• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Before Header

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
Donate

Leasehold Knowledge Management Logo

Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold reform

Mobile Menu

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
  • Advice
  • News
    • Find everything …
    • About Peverel group
    • APPG
    • ARMA
    • Bellway
    • Benjamin Mire
    • Brixton Hill Court
    • Canary Riverside
    • Charter Quay
    • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
    • Cladding scandal
    • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
    • Commonhold
    • Communities Select Committee
    • Conveyancing Association
    • Countrywide
    • MHCLG
    • E&J Capital Partners
    • Exit fees
    • FirstPort
    • Fleecehold
    • Forfeiture
    • FPRA
    • Gleeson Homes
    • Ground rent scandal
    • Hanover
    • House managers flat
    • House of Lords
    • Housing associations
    • Informal lease extension
    • Insurance
    • IRPM
    • JB Leitch
    • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
    • John Christodoulou
    • Justin Bates
    • Justin Madders MP
    • Law Commission
    • LEASE
    • Liam Spender
    • Local authority leasehold
    • London Assembly
    • Louie Burns
    • Martin Paine
    • McCarthy and Stone
    • Moskovitz / Gurvits
    • Mulberry Mews
    • National Leasehold Campaign
    • Oakland Court
    • Park Homes
    • Parliament
    • Persimmon
    • Peverel
    • Philip Rainey QC
    • Plantation Wharf
    • Press
    • Property tribunal
    • Prostitutes
    • Quadrangle House
    • Redrow
    • Retirement
    • Richard Davidoff
    • RICS
    • Right To Manage Federation
    • Roger Southam
    • Rooftop development
    • RTM
    • Sean Powell
    • SFO
    • Shared ownership
    • Sinclair Gardens Investments
    • Sir Ed Davey
    • Sir Peter Bottomley
    • St George’s Wharf
    • Subletting
    • Taylor Wimpey
    • Tchenguiz
    • Warwick Estates
    • West India Quay
    • William Waldorf Astor
    • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
  • [Custom]
Menu
  • Advice
  • News
      • Find everything …
      • About Peverel group
      • APPG
      • ARMA
      • Bellway
      • Benjamin Mire
      • Brixton Hill Court
      • Canary Riverside
      • Charter Quay
      • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
      • Cladding scandal
      • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
      • Commonhold
      • Communities Select Committee
      • Conveyancing Association
      • Countrywide
      • MHCLG
      • E&J Capital Partners
      • Exit fees
      • FirstPort
      • Fleecehold
      • Forfeiture
      • FPRA
      • Gleeson Homes
      • Ground rent scandal
      • Hanover
      • House managers flat
      • House of Lords
      • Housing associations
      • Informal lease extension
      • Insurance
      • IRPM
      • JB Leitch
      • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
      • John Christodoulou
      • Justin Bates
      • Justin Madders MP
      • Law Commission
      • LEASE
      • Liam Spender
      • Local authority leasehold
      • London Assembly
      • Louie Burns
      • Martin Paine
      • McCarthy and Stone
      • Moskovitz / Gurvits
      • Mulberry Mews
      • National Leasehold Campaign
      • Oakland Court
      • Park Homes
      • Parliament
      • Persimmon
      • Peverel
      • Philip Rainey QC
      • Plantation Wharf
      • Press
      • Property tribunal
      • Prostitutes
      • Quadrangle House
      • Redrow
      • Retirement
      • Richard Davidoff
      • RICS
      • Right To Manage Federation
      • Roger Southam
      • Rooftop development
      • RTM
      • Sean Powell
      • SFO
      • Shared ownership
      • Sinclair Gardens Investments
      • Sir Ed Davey
      • Sir Peter Bottomley
      • St George’s Wharf
      • Subletting
      • Taylor Wimpey
      • Tchenguiz
      • Warwick Estates
      • West India Quay
      • William Waldorf Astor
      • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
You are here: Home / Latest News / Grenfell is becoming our worst corporate scandal, says Dominic Lawson in Sunday Times

Grenfell is becoming our worst corporate scandal, says Dominic Lawson in Sunday Times

December 14, 2020 //  by Sebastian O'Kelly

Kingspan, Celotex, Arconic … The Arconic employees the inquiry most wants to question are based in France: Claude Wehrle, Claude Schmidt and Gwenaëlle Derrendinger

A damning and influential article by Dominic Lawson about the build safety regime – and the wider UK housebuilding sector – was published in The Sunday Times yesterday.

It was sub-titled “We now know the Kingspan cladding firm rigged tests — even after the fire”.

The Grenfell inquiry has exposed that months after the fire Kingspan — whose combustible foam insulation was inside the cladding — engaged in a campaign to persuade MPs and government ministers that its own product was no more dangerous than a non-combustible one.

Grenfell is becoming our worst corporate scandal

How fortunate for the executives of Kingspan that their interrogation at the Grenfell Tower inquiry last week coincided with the arrival in the UK of the Covid-19 vaccine and a possibly terminal crisis in our trade negotiations with the EU.

