Britain's Jews are proud of the community's great entrepreneurial traditions. Then, every so often, a scandal erupts that gives us all cause for pause, says Alex Brummer
July 28, 2016 08:12
Britain's Jews are rightly proud of the community's great entrepreneurial traditions. Among the FTSE 100, Shell, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Anglo-American, WPP, Next and British Land can all claim strong Jewish roots.
Then, every so often, a scandal erupts that gives us all cause for pause.
Many winced as details of Sir Philip Green's part in the collapse of BHS were exposed in a probe by MPs.
Over the past decade, the former Carmel College schoolboy looked to have overcome the reputational damage when his jeans company Amber Day fell apart in the 1990s.
Through his acquisition of fading, high-street favourite BHS and then through the turnaround of Arcadia - owner of Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Burton, Wallis and much else - he luxuriated in the title of "King of the High Street". And he gained the public recognition he craved when the Blair-Brown government awarded him a knighthood for retail services after he had funded the establishment of a "fashion" academy school.
As the successor coalition government searched for spending cuts, they commissioned Sir Philip to do a study on the efficiency of Whitehall.
I remember him inviting me to Arcadia's headquarters in Berners Street in London to be briefed on how he could cut the government's telecoms and paper-clip costs. He was proud to have gained recognition for his untutored business genius.
The willingness of successive governments to indulge Sir Philip was surprising. His decision to move much of his wealth offshore into his wife Tina's companies, so as to avoid taxes, produced adverse headlines.
Remarkably, he weathered the storm as £420 million of BHS funds and £1.2 billion of Arcadia reserves were paid out in the form of dividends.
The opprobrium was limited because BHS and Arcadia remained UK-domiciled firms which paid their corporation taxes and other domestic charges such as business rates.
Certainly, he could not have foreseen that the £42 million surplus in the BHS pension fund when he bought the company in 2000 would balloon by 2015 into a £571 million shortfall.
But his failure to resolve the pension-fund crisis, before selling the company to thrice-bankrupt Dominic Chappell for one pound, was at the very least an act of neglect which has delivered huge public damage to his reputation.
In my own regular conversations with him, and in print, I have made no secret of my view that he should take responsibility for his share of the BHS pension-fund deficit - around £250 million - and save himself a great deal of trouble.
Somehow, he convinced himself that the pensioners would get a better deal if he, rather than the regulators, reconstructed the pension fund.
In other words, he was determined to cut a deal that was simply not there. This opened the door for his main critics, such as Frank Field MP, to accuse him of theft, which is patently untrue.
But the public will not see it like that. My office postbag has included several letters noting that Robert Maxwell and Sir Philip are both "Jews".
It is quite encouraging that at a time when antisemitism has been a subject of concern because of the disgusting behaviour of some Labour Party extremists, not much has been made in the media of Sir Philip's ethnic background. In an earlier era, he might have been expected to appear in photographs wearing a kippah at a lavish family barmitzvah. Instead, the chosen pictures have been of Sir Philip and Tina on their £100m yacht. Sir Philip always has imagined that his philanthropy to Jewish Care and other important causes would insulate him from criticism in the community. In spite of his undoubted generosity, he failed to recognise that reputation trumps all else.
It is unfortunate that several of Sir Philip's associates are also prominent community members. Mike Sherwood of Goldman Sachs, another philanthropist, is described by MPs as the "gatekeeper" who effectively gave Sir Philip the go-ahead to sell BHS for one pound, even though GS received no fee. Lord (Tony) Grabiner QC, one of the country's most prominent jurists, faced severe criticism for governance failings.
Even though he was chairman of Sir Philip's top company Taveta Investments, collecting an annual fee of £110,000, Lord Grabiner was absent at the board meeting at which the BHS sale was agreed. Olswang, a prominent London legal firm with Jewish origins, is criticised for the size of its fee (taken out of BHS funds), its lack of co-operation with the Parliamentary probe and over the quality of its due diligence.
Sir Philip's friends would argue that the real cause of the shortfall in the BHS pension fund is the change in interest rates which caused the deficit in many private sector pension funds to balloon. There is a truth in this. The pension-fund deficit at Tata Steel's South Wales operations is of a similar size to that of BHS and it has attracted very little of the same criticism.
The reality is that the optics of Sir Philip's behaviour at BHS are wrong despite his declared willingness to bail out the BHS pensioners. He is paying a high personal price for having sold the company to a fantasist with undue haste. His actions also cast a broader pall over the reputation of the ethics of Jews in business. It is a discomforting situation which could and should have been avoided.
Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail
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