The inquiry looked at the events leading up to the decision by BHS owner Sir Philip Green to sell the high street chain to a previously unknown company, Retail Acquisitions Ltd (RAL) run by a former racing driver Dominic Chappell who had also been made bankrupt. A year after the £1 deal, the retail chain went into administration threatening 11,000 jobs, while its pension deficit continued to balloon.

The report says Green was behind ‘the systematic plunder of BHS at the cost of the 11,000 jobs and 20,000 people's pensions now at risk’, with the committees describing this as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’.

‘Sir Philip Green, Dominic Chappell and the respective directors, advisers and hangers-on who all got rich or richer are all culpable, with the only losers the ordinary employees and pensioners,’ it said.