It did not just hire the lobbying firm Portland to fix meetings with MPs and ministers in which, to quote the PR outfit itself, “there is immeasurable value in getting Kingspan’s manifesto in front of these decision-makers”.

In July 2018, Kingspan presented to MHCLG and to the relevant parliamentary select committee the results of tests it had conducted on insulation made by the rival firm Rockwool, whose product is not combustible but is less thermally efficient.

Building firm Kingspan ‘gamed fire tests in aftermath of Grenfell blaze’

The construction giant Kingspan manipulated fire tests after the Grenfell Tower disaster to undermine a competitor and gain commercial advantage, a public inquiry was told today. The insulation firm, owned by the Irish billionaire Murtagh family, was accused of perverting science by setting up fire tests for rival products that were “designed to fail”.

These tests were deliberately rigged.

Or, to quote an internal email from a Kingspan technician revealed at the inquiry: “I have introduced as many weak features/details as possible to ensure it has the best chance of performing poorly.”T

The Grenfell Inquiry counsel Richard Millett QC put it to Adrian Pargeter, the director of technical, marketing and regulatory affairs at Kingspan, an Irish company:

“Kingspan, even in … the face of an investigation into fire safety after Grenfell, was doing its best to ensure that the science was secretly perverted for financial gain. That has been your own approach and Kingspan’s general approach for years. It’s still going on … Did you see the aftermath of the Grenfell fire as something of a commercial opportunity?”

Mr Pargeter denied this.

Earlier text messages between members of Kingspan’s technical team, Peter Moss and Arron Chalmers, were read to the inquiry.

They joked about the way the firm had managed to get its Kooltherm K15 insulation categorised as “class 0” — that is, appropriate for use in buildings higher than 18 metres — in part by using a different material in the official tests from what was actually being sold.

Chalmers: “Doesn’t actually get class 0 when we test the whole product tho. LOL.”

Moss: “WHAT. We lied? Honest opinion now.”

Chalmers: “Yeahhhh …”

And later in the conversation: “All lies, mate … Alls we do is lie here.”

A week earlier the inquiry heard that when a constructor questioned whether Kooltherm K15 was suitable for a high-rise, the Kingspan executive Philip Heath emailed a friend:

“I think [they] are getting me confused with someone who gives a dam [sic].”

Dominic Lawson writes: “It was astute of Kingspan’s founder, Eugene Murtagh, and his son Gene (now in charge of the business) to have cashed in shares worth £98m in the weeks before the inquiry got its teeth into this matter.”

Eugene, Gene and Paul Murtagh net worth – Irish Rich List 2020

RANK: 5Building supplies€2.219bn (£1.953bn) ▲€777m Murtagh, 78, chairman of Kingspan, the global maker of insulation and other building products, made €44m in share sales last year as the value of his 14.9% stake in the rapidly growing €10.2bn London-quoted company rose to more than €1.5bn.

Eugene Murtagh is a billionaire, having built up his company from a one-man operation in County Cavan in the 1970s, into a multinational business. In October, the Irish Times pronounced Gene Murtagh its “business person of the month”, noting that “sales have jumped more than 300% to €1.65 billion since [he] took charge in 2005”. Not a mention of Grenfell.

The denies any culpability for the deaths of the 72 men, women and children who died at Grenfell.

Only 5% of the insulation on the tower contained Kooltherm K15.

The rest was provided by Celotex, a French company, and the cladding panels as a whole by the US firm Arconic.

Lawson writes: “The Arconic employees the inquiry most wants to question are based in France (Claude Wehrle, Claude Schmidt and Gwenaëlle Derrendinger).

“They have refused to give oral evidence on the grounds that something called the French Blocking Statute prevents them from “sharing commercial or technical information to establish evidence in foreign courts”. But as the inquiry’s counsel observed, there has been “only one successful prosecution under the French Blocking Statute in the 51 years since that statute was enacted”.

“It does not take a cynic to surmise that the reason for their refusal to be questioned may lie elsewhere.”

With the evidence emerging from the Grenfell inquiry, it will be up to the Metropolitan police to initiate any manslaughter charges.

Lawson concludes:

“Even this uninvolved observer was reduced to shuddering fury when seeing what emerged last week at the inquiry. So it is hard to imagine the feelings of families now trapped in unsellable properties, let alone those of the relatives of the Grenfell residents for whom this was a death trap.

“It turns out that the depravity, at a corporate level, was worse even than we could have imagined.”

