Dominic Chappell, the former CEO of collapsed BHS, and his colleague at the time Lennart Henningson have been ordered to pay 110 million pounds to creditors after they were found to have breached their corporate duties. The ruling comes eight years after BHS fell into administration, when it was said that the company owed creditors more than one billion pounds.
FRP Advisory, which is acting as a liquidator to BHS, brought the case against the directors on behalf of creditors, according to a report by the Guardian. The issue at hand is in regards to the directors breaching their fiduciary duties by continuing to trade rather than putting BHS into insolvency proceedings, the media outlet added.
In a prior hearing in June, Chappell failed to show up or send a representative, thus the judge of the case ruled against him. To the Guardian, Tony Wright, joint liquidator, said: “We are pleased that the court has found these directors accountable for almost all of the deficit suffered by creditors. It justifies years of effort by the liquidators and the Pension Protection Fund.”
Chappell and his company Retail Acquisitions bought BHS in 2015 from Philipp Green, the chairman of the now shuttered Arcadia Group, for one pound. BHS later went into administration in 2016. This was shortly trailed by the liquidation of Retail Acquisitions in the following year, while the firm’s boss, Chappell, was being accused of extracting around 17 million pounds from BHS, his newly purchased retailer.
In 2020, Chappell was then ordered to pay 9.5 million pounds towards the BHS pension schemes after the administration filing left a 571 million pounds deficit, triggering legal proceedings from the UK’s Pensions Regulator.
