Sir Phillip Green has launched a legal challenge to the Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) investigation into the PwC’s audit of BHS.
It comes after the FRC fined BHS’s accountancy firm PwC £10 million and issued a hefty fine on on Steve Denison, the audit partner responsible for the accounts of BHS and parent company Taveta for the year to August 2014, prior to BHS’s public downfall.
According to Sky News, Taveta Investments has made an application for an urgent review to force the FRC to amend its report into the audit.
It is also thought to have applied for an injunction to prevent the watchdog’s findings from being made public, raising questions about the content of the report.
This is the latest development in what is becoming an increasingly ugly legal battle between various parties.
On Wednesday Denison, who has audited BHS since 2008, admitted to misconduct in relation to his 2014 audit of BHS and Green’s Taveta.
The auditor had given BHS a clean bill of health, and months later Denison signed off BHS’s accounts as a “going concern”.
Days later Green sold the chain to Dominic Chappell for £1, and soon after it collapsed entirely – leaving a huge pensions black whole which affected 22,000 employees and former employees.
Chappell is also reportedly considering legal action over the discredited audit, and it is understood that Chappell’s argument evolves around how he used accounts rubber-stamped by PwC as the basis for his acquisition of BHS.
He is expected to write to PwC about his concerns within the next fortnight.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette’s free daily email newsletter
