FIVE disgraced former directors of MG Rover, the failed Midlands car maker, are to receive an early Christmas present with an £11m-plus payout from the wreckage of the firm.

Their windfall will bring to £42m the total they have extracted from the collapsed company in one of Britain’s biggest business scandals.

The five — John Towers, Nick Stephenson, John Edwards, Peter Beale and Kevin Howe — will share the payout from the winding up of MGR Capital, a car finance operation kept separate from the rest of the group.

MG Rover workers, who lost their jobs overnight, received only the minimum statutory redundancy pay and had their pension entitlements cut. While most have found new jobs, they have suffered an average pay cut of £6,000 a year, according to a recent study.

Towers, Stephenson, Edwards and Beale, known as the Phoenix Four, are expected to get about £2.5m each from their latest pay day. Howe, who was chief executive of MG Rover, will get about £1.4m.

The sums have provoked fury in Birmingham, where MG Rover had its main Longbridge plant. Chrissy Chapman, 48, a former window fitter who received a £6,500 pay-off, said: “The more we think about it, the kind of money they are claiming, the more disgusting the people in the workforce find it. We have had to suffer. They should be tried for what they have done, because for me it is fraud.”

He now works as a lorry driver and is in debt after funding his son’s university education.

“It’s absolutely despicable,” said Adrian Ross, a former senior union official at the plant.

Alan Mercer, 58, who was a Rover assembly line worker for 16 years, said: “I think I should have some of the money first.”

The Phoenix group face calls to put the money into a workers’ trust fund that they set up before the company went into administration in April 2005.

Richard Burden, the MP for Birmingham Northfield who has led a campaign for compensation for the workers, said the Phoenix executives had a “moral obligation” to put their payouts into the fund.

“They should do the right thing by the people who did the right thing by them,” said Burden. “I would like to see them make that commitment and if it’s not into the fund, then into some other kind of community service or facility. The closure of Longbridge hit this community hard — I would liken it to the way mining communities were hurt by the closure of their pits.”

Phoenix has not made payments into the fund, citing legal advice during the long-running official inquiry into the collapse of MG Rover. The report was finally published in September and, while highly critical of the directors’ conduct, it did not accuse them of breaking the law.

Their spokesman would not comment on whether they would take the full £11m when it became available next month, what they would do with it or whether they might give some of it to the trust fund.

Lloyds Banking Group, in which the government holds a 43% stake, owns half of MGR Capital and is also in line for an £11m-plus windfall.

The Phoenix consortium bought MG Rover from BMW in 2000 for £10. The company gradually withered and died over the next five years, while the Phoenix executives enriched themselves through hefty salaries, pensions and other benefits. Much of the money has been paid into an offshore trust registered in Guernsey.

The five directors made their fortune by buying MG Rover’s car finance business using money indirectly lent to them by MG Rover. When they bought the car finance operation, it had assets of about £400m and about 70,000 financing contracts with companies and members of the public.

An internal memo from an employee of Deloitte, the accountancy firm that advised on the deal, said the object of the arrangement was for the “boys to make money”.

Additional reporting: Helen Brooks

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