Sir Philip Green has made a last ditch plea to save his knighthood, hinting that he is close to agreeing a rescue deal for the failed retailer BHS’s pension fund and stating he is “very, very, very sorry” for the collapse of the business.

On Thursday MPs will debate the BHS saga in parliament. The backbench motion calls on Green to resolve the deficit in the company pension fund while an amendment demands his knighthood “be cancelled and annulled” by the house’s honours forfeiture committee.

In an interview with ITV News on Tuesday Green said his advisors were engaged in a “strong dialogue” with the Pensions Regulator: “If we arrive at the place where we hope to arrive, there will be no requirement for [industry lifeboat] the Pension Protection Fund [to step in].”

However, in a statement issued after Green’s ITV interview was broadcast, the Pensions Regulator appeared to suggest that a deal was some way from being agreed. The Pension Regulator said talks with Green about a possible settlement are “ongoing”, adding: “We are yet to receive a comprehensive and credible written proposal and have made clear what we require.”

Green declined to give an indication of the sums involved in making good the pension scheme’s deficit, which the last official measure put at £571m. “We are in very strong dialogue with the regulator for a solution. We’ve had a team of advisers working on this virtually every day. Just because I might not be sitting behind a desk, doesn’t mean I’m not working on it.”

Green had faced criticism after spending the summer sailing around the Mediterranean in his new £100m superyacht Lionheart.

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In an interview the Topshop owner also said he was “sad and very, very, very sorry” for the hardship suffered by BHS’s staff and pensioners in the wake of the retailer’s collapse into administration earlier this year. In a bid to show his willingness to face up to the BHS mess Green revealed that six days before his bruising appearance before MPs in June he had had a heart stent fitted. “I didn’t call … to postpone me going or try to avoid it and use it as an excuse. I’m not running,” said Green.

Earlier on Tuesday Green published a review by his lawyers which hit back at the parliamentary report published in July , calling it “bizarre” and beset by “serious factual errors”.

In the report Lord Pannick QC and Michael Todd QC criticised the MP’s findings, which held the tycoon responsible for leaving BHS with a £571m pension deficit, taking nearly £400m in dividends from the retailer and selling the business for £1 in March 2015 to the serial bankrupt Dominic Chappell’s Retail Acquisitions consortium.

But Ian Wright, the chair of the then business innovations and skills select committee and one of the MPs behind Thursday’s motion, said the criticism of their work by Green’s team was an attempt to “wiggle off the hook”.

MP hits back after Sir Philip Green calls BHS collapse report 'bizarre' Read more

Wright said: “This legalistic opinion doesn’t question the facts of the unanimously agreed select committee report but it does mirror Sir Philip’s litany of excuses for the collapse of BHS and for his delay in ‘sorting’ the BHS pension deficit.”



Frank Field, the chair of the work and pensions committee who co-chaired the BHS inquiry with Wright and is also sponsoring the motion, is singled out for particular criticism by Green’s lawyers for jumping to conclusions “before he had heard all of the evidence”.

But Field responded by saying that the contents of the parliamentary report had been agreed unanimously by 10 MPs drawn from two different select committees and were based on “huge amounts of evidence”. “That one of the country’s top legal minds has been drawn in to defend Sir Philip’s actions shows how Herculean that task is. But the house will draw its own conclusions later this week.”