Could BHS have been saved?

Five weeks after BHS went into administration Duff&Phelps has announced that it has been unable to find a buyer for the business as a going concern and so BHS is to go into liquidation.

Sports Direct, Pound-stretcher, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, the entrepreneurs behind Matalan and Select Fashion all tabled offers but the administrator says none was either willing or able to come up the funding required to keep the business going.

I'm told that a buyer would have needed in excess of £100 million in the first few weeks of trading simply to reestablish credit lines with suppliers and place orders in time for the run up to Christmas.

The last remaining bidder, Richesse, fronted by Greg Tufnell (best known - even it would appear in the retail world - as Phil Tufnell's brother) made an offer of £30 million. The ambition was there but this morning a final deadline of 9am to provide proof of funds was missed.

BHS is running on fumes. After five weeks of brisk trading the warehouses are starting to empty and there's a need to act before gaps start appearing on the shelves.

Duff & Phelps says it made "considerable effort" but ultimately decided that it can raise more money by from trading out the stock and selling on the property leases than it can from the sale of BHS as a whole. Put another way: the business is worth millions of pounds more dead than it is alive.

On the face on it, this is hard-headed, cold-hearted calculation but Duff & Phelps has legal obligation to raise as much money for creditors as possible - if jobs can be saved in the process then so much the better but it is not a requirement.

That said there the outcome of the process is both surprising and fails a basic test of fairness. At BHS head office the redundancies have already begun.

The scale of the heart-ache here is breath-taking. 8,000 people who are directly employed by the company will likely all lose their jobs.

The 3,000 people who work in the BHS restaurants (sub contracted to Compass group) and in the concessions (run by Arcadia) are all at risk.

Hilco Global have been appointed to help Duff and Phelps break the business off and sell off the assets.

In the next few weeks there's the prospect of BHS's secured creditors (Gordon Brothers, Grove Point, HSBC and Sir Philip Green) getting the £120 million they are owed returned to them while staff lose their jobs and the redundancy bill ends up with the taxpayer.