Being chairman of the work and pensions committee might sound a bit dull. Not if you’re Frank Field. The Labour MP just combines the job with another role: that of professional wind-up merchant.
Mr Field got a nice rise out of Sir Philip Green on Thursday after saying that he should be stripped of his knighthood unless he pays up for the £571 million hole in the BHS pension fund. The vilified knight’s response was that Mr Field should stand down from his committee’s inquiry “as he is clearly prejudiced”. Instead, Mr Field found a new way to rile Sir Philip: making two of his foes advisers to his committee, a duo who helped to torpedo Sir Philip’s 2004 Marks & Spencer bid.
One is Lord Myners, M&S chairman at the time, who Sir Philip said afterwards deserved “a proper f***ing kick in the head” and who then threatened to sue him after also being called “an antisemitic left-winger”. The other is David Norgrove, ex-head of M&S’s pension trustees, who claimed that if Sir Philip bought the company, he’d have to put up to £785 million a year extra into the pension fund, a figure dismissed as “pious nonsense”. Mr Norgrove has since been pensions regulator and is now the Low Pay Commission chairman, so may also have views on Sir Philip’s new £100 million superyacht.
The subtext is that Sir Philip is in for a rough ride, deservedly so for a man who sold BHS for £1 to the twice-bankrupt “buffoon” Dominic Chappell and seems to think he’s got no responsibility for it collapsing a year later, leaving 20,000 pensioners in the lurch. Yet it would be wrong for the inquiry to degenerate into personal score-settling. The MPs need to find new facts, all the more so when you hear Sir Philip say that he’s “confused at the £571 million figure, as this is as if an insurance company were doing a buyout”.
As pensions expert John Ralfe, who is also advising the committee, puts it: “It’s as hard a number as you ever get in pensions” — the result of BHS going bust, so crystallising the liability. Indeed, Sir Philip could have avoided all this drama if he and the BHS pension trustees had gone to the pensions regulator and got approval for BHS’s sale to Mr Chappell. That is not mandatory, but good practice. So one question: why didn’t Sir Philip pre-clear the deal? A second turns on the precise nature of the “financial support” BHS was receiving from the Green family’s Jersey-based investment vehicle, Taveta.
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More questions should follow from Monday’s appearance before Mr Field’s committee of the present pensions regulator and the head of the Pension Protection Fund. Wind-ups will only get Mr Field so far.
Waste of energy
Few people are experts in anaerobic digestion. Not some new-fangled diet, as it happens, but part of the process of turning waste into energy. Adrian Ringrose has been having a go at it and it must be harder than it looks. The Interserve boss started off with waste and now he’s got even more of the stuff: a wasted £70 million, not to mention 16 per cent off the shares, now down to 329¼p.
Mr Ringrose has just found some “further deterioration” in Interserve’s £146 million contract with Viridor for a new waste-to-energy plant in Glasgow — and not the sort of biological deterioration he was after, what with the thing not even built yet. Instead, he’s got continuing problems with his supply chain, not least Energos, a “gasification” specialist. Anyway, the project’s now running about a year late. And, apparently, investors need not worry that Interserve also has a £177 million contract to build another such Scottish plant for Viridor in Dunbar because this one uses different technology.
It’s true, too, that Interserve flagged up some of the problems at February’s full-year results. Even so, it does look a bit awkward that in mid-April Mr Ringrose sold 25,879 shares and three executive directors, Steve Dance, Bruce Melizan and Dougie Sutherland, each sold 38,167 — and all at above £4. Some sales were to settle tax liabilities after a performance share plan, but, even so, some directors still made almost £100,000. Investing it in Interserve would demonstrate their confidence that there’s no more waste to come.
Just blame Brexit
Brexit gets the blame for just about everything nowadays. So we may as well make it the culprit for those worse-than- expected US non-farm payroll figures, the exciting monthly jobs update that discriminates against farmers. Those 160,000 new jobs in April rather missed the forecast 208,000, even if average hourly earnings were ahead.
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It’s only one month and, if Brexit risks aren’t really to blame, the EU referendum is still influencing the Fed. Some economist loons were pencilling in a US rate rise at the Fed’s June 14-15 meeting. Yet that always looked unlikely with the Brits going to the polls on June 23. There’s no chance now.
Wanna bet?
What thrilling times for John Mappin, the Scientologist owner of Camelot Castle in Tintagel, Cornwall. He’s placed 30 bets so far, totalling £7,200, with William Hill on Donald Trump first becoming the Republican nominee and then US president.
Should both occur, he’ll win more than £79,000, which doesn’t sound enough for such a ludicrous bet, though that’s mainly because he didn’t start punting until July 2015 when the Donald was 20-1 for the nomination and 33-1 for the White House. Hills started out with respective odds of 100-1 and 200-1.
Mr Mappin says he found the odds “not in line with my observations of reality”. Fairy castles and Scientology are more his thing.