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

Related posts:

worst building safety scandal in history‘Worst building safety scandal in modern history’ Sunday Times reports Taylor Wimpey ground rent scandal, as executives meet leaseholders The Times saturation coverage of cladding scandal Default ThumbnailSunday Times reports the forfeiture scandal of Dennis Jackson at Plantation Wharf LKP tells Sunday Times reader not to buy leasehold house (and there is no excuse for them)

Category: Cladding scandal, Latest News, News, NewsSlider, PressTag: Adrian Pargeter, Arconic, Celotex, Claude Schmidt, Claude Wehrle, Dominic Lawson, Eugene Murtagh, Gene Murtagh, Gwenaëlle Derrendinger, Kingspan, The Sunday Times

Sign up to the LKP newsletter

Fill in the link here

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @LKPleasehold

Mentions

Anthony Essien (34) APPG (44) ARMA (91) Benjamin Mire (32) Cladding scandal (71) Clive Betts MP (33) CMA (46) Commonhold (55) Competition and Markets Authority (42) Countryside Properties plc (33) FirstPort (55) Grenfell cladding (56) Ground rents (55) Israel Moskovitz (32) James Brokenshire MP (31) Jim Fitzpatrick (36) Jim Fitzpatrick MP (31) Justin Bates (41) Justin Madders MP (75) Katie Kendrick (40) Law Commission (61) LEASE (68) Leasehold Advisory Service (65) Leasehold houses (32) Liam Spender (39) Long Harbour (51) Lord Greenhalgh (32) Martin Boyd (87) McCarthy and Stone (43) National Leasehold Campaign (42) Persimmon (49) Peverel (61) Property tribunal (49) Retirement (38) Robert Jenrick (33) Roger Southam (47) Sajid Javid (38) Sebastian O’Kelly (67) Sir Peter Bottomley (211) Taylor Wimpey (106) Tchenguiz (33) The Guardian (33) The Times (34) Vincent Tchenguiz (45) Waking watch contracts (40)
Previous Post: «APPG on leasehold reform Full APPG, December 10: Can be seen here
Next Post: Government steps back from dumping all cladding costs on leaseholders Wicker Riverside»

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Michael Epstein

    December 14, 2020 at 6:39 pm

    And still they want Leaseholders to be held responsible?

  2. MEF

    December 17, 2020 at 10:20 am

    So the French company involved will not appear at the Inquiry on the grounds that they are prevented from “sharing commercial or technical information to establish evidence in foreign courts”. Technically the Inquiry is not a court.

  3. James Brooks

    December 17, 2020 at 11:53 am

    Do you remember how Cameron crowed about his ‘bonfire of the regulations’ in 2015? This followed years of privatisation of testing and research. We used to have a well-regarded and well-funded Fire Research Establishment; all gone under the neo-liberal ideology of free-market privatisation. Cap all of that with the Banker’s Crash (yet another symptom of neo-liberal ideology), and the consequent savage cuts to local government and their building control functions, and the outcome was Grenfell. The government have framed the Grenfell terms of reference to avoid scrutiny of government’s responsibility for the Grenfell tragedy, but we have seen enough now to know that the root cause was a failure of effective regulation.

  4. Anthony Woolf

    December 17, 2020 at 7:06 pm

    Grenfell was failed by so many different companies and organisations. Cladding company Arconic of course, and the insulation suppliers Kingspan and Celotex beahved in an appalling way. But supposedly independent organisations (BRE, NHBC, BBA) let themselves be bullied or persuaded into providing certificates and data that could easily be misrepresented by these companies. Then the building designers seem to have been more concerned to avoid or get round regulations than to comply with them, and finally the actual builders didn’t build it properly.
    We now know that high-rise blocks are not “safe as houses.” The only way to change this is to fund genuinely independent organisations – with teeth – to check up on the manufacturers, designers and builders. They must be funded by a levy that the industry has no choice but to pay, and directors of companies involved in construction should not have any part in their management.

  5. terry sullivan

    January 23, 2021 at 4:58 pm

    prescotts involvemnet?

    un involvement?

Above Footer

Advising leaseholders. Avoiding disasters.
Stopping forfeiture. Exposing abuses. Urging reform.

We depend on individuals for the majority of our funding.

Support Us and Donate

LKP Managing Agents

Become an LKP Managing Agent

Common Ground
Adam Church
Blocnet property management2

Stay in Touch

To achieve victory in the leasehold game where you are playing against professionals and with rules that they know all too well - stay informed with the LKP newsletter.
Sign Up for Newsletter

Professional Directory

The following advertisements are from firms that seek business from leaseholders.
Click on the logos for company profiles.

Barry Passmore

Footer

About LKP

  • What is LKP
  • Privacy and data

Categories

  • News
  • Cladding scandal
  • Commonhold
  • Law Commission
  • Fleecehold
  • Parliament
  • Press
  • APPG

Contact

Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
Open Data Institute
5th Floor
Kings Place
London N1 9AG

sok@leaseholdknowledge.com

Copyright © 2025 Leasehold Knowledge Partnership | All rights reserved
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership Limited (company number: 08999652) is a company limited by guarantee that is a registered charity (number: 1162584) with the Charities Commission.
LKP website is hosted at www.34sp.com
Website by Callia Web