A damning report into the collapse of MG Rover claimed yesterday that one of its former directors attempted to destroy evidence after the company went bust in 2005 and another was having a personal relationship with a consultant who was paid £1.6 million by the business.

The 850-page report, begun four years ago at a cost of £16 million to the taxpayer, also claims that MPs investigating the demise of the company were given “inaccurate and misleading information” by Peter Beale, one of the directors dubbed the “Phoenix Four”. Inspectors said that Mr Beale bought computer software to eliminate evidence the day after the Government announced the inquiry.

They also found that Qu Li, a female consultant appointed by Phoenix to explore potential business collaborations, was having a personal relationship with Nick Stephenson, another director. Dr Qu Li and companies associated with her received more than £1.6 million in 15 months.

The inspectors write that “we consider that Mr Beale gave untruthful evidence during his interviews” when he claimed that “he had not deleted from his laptop any documents relating to the companies under investigation”. The report says Mr Beale installed software called Evidence Eliminator on his computer the day after the SFO inquiry was announced so that he could delete material before it could be assessed by the inspectors.

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It is understood that the SFO was disappointed that there was insufficient evidence to pursue a criminal prosecution against the four directors — John Towers, Mr Beale, John Edwards and Nick Stephenson — who bought the company for £10 from BMW in 2000. The SFO also believes that government inspectors let Mr Beale off the hook when they took at face value his insistence that he had not deleted any files from his laptop.

Despite a substantial financial sweetener from BMW, the group went bust within five years, leaving 6,300 workers unemployed and creditors owed £1.3 billion. In the process, the four directors remunerated themselves generously. The report found that they paid themselves about £9 million each between 2000 and April 2005 and stood to make a further £3.2 million each from share schemes and dividends. Lord Mandelson said yesterday that he was calling for the Business and Enterprise Select Committee to set up an inquiry into the finding that Mr Beale misled the committee.

Peter Luff, the chairman of the committee, said that the issue would be raised when it next met in ten days.He said: “We have a longstanding interest in Rover. We will be meeting to discuss how best to take forward our concerns. It is unthinkable that we wouldn’t take the matter further in some way.” Julie Kirkbride, who sits on the committee, said that she would urge the cross-party group to call the four men back to face questioning.

The report found that the four directors paid themselves a salary of £250,000 as soon as they bought the company and within seven months awarded each other a £500,000 bonus. Six months later, in June 2001, they topped up their basic pay with another £500,000 bonus each.

According to the report, Mr Stephenson said that he saw his bonus as “part of the reward for having done an extremely unusual and extremely challenging deal in raising a lot of money”. However, by January 2002, their finance director informed them that cash reserves were dangerously low. He warned that should car sales fall short of targets, “the directors would need to give careful consideration of the solvency of the company”.

The four also awarded each other bonuses for a joint venture with a Chinese firm that was never signed.

The four, who have always denied wrongdoing, issued a joint statement. It said: “The report is entirely as we expected — a witch-hunt against us and a whitewash for the Government. It drips with the hallmarks of this Government — spin, smear and point blank refusal to take any responsibility for their own actions.

“We criticised the Government for failing to help MG Rover. As we have seen elsewhere, there is a price to be paid for criticising this Government and for us the price is this report.”

Lord Mandelson, who has started work on proceedings to have the Phoenix Four banned from being company directors, said that they had “brass neck nerve” to describe the report as a witch-hunt and urged them now to “do the decent thing” and formally disqualify themselves from holding any future directorships.

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