Last week was a bad one for capitalism. Two Commons committees, and an astonished outside world, watched a long list of highly paid individuals blame the downfall of BHS on everyone but themselves. Meanwhile, Mike Ashley did accept some responsibilty for goings-on at his Sports Direct but he had a mighty admission to make: some of his workers had effectively been paid less than the minimum wage.

The reaction to these revelations has been enlightening. No chairman or chief executive of a FTSE 100 company has risen to express outrage. Professional bodies of accountants and lawyers have not called for a fundamental examination of ethical standards in their industries. The Daily Telegraph, in a leader column, told its readers that capitalism “remains a force for good”. It’s as if the establishment would prefer the caravan to move along so that everyone can get back to the business of making money.

Thank goodness, then, that the committee running the BHS inquiry has decided it wants more details, from more people. Last Thursday – a day after hearing the wandering testimony of Dominic Chappell, the thrice bankrupt who paid £1 for BHS – it announced a fresh set of witnesses. Some 14 were called, including six who had already appeared.

The 14 include three individuals from Goldman Sachs, including one of its two men in London, Michael Sherwood, who worked on Green’s failed attempt to buy Marks & Spencer in 2004. It will also hear from Neville Khan, managing partner of Deloitte, and Lord Grabiner, chairman of Taveta, Green’s holding company. These are very big cheeses.

The more testimonies, the better, because two points are clear already from the BHS inquiry. First, Chappell was plainly insufficiently experienced to own BHS, a loss-making company with 11,000 employees and a large deficit in its pension scheme. Second, Green and Chappell could not have completed the deal if so many supposedly reputable firms and individuals had not performed their roles and lent their good names.

These are crucial points if – as seems highly likely – it turns out that Green broke no rules in his selling of BHS. What is there to prevent owners of other companies with towering pension deficits selling to inexperienced purchasers?

One safeguard, in theory, is regulation. But, at BHS, the sale proceeded without the approval of the Pensions Regulator. Green, supposedly frustrated by the slow and inconclusive progress of previous discussions, went ahead anyway, as he was legally entitled to do. That may be a loophole that needs to be closed. It may be that the Pension Protection Fund, a lifeboat financed by a levy on defined-benefit schemes, has created a perverse incentive for employers to shirk their pension responsibilities.

The second safeguard is meant to be the accountants, lawyers and financial advisers. Yet law firm Olswang represented Chappell in the knowledge of at least one of his bankruptcies, and now refuses, citing client confidentiality, to say how much it was paid, or on what basis. Accountant Grant Thornton, Chappell’s other key adviser, is a firm that likes to boast about its moral compass. Its new chief executive, Sacha Romanovitch, has launched a scheme called Vibrant Economy, with the aim of passing on “something better to the next generation”. The 11,000 employees of BHS who lost their jobs may not laugh.

Businesses will always fail, of course. But the sale of BHS to an underfunded individual with no retail experience and multiple bankruptcies is different. Green will give his account next week. After that, the Commons committees must keep pressing the advisers.

None of the well-paid handmaidens to the transaction seems to have stopped to examine adequately the wider moral picture. With this in mind – and if a reformed pension system is still full of holes – the crisis in the corporate world runs much deeper than the inevitability of occasional accidents.

Coasting Uber could step on the gas after nod from Brussels

Given the sheer volume of court rulings that have gone against Uber lately, it would be no surprise to find that the world’s judiciaries have been infiltrated by a cadre of disgruntled black cab drivers.

The California-based taxi app has now fallen foul of courts in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium – and that’s just in Europe. Judges in Brazil and India have also thrown brass tacks under the wheels of the Uber juggernaut, which has been rapidly gathering speed since the company was founded in 2009.

One of the chief complaints is that its lower-cost UberPop service – now banned in a handful of countries – relies on drivers who do not have a licence to operate private hire vehicles. This angered traditional taxi drivers, whose lobby groups have found allies among the political classes.

In France, Uber was found guilty of running an illegal taxi service, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of two years for executives held responsible. They avoided jail but, in a measure of the strength of anti-Uber sentiment in France, two executives had to pay combined fines of €50,000.

But there may be hope for Uber in Europe. The European commission recently issued guidelines stating that “sharing economy” businesses such as Uber and Airbnb should be banned only as a last resort. It hinted that it could call upon these guidelines when determining whether national legislation violates EU treaties.

So far, Uber has tended to drop its UberPop service rather than fight its corner: it relies for income instead on its more upmarket chauffeur-style services, which use fully licensed drivers.

But the company has many friends in high places and the thinly veiled message of support from the European commission may well embolden chief executive Travis Kalanick. If the commission continues to lean towards backing Uber, he will at some stage feel ready to test those bans in the highest European courts. And that could lead to a head-on collision.

Brent crude is up – but Big Oil still isn’t back in the black

The oil price has hit $52 a barrel in recent days, which represents a 70% cost bounce-back since the middle of February.

So are Shell, BP and the North Sea industry back in business now? And will car owners and other oil and gas consumers be put on the back foot? Can one expect to see crude values running up again to the $100 a barrel levels seen for the three years preceding June 2014?

Perhaps: there is reason to believe that the bottom of this particularly brutal commodity cycle has indeed been reached. Most analysts are gently optimistic that the Brent crude benchmark will be back above $60 by year end, but see no reason to suppose it will be much higher for 2017 or much beyond.

Last week Shell unveiled deeper cutbacks following its successful tie-up with rival BG, while BP hived off its £1bn Norwegian business to a new venture with a local independent called Det Norske. Big Oil is still living beyond its means.