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The retail tycoon Philip Green has been named in parliament as the businessman accused over sexual harassment and bullying allegations that the Daily Telegraph was barred from reporting by an injunction.
Green, the owner of Topshop, was named by Labour peer Peter Hain, who said he was using parliamentary privilege in the public interest.
Lord Hain told the House of Lords: “Having been contacted by somebody intimately involved in the case of a powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying which is compulsively continuing, I feel it’s my duty under parliamentary privilege to name Philip Green as the individual in question, given that the media have been subject to an injunction preventing publication of the full details of a story which is clearly in the public interest.”
Hain’s intervention comes after court of appeal judges granted a temporary injunction blocking the Daily Telegraph from publishing allegations of misconduct made by five employees about a figure the newspaper described as a “leading businessman”.
That decision overturned an earlier finding by the high court that to identify the man would be in the public interest.
On Tuesday, the Telegraph published claims that an unnamed “leading businessman” had used NDAs to pay off former employees who had accused him of discreditable conduct, in what it described as “a British #MeToo scandal”. The Guardian has approached Green for comment.
There was silence in the House of Lords after Hain made his statement, an intervention before a routine statement on immigration made by Conservative Home Office minister Lady Williams.
After the name was revealed, Conservative vice-chairman James Cleverley said on Twitter that he hoped “people must now realise that injunctions and super-injunctions are nothing more than a good way to part with large sums of money and a bad way to keep things secret”.
Labour’s shadow women and equalities minister Dawn Butler said Labour would reform the use of NDAs unless the government did so first, saying: “If the current law doesn’t protect the voices of survivors, the next Labour government will legislate to do so.”
Theresa May said the government was committed to reforming the use of NDAs when questioned in the Commons on Wednesday.
“Non-disclosure agreements cannot stop people from whistleblowing, but it is clear that some employers are using them unethically,” May said. She said the government was going to bring forward its consultation “to seek to improve the regulation around non-disclosure agreements and make it absolutely explicit to employees when a non-disclosure agreement does not apply and when it cannot be enforced”.
She was responding to a question from Labour’s Jess Phillips, who said: “It seems our laws allow rich and powerful men to do what they want as long as they pay to keep it quiet.”
