, financial advisory at Deloitte.
Then, on Wednesday morning, the MPs will be hearing from Michael Sherwood, vice chairman at Goldman Sachs, Anthony Gutman, co-head of EMEA investment banking services at Goldman Sachs, Michael Casey, managing director at Goldman Sachs, Mark Sherwood, former property director at BHS, Paul Budge, finance director at Arcadia Group and director at Taveta Investments, Chris Harris, group property director at Arcadia Group, and Brett Alexander Palos, director at Taveta Investments.
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Titcomb and Gutman have appeared in front of the committees before as part of the two inquiries sparked by BHS being put into administration in April.
Titcomb appeared in the first evidence session of the inquiries, where she discussed the pension scheme recovery plan the Regulator had received from Arcadia, prior to BHS being sold for £1 to Retail Acquisitions in 2015.
Since Titcomb's hearing, the MPs have built a timeline of the pension recovery plan's demise, based on further written evidence from the Regulator and Arcadia, with chair of the Work and Pensions committee Frank Field saying the information received "paints a worrying picture".
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At an evidence hearing last month, Gutman said that, although his firm had declined to provide formal assistance on the deal and had not been paid for its involvement, he had highlighted Retail Acquisitions' Dominic Chappell's previous bankruptcies and the lack of details in the buyer's proposals for BHS to decision makers at Arcadia.
Gutman later provided nine pages of written evidence to the MPs, who had requested further details on the £1 sale.
"An emerging theme of this inquiry is witnesses seeking to correct and clarify evidence they have given," said Field, when the additional evidence from Gutman was made public. "What we are learning now throws some of the accounts we have heard so far further into question."
The BHS collapse resulted in the launch of two inquiries – one from the Work and Pensions committee into the role of pensions protection and regulation and another from the Business, Innovation and Skills committee on the sale of BHS to Retail Acquisitions.
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