TAnd individuals have left more than £300 million in their bank accounts since their products sparked the Grenfell fire, but their companies have paid almost nothing towards the costs of the UK cladding scandal.
Bosses at Arconic, Kingspan and Saint-Gobain – which manufactured parts of the west London tower’s deadly flammable cladding system – have received a total of £302.3 million since the disaster killed 72 people seven years ago.
All three manufacturers had made fire safety claims about their panels, which turned out to be incorrect. The products were also applied to thousands of other buildings, trapping families with apartments they couldn’t sell and taxpayers having to pay for the repairs.
In time for the anniversary of the Grenfell fire on Friday, The Sunday Times analyzed the companies’ financial results. comparing the payouts companies have made to repair buildings with what individuals have made in dividends, stock sales and payments since 2017.
At the top of the payout list Eugene Murtagh, 81, Kingspan’s billionaire Irish founder who started making agricultural trailers in the backyard of a pub in Co Cavan, near the border with Northern Ireland, in 1965. In the seven years since Grenfell Tower was engulfed in flames, he has £149.3 in his bank account. million from share sales (£80.7 million), dividends (£68.1 million) and payments (£540,000). He stepped down as chairman in 2021.
His son, Gene Murtagh, the group’s chief executive since 2005, made £26m – including from a £3m block of shares sold just before damaging fire test evidence emerged during the Grenfell inquiry. It was revealed that Kingspan engineers joked that “all we do is lie [sic]”about fire tests. A year after the disaster, Gene Murtagh bought a €7.5 million seaside mansion in Dalkey, Dublin.
The director, Gilbert McCarthyFinance Director Geoff Doherty and director of insulated panels Russell Shiels shared a further £34.9 million during the period.
Kingspan, by contrast, has paid just £752,000 to get its products out of flats in Britain. The group made a record profit of €877 million (£763 million) last year. Kingspan’s spending on repairing dangerous buildings in the seven years since Grenfell is less than 0.1 percent of that.
Kingspan is said to have paid £4 million as part of its £150 million settlement with Grenfell survivors and relatives. The Irish giant denies liability for the disaster, saying K15 insulation on 5 percent of Grenfell Tower was used in a “non-compliant system” without the company’s knowledge.
Kingspan said K15 “can be used safely” in “suitable systems”, adding that the company stood by its commitment to pay its share of remediation costs when Kingspan was responsible for inappropriate use of K15. “We have responded to every recovery request we have received; however, the volume was very low,” said Kingspan.
Work to strip the Kingspan K15 insulation has yet to begin at the 12-storey block where Nathan and Tara Jeans are stuck with their son Ernest, five, and Etta, two. “We are a family of four in a single bed,” says Nathan, 40, a copywriter. The family have lost £100,000 due to rising insurance, service charges and rent on their unsellable shared ownership flat (£25,000); legal costs for the sale they lost (£3,000); and higher home prices where they would have purchased.
Nathan and Tara Jeans, along with their children Ernest and Etta, have lost £100,000 in the upholstery scandal
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR SUNDAY TIMES
They are among 700,000 residents trapped in dangerous buildings and almost three million people with flats they could not sell because of national security failings exposed by Britain’s worst post-war fire.
“Here they are, the heads of these companies, making millions while paying next to nothing to solve the financial problems they have caused for thousands of tenants. At least we’re only losing money; 72 paid the ultimate price,” Nathan said.
Manufacturers Arconic and Saint-Gobain have recovered almost all of their legal expenses in Grenfell from insurers, including their share of the £150m civil settlement, according to their accounts.
Arconic made the cladding of Grenfell Tower. The company had sold the panels as safe based on a fire test for another product, the Grenfell inquiry heard. “Oops,” one manager emailed after the real panels failed catastrophically on tests in 2011. He urged colleagues to make the results “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!” hold. The company’s latest accounts still do not provide for the possibility of removing the Grenfell-style cladding from blocks across Britain.
Tim Myers, former CEO of Arconic, benefited from the sale of the company to a hedge fund last year
Bosses profited from the sale of Arconic to a hedge fund last year. Tim Myers, Arconic’s CEO from 2020 to 2023, collected shares of £22.3m on top of £23.9m in pay since Grenfell. Its chief financial officer Erik Asmussen and head of commercial affairs Mark Vrablec earned a further £9.2m from share sales plus £9.2m in wages, bringing the trio’s total to almost £65m.
The group said the coating was used worldwide and test results were widely available. The responsibility for compliance with construction safety “does not” lie with the supplier of materials, it added. Arconic said it did not comment on individual pay, but added that the arrangements predated last year’s sale.
Celotex, owned by £35 billion French giant Saint-Gobain, carried out a fire test in 2014 that cleared its flammable insulation for use in high-rise buildings – a lucrative market. The panels then covered most of Grenfell Tower, releasing toxic gas including hydrogen cyanide during the fire.
Since the fire, Saint-Gobain has paid its CEO Pierre-André de Chalendar £11.7 million. Benoit Bazinhis successor since 2021, has earned £15.8 million.
Benoit Bazin has earned £15.8million at Saint-Gobain. The company owned Celotex, which made insulation used in Grenfell
ALAMI
Saint-Gobain’s British arm has not set aside any amount to repair blocks because it was “not possible” to reliably estimate the costs, the accounts said. Celotex has spent £36.5 million on legal claims and fees related to Grenfell, all of which has been recouped from insurance.
Celotex said it does not design or install cladding systems and it did not do so at Grenfell. It adds that a system with Grenfell insulation passed a subsequent fire test. Its own investigation found that there was “unacceptable behavior”, but six employees have left and controls have been tightened.
The government changed the law two years ago to make companies that profit from unsafe buildings pay to repair them. Michael Gove, the Housing Secretary, told manufacturers in 2022 that he would do “whatever it takes” to prevent “individuals and companies liable for construction defects” from selling products in Britain if they do not commit funding.
The Grenfell public inquiry will publish its final report on September 4. Criminal cases are not expected to begin until 2027, ten years after the fire.
● The full methodology: Our research into bosses’ earnings focused on annual reports since 2017, when the Grenfell disaster occurred on June 14. Personal payout figures are conservative because they exclude earnings for 2017 if the company’s financial year started before June, and for 2023 if results have not yet been reported. If the totals do not add up, this is due to rounding.
Compensation reports published by companies list salaries, bonuses, pensions, benefits and the number of shares held by directors. However, they do not explicitly mention the dividend income of directors. We calculated this income based on the dividend per share data disclosed by the companies, multiplied by the number of shares owned.
Share sales are also excluded from compensation reports, but companies must disclose when directors buy and sell shares. We have included all shares sold by private individuals since mid-2017, because that is when they realize the value of the shares. These shares may have been owned for many years before 2017.
Analysts at Argus Vickers provided details of shareholdings in listed companies for owners who no longer act as directors but still have large stakes in companies.
Fire safety provisions and benefits are as stated in each company’s most recent financial results.