Firms liable for Grenfell inferno made tens of millions since tragedy

Bosses at the firms responsible for the Grenfell Tower inferno have raked in hundreds of millions of pounds in the years since the tragedy.

The results of the public inquiry today laid bare a toxic corporate culture in both the construction trade and the industry that produced the flammable materials used in the block’s botched refurbishment.

A tranche of outrageous emails showed a key firm misleading customers about the safety of flammable cladding panels, and construction firms displaying a cavalier attitude to fire safety.

Yet many of those at the top of the very businesses blamed for the tragedy, which claimed 72 lives in 2017, have continued to enjoy considerable riches. In his excoriating final report, inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick condemned a roll call of individuals and companies who helped pave a ‘path to disaster’.

Arconic

When performing his duties as a part-time fireman in picturesque France, few would guess Claude Wehrle was implicated in Britain’s deadliest post-war inferno.

He was the technical manager for French firm Arconic and crucial in the development of highly flammable cladding panels which the inquiry identified as the ‘principle reason’ the fire spread rapidly.

Mr Wehrle cited an obscure French law to justify his refusal to give evidence before the inquiry – a claim Sir Martin said was ‘debatable’ at best.

He concluded Mr Wehrle ‘deliberately and dishonestly’ misled British authorities about the dangerous potential of the aluminium composite material (ACM) panels when they caught fire, to obtain a safety certificate in a country the company saw as a soft touch.

Mr Wehrle wrote in an email it was ‘hard to make a note’ about a failed fire test of the Reynobond 55PE panels as ‘we are not clean’.

Sir Martin’s report said: ‘Mr Wehrle’s frankness with his own colleagues suggests that they knew as much as he did.’

Deborah French, Arconic’s UK sales manager who sold the panels for the Grenfell refurbishment project, was found to be ‘clearly at fault’ for failing to pass on information to Arconic’s customers about the danger of the cladding, which she was told about directly.

She could not explain this omission to the inquiry. The report said the failures of both Mr Wehrle and Ms French ‘reflected a sustained and deliberate strategy by Arconic to continue selling Reynobond 55PE in the UK based on a statement about its fire performance that it knew to be false’.

Celotex and Kingspan

Celotex provided the vast majority of the flammable insulation used on the tower, while Kingspan provided the remainder.

Irish giant Kingspan was accused of ‘knowingly creating a false market for insulation’ on buildings taller than 18 metres, which Celotex then sought to break into using ‘a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market’.

Since the fire, Celotex’s parent company Saint-Gobain has paid its chief executive Pierre-André de Chalendar £11.7million, while Benoit Bazin, his successor since 2021, has earned £15.8million, according to recent accounts.

For Kingspan, billionaire founder Eugene Murtagh has banked £149.3million – from share sales (£80.7million), dividends (£68.1million) and pay (£540,000) – while his son Gene Murtagh, the group’s chief executive since 2005, made £26million.

Just one year after Grenfell, Gene Murtagh bought a €7.5million seafront mansion in Dalkey, Dublin. Neither the Kingspan or Celotex executives were named in the report but the corporate cultures of both companies were strongly condemned.

Rydon

Clowning around at his £2million luxury mansion, millionaire fat cat Robert Bond enjoyed the fruits of his firm Rydon’s success for many years.

The inquiry concluded Rydon, the lead contractor on the Grenfell project, ‘failed to consider even the simplest questions’ of fire safety.

Even after the tragedy, the firm’s profits rose by some 60 per cent in just two years, with its best-paid director – thought to be owner Mr Bond – said to have enjoyed a salary increase of 12 per cent to £473,000 over the same period.

Mr Bond lived a luxury lifestyle, with an Aston Martin parked on his drive alongside a silver convertible Porsche.

Photos on his wife Tina’s Facebook showed an apparent shared love for classic sports cars with the couple posing together in front of a silver Ferrari. Other photos were from a family holiday on a yacht in south-east Asia.

The Bonds’ vast mansion in Kent, complete with swimming pool, was sold in 2020 for more than £2million.

Rydon divested its contracting operations in 2021 to a new business, Real. This collapsed into administration in late 2023 owing millions of pounds.

Sir Martin did not single out Mr Bond personally but said in his final report that the company he ran was as culpable as the cladding manufacturers because of its ‘casual attitude’ throughout the project, and because it gave ‘inadequate thought to fire safety’.

He added: ‘Rydon bears considerable responsibility for the fire at Grenfell Tower.’

During the inquiry, it emerged Rydon had told Grenfell’s management organisation it could save them up to £376,175 on the cladding when in fact the cladding savings offered to Rydon were put at up to £576,973.

Harley Facades

The boss of cladding contractor Harley Facades enjoyed a life of opulence while his firm was designing the cladding system, which the report said bears ‘a

significant degree of responsibility’ for turning Grenfell into a deathtrap.

Ray Bailey did not understand the material could burn, which the inquiry chairman condemned as ‘a striking misconception’.

Harley Facades was paid £2.6million for its part in the Grenfell project. And the family-run firm’s latest balance sheet, from 2023, suggests it remains a healthy business, with more than £4.2million listed as ‘cash at bank and in hand’.

Mr Bailey, 65, and his wife Belinda live in a grand house worth around £1.5million in East Sussex with a Porsche and a Land Rover among the cars spotted on their drive.

Mrs Bailey, 64, is the company secretary while their ‘incompetent’ son Ben Bailey helped to manage the Grenfell project.

The family mansion has three buildings with a large, covered swimming pool attached to the main house. Mrs Bailey had previously posted photos on social media showing exotic holidays, including one of her sitting next to a huge tiger, while her husband enjoyed skiing and motorsports.

The report said that Harley Facades, which installed but did not manufacture the lethal cladding panels, ‘did not concern itself sufficiently with fire safety

at any stage during the refurbishment’. The firm had a ‘striking lack of technical knowledge’ and ‘fell far short of the standard of a reasonably competent cladding contractor’.

Ben Bailey Jnr, then a 25-year-old graduate with a foundation degree in motorsport engineering, allegedly ‘lacked the competence and experience to act as Harley’s project manager’.

Studio E 

Some of the most damning criticism in Sir Martin’s report is reserved for the architects of the doomed refurbishment, Studio E, and particularly the project manager Bruce Sounes.

The inquiry said his work ‘fell seriously below the standard to be expected of a reasonably competent architect’. This included his failure to properly assess the suitability of either the cladding or insulation panels, both combustible – assuming ‘there was nothing to worry about’.

Fire Assessor

Carl Stokes was a former fireman responsible for carrying out fire assessment for the whole estate run by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which consisted of nearly 10,000 properties.

But the inquiry found he had ‘misrepresented his experience and qualifications (some of which he had invented) and was ill-qualified to carry out fire risk assessments on buildings the size and complexity of Grenfell Tower, let alone to hold the entire TMO portfolio’.

London Fire Brigade officers had expressed concerns about his competence but the TMO ‘continued to rely uncritically on him’, making the danger ‘more acute’.

He was paid £244,318 over seven years as fire risk assessor, according to documents.