MG directors get another £11m

Five former directors of MG Rover will get a further an £11m-plus payout from the wreckage of the firm, according to reports.

The payment - from the winding up of MGR Capital, a car finance operation kept separate from the rest of the group - takes the total amount John Towers, Nick Stephenson, John Edwards, Peter Beale and Kevin Howe took from the company to £42m.

Towers, Stephenson, Edwards and Beale, known as the Phoenix Four, are expected to get about £2.5m each from their latest pay day. Howe, who was chief executive of MG Rover, will get about £1.4m.

MG Rover workers received only the minimum statutory redundancy pay and had their pension entitlements cut when the firm collapsed.

However, Richard Burden, the MP for Birmingham Northfield who has led a campaign for compensation for the workers, said the Phoenix executives had a “moral obligation” to put their latest payouts into the fund.

"They should do the right thing by the people who did the right thing by them,” Burden told the Times newspaper. “I would like to see them make that commitment and if it’s not into the fund, then into some other kind of community service or facility. The closure of Longbridge hit this community hard - I would liken it to the way mining communities were hurt by the closure of their pits.”

The long-running inquiry into the collapse of MG Rover was published in September and, while highly critical of the directors’ conduct, it did not accuse them of breaking the law.

Lloyds Banking Group, in which the government holds a 43 per cent stake, owns half of MGR Capital and is also in line for an £11m-plus windfall.

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