Green Pledges Up to $450 Million in BHS Pension Settlement

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. retail magnate Philip Green agreed to pay as much as 363 million pounds ($450 million) to compensate 19,000 former workers of collapsed department-store chain BHS after months of haggling with the country's Pensions Regulator.

The payment will enable trustees of BHS retirement plans to achieve a “significantly better outcome” than they would have under the U.K.'s Pension Protection Fund, Green said in a statement Tuesday. Regulators dropped their enforcement actions against the tycoon and his investment vehicles.

“The settlement is way beyond what I thought we would get because Green loves bargaining,” Frank Field, a lawmaker who led an inquiry into BHS's collapse, said by phone. “It's a very important milestone in getting justice for pensioners and workers.”

BHS, whose stores were a fixture of the U.K.'s downtown shopping streets for decades, had a pension deficit of at least 571 million pounds when it failed last April, a year after Green sold it for a pound. A parliamentary report last year branded the 64-year-old tycoon the “unacceptable face of capitalism” and lawmakers voted in favor of stripping him of his knighthood, saying he had extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from the company while failing to invest sufficient funds to keep it afloat.

No decision will be made on the honor until the government's Insolvency Service has concluded its investigation into BHS's demise, Field said. Green, who also controls Topshop and other retail chains, was knighted a decade ago.

BHS Sale

The billionaire, who had owned BHS since 2000, offloaded the business to a consortium fronted by Dominic Chappell, a former race-car driver with no retail experience. BHS employed 11,000 people when it collapsed under Chappell's leadership.

“Once again I would like to apologize to the BHS pensioners for this last year of uncertainty,” Green said in a statement. “I hope that this solution puts their minds at rest and closes this sorry chapter for them.”

Of Green's settlement, 343 million pounds will be used to fund a new pension program which will give retirees higher benefits than they would have received from a bailout by the Pension Protection Fund. An additional 20 million pounds will be used to cover related expenses, the Pensions Regulator said in a separate statement.

“The agreement we have reached with Sir Philip Green represents a strong outcome for the members of the BHS pension schemes,” the regulator's chief executive officer, Leslie Titcomb, said. “It takes account of the interests of both pensioners and the PPF, and brings a welcome level of certainty to present and future pensioners.”

Excluding the settlement, Green's net worth stands at $3.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sam Chambers in London at schambers7@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Paul Jarvis