Scrutiny of Boohoo’s relationship with Leicester suppliers who paid workers illegally low wages felt like punishment for not taking more business out of the UK, the company’s founder, Mahmud Kamani, told MPs on Wednesday.
The billionaire owner of Boohoo was speaking to the environmental audit committee – which is investigating the impact of fast fashion – in an appearance that represented his most substantive public questioning since the scandal emerged this summer. Repeatedly he said that his company was “committed to making good”.
“We will make Leicester right, we will make things correct,” he said. “That I promise you.”
At other times Kamani seemed dismissive of the idea that, as group executive chair and founder of the company estimated to have been buying 70-80% of Leicester’s garment output, he had any personal responsibility for problems there.
“I cannot possibly know everything in this business, but I do know this is a priority in our business,” he said.
In an occasionally abrasive manner Kamani claimed that an independent report by Alison Levitt QC – which found that Boohoo was responsible for “inexcusable” failures, with a series of red flags being ignored, and prompted an apology – “stated there was no wrongdoing on Boohoo’s behalf”.
The hearing found that Boohoo, begun by Kamani in 2006, had exited 64 Leicester factories since late 2019 as it sought to reform its supply chain, with 400 unannounced audits carried out this year. But neither Kamani nor its group director of responsible sourcing, Andrew Reaney, would say how many of those cases were to do with low pay.
Kamani sought to present himself as “a market trader who had been very fortunate” and learnt “the ethics of hard work” from his father. He apologised if his inexperience of political questioning had led him to answer slowly or stutter. “The last 12 months have been very difficult for me, my family and my colleagues,” he said.
He later appeared to raise the possibility that more of Boohoo’s business could be taken overseas if scrutiny of its UK supply chain became too onerous.
“For us to move out of Leicester, it’s very easy for us to take all our production offshore,” he said. “Lots of people in the fashion industry have moved offshore. We are still here and sometimes, sometimes, it feels like we get punished for it, just sometimes.”
With concerns among campaigners and industry sources that Boohoo was looking to move more of its supply base abroad, Kamani did not answer directly whether he had been looking to do this.
“We are committed to Leicester,” he said. “Hopefully once we can work closely with factories, we’ll hopefully increase our production and units in Leicester.”
He also defended a Black Friday sale where crop-top garments went on sale for 6p as effective PR. “The fact that we’re talking about it today means that that marketing worked,” he said.
