Phoenix Four rise again with £17m pensions

THE four businessmen who formed the Phoenix consortium to buy Rover for £10 in May 2000 can look forward to retirement having made about £40m out of the company.

While 6,500 Longbridge workers - many with 15 and 20 years' employment at the Midland car plant - will be lucky to draw a full pension from a fund facing a £400m shortfall, the bosses will be able to live off a £17m pension pot.

The Phoenix Four have over the same period paid themselves about £11m in salaries while their company has never achieved a profit. And they have r e c e i v e d £10 million in interest and capital payments that accrued from loans given to them as part of the corporate restructuring that followed when they took over MG Rover from BMW.

But the four - John TowersNick Stephenson, John Edwards and Peter Beale - have also managed to ringfence themselves from the heavily loss-making MG Rover plant.

There is no suggestion that the four have done anything illegal, but their ability to take control directly of some parts of the Rover business - the profitable bits - was dubbed 'a financial sleight of hand' by Martin O'Neill, the Labour chairman of the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee. Over the past five years, it has been established that the Phoenix Four have: Benefited from owning a share in MGR Capital - a joint venture with HBoS that was set up to manage leases retained by BMW. Owned Studley Castle in Warwickshire, valued at £2 million, which is used as a training facility for the company. Owned Xpower, the company that makes the SV-R sports car.