Tesco bank chief’s £18,000 travel expenses exposed

Benny Higgins, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Tesco Bank, spent more than £18,000 on London taxis in just eight months last year on trips to upmarket restaurants, private members’ clubs and the supermarket’s various head offices, The Guardian, has reported.

The news comes despite what is reportedly a tough new regime implemented by the supermarket giant’s chief executive, Dave Lewis.

According to documents seen by the newspaper, multimillionaire Mr Higgins spent more than the annual salary of one of the retailer’s store workers on London taxis between March and October last year.

The documents so that Mr Higgins and his PA on his behalf, claimed for trips including more than £700 on taxis booked for airport transfers with Higgins’ daughters named as passengers, and thousands of pounds on journeys to the Royal Opera House, private members’ clubs and a string of restaurants. Some of the taxi claims, for relatively short journeys, run to hundreds of pounds.

Despite the head office of Tesco Personal Finance, the division which includes the challenger bank, being in Edinburgh, the bills also suggest that Mr Higgins, who held senior roles at RBS and Standard Life and left a role at HBOS in 2007 after less than two years with a £2m golden goodbye, tends to spend at least half of his week in London.

A Tesco source quoted by the newspaper said the documents, which show Higgins spent more than £170, more than twice the daily earnings of a Tesco shop assistant, on trips to and from the Royal Opera House from the Soho hotel – a 15-minute walk, show costs that are “just out of control.”

Without explaining the huge discrepancy, The Guardian says one trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum – five stops on the underground, which would have cost less than £5 with an Oyster card – resulted in a £389.85 taxi bill.

Also included are bills for £2,000 for trips to Tesco’s corporate offices in Cheshunt, Welwyn Garden City and Moorgate, central London.

A Tesco spokesperson refused to comment on the detail or scale of the claims, or whether Higgins’s claims were sanctioned, but said: “All Tesco colleagues adhere to a clear policy that allows travel and other expenses for business reasons.”

However, they seemingly frivolous travel habits of Mr Higgins appear to be in stark contrast to Tesco group boss, Dave Lewis, who, when he arrived in October 2014 ordered the immediate sale of the fleet of corporate aircraft and announced that he would be taking the train rather than a car into central London from Tesco’s Hertfordshire HQ.

That saving alone, he said, would pay for an extra member of staff in store for a day.