BHS Committee: Sir Philip Green - Part 1 Select Committees

Is that for you all for me? Hopefully for both of us. Let's go

together and say prayers. I came here this morning, despite it being

that we could agree to disagree about how we got here, but we are

here. I am not running away but we are going round and round. I want to

try, and you will get my best shot and some way or other to find a

solution to the pensions. We have others who want to go outside,

otherwise I have to pray. I want to go outside and have everyone leaving

here saying I am not in any way shape or form running away. If there

rioters we can look at I will at them. I want us to have the break so

that everybody knows that I am committed. In all the things I've

told you this is one thing in my life that I have got. There is

nothing that I am going to tell you that you cannot go and check up. If

I told you I spoke to a guy you can go and check all of the things I am

telling you, this is important for me because I am not going to tell

you lies because there is no purpose to it. I am just going to have a

break and reiterated. I am committed to finding a solution and I am not

running away from it. The regulator has not been easy, to put it mildly,

is not run towards us to help find a solution, for whatever reason.

Letters us maybe have a break on that basis. Let us finish this and

then we can have a break. There are some that might be controversial and

I didn't think that was. You have made your point. There was support

in place. Would you have concurred with your chairman that if a

solution had not been found for BHS in January 2015 that either it had

to be sold or it had to go into administration? Did you agree? What

I would rather do is so that we don't go off into a whole new area,

I am happy to start by questioning isolation and happy to answer. There

is a pensions side to this. There is an answer to this. There are two

different answers, if I may. Give UI -- give me either. I will give you

both! Police. Please. If I want to be a corporate business and we would

have taken the business into ourselves which is based on all that

it is going on now, it couldn't have been any worse than where we are now

so I am better off taking this through a levy and other business

people have taken these things through pre-packs in all sorts of

processes, and I went many miles to try not to let that happen. If I

look back now, in terms of the last four weeks, I could be a murderer

the way they are writing about me. I haven't got any guns but the stuff

that is being written every day is pretty outrageous. I now sort of say

in hindsight that in 2014I maybe should have said we would put it

into a process and resurrect it and we could get to this in a few

minutes time. My response to you is he is giving you a common-sense

approach that in his opinion if we could not find another solution... I

think that was a yes, that are either had to go into administration

or... It didn't have too, we could have kept finding it. It was an

option at the time. With respect, putting businesses into bankruptcy

or into admin, based on, we are in the industry, so there is a lot of

commonality across the businesses, it was a very last resort. So you

had three options, administration, I totally understand it is the last

thing you want to do, or selling it, or continuing to fund it. You were

prepared to go down the selling route. What first attracted you to

the twice bankrupt, penniless retailer? If we are to start this,

we cannot have a break. We either carry on... That I want to have a

quick break. If you want to carry on we cannot take that in isolation.

No, there are other questions. Mr Chairman, this is in your hands. We

will actually break and we will begin with Jeremy Wagner comeback.

Can I just put 1.2 you, which in our evidence shock to me? One of the

images that has always come across is about how you delegate and you do

a lot of your business on your phone and so on, but the key meeting where

the chairman you had appointed, you paid rather well, Lord Gravel, just

did not turn up for the sale of BHS. He didn't even have the papers. Did

that disappoint you, that the person who was in a sense paid by you well,

had failed in his stewardship? I am not going to answer on behalf of

Lord Gravel. I want you answer for yourself. I can't answer, I don't

know the circumstances of that day. I don't know, he may have been in

court or tied up. I don't know will stop he would not turn up because he

didn't want to turn up. He may have had another commitment, it may have

been short notice, I don't know. But you paid him incredibly well, as you

paid a lot of people, he didn't even bother to spend -- sent for the

papers to fill in and he was acting on your behalf. I can't answer for

him. I am telling you that he has been with us for 12 years and he

obtains most of the board meetings and gets all the papers and I don't

know why he didn't. But I am saying that there is certainly no specific

reason that he would not have been in the loop in relation to that.

Very good. Sir Philip, I will accompany you back if I may add a

quarter of a now we will resume. Thank you very much. That is where

we leave our live coverage from the select committee rooms. You can

continue watching the session live online.

Not for the first time, the government is looking at this

through the wrong end of the telescope. Surely rather than try

and put bent local authorities from taking ethical and admire a mental

issues into account when making decisions it should, as the Scottish

Government does, encourage them to do so. Does the Minister really

believe that council tax payers money should be used to prop up

oppressive regimes and support unlawful activity throughout the

world? I find it surprising that the SNP and gauges and supports

discrimination of this kind when what we should do is we should trade

with the world, except where there is a boycott or a decision at a

national level. The