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A hotel group controlled by exiled billionaire prosecutor Sir James Ratcliffe has been fined by the government along with 138 other “dishonest employers” who failed to pay their staff the national minimum wage.
Ratcliffe, who is worth an estimated £ 12bn, owns 55% of Home Grown Hotels, a boutique group that he co-founded with Robin Hutson, a hotelier who built and sold the Hotel du Vin chain and is a former member club chair . Soho House.
His business was included on a list of national minimum wage violators published by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on Thursday, when the department reintroduced a policy of “name and shame” companies that had paid staff. illegally low wages.
The UK’s largest private sector employer, Tesco, was also cited on BEIS’s first list for two years, an announcement that coincided with the appointment of its former CEO Dave Lewis to the New Years honors list, and the Pizza Hut restaurant chain.
Business Minister Paul Scully said: “Paying the minimum wage is not optional, it is the law. It is never acceptable for any employer to defraud their workers, but it is especially disappointing to see big family names who should know more on this list. “
The latest list of offenders, which showed that the 139 companies mentioned failed to pay a total of £ 6.7 million to more than 95,000 workers, covers investigations between September 2016 and July 2018, a period in which compliance minimum wage was a major news story following a Guardian investigation incident that exposed how Sports Direct workers were being paid below the legal minimum.
Ratcliffe made his fortune in the petrochemical industry by founding Ineos and has become a well-known, if sometimes controversial, figure in the corporate world.
He first came to the public’s attention after threatening to shut down his Grangemouth petrochemical plant in 2013 and cause a dramatic downfall of the Unite union, but has since made headlines by leaving Britain for Monaco duty-free, becoming a standout. Brexit supporter and take over Team Sky and rename it Team Ineos.
BEIS stated that Ratcliffe’s Home Grown Hotels had failed to pay 25 workers £ 13,790, which the company said was related to “inadvertent breaches of very complex regulations” after “deductions made for staff accommodation and uniform deposits.”
A company spokeswoman said the company had reimbursed staff, received a £ 6,000 fine from HMRC and that Ratcliffe “is not involved in the day-to-day running of the company.”
She added: “[Co-founder] Robin Hutson was completely satisfied with the quick approach taken by company accounts and HR teams and was understanding of how such a mistake could have arisen with the changing hours worked by employees within the hospitality industry. HMRC guidelines related to this element are complicated, the hospitality industry is not as straightforward as other companies due to inconsistent hours worked from month to month. “
A Tesco spokeswoman, who according to BEIS had underpaid 78,199 workers for a total of £ 5.1 million, said: “In 2017 we identified a technical problem that meant that some colleagues’ wages were inadvertently falling below the minimum wage. national. We are very sorry this happened and we proactively reported the issue to HMRC at that time. All of our colleagues were fully reimbursed and we immediately changed our policies to prevent this from happening again. In most cases, the refund was £ 10 or less. Once we discovered this error, we took a proactive, transparent and cooperative approach with HMRC. “
A spokeswoman for Pizza Hut, which underpaid 10,980 workers by £ 846,000, also said the infringement was unintentional and that staff had been reimbursed.
Tesco and Pizza Hut declined to reveal how much they had been fined.
Jeni Morris, head of the national minimum wage team at EY Accountants, added: “In my experience, most employers do not deliberately disobey NMW rules, but are inadvertently caught up in a number of technicalities in complex legislation “.
