DISGRACED retailer Sir Philip Green’s attempt to gag accountancy watchdog the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) was thrown out by the High Court today.

The Monaco-based tycoon’s company Taveta Investments — parent of Arcadia Group, which owns Topshop and Miss Selfridge — tried to stop the FRC publishing a damning report on the audit of BHS by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The collapse of the high street retailer in 2016 saw 11,000 jobs lost and left a £571 million black hole in the company’s pension fund just over a year after Mr Green had sold the company to three-time bankrupt Dominic Chappell for £1.

The FRC announced earlier this month that it had fined PwC £10m over its audit of BHS and Taveta’s accounts for the year to August 30 2014, as well as fining the PwC partner responsible, Steve Denison, £500,000 and banning him for 15 years.

The fines will be reduced to £6.5m and £325,000 respectively in return for an early settlement.

Taveta tried to suppress the report to prevent “the publication of statements alleged to defame Taveta personnel” ahead of a judicial review of the FRC’s alleged failure to give the company the opportunity to respond to any criticisms.

But Mr Justice Nicklin refused Taveta’s application for an injunction, saying that, while the report “does make criticisms of the Taveta personnel that are capable of being defamatory of them (and seriously so), such a threatened publication is not exceptional” enough to grant an injunction.

He added that those said to be “adversely affected” by the report's publication did not include Mr Green.

Labour MP Frank Field, chair of the Commons work and pensions select committee, praised the High Court for dismissing “the special pleading of a plaintiff whose financial resources are almost unlimited.

“In doing so, it has struck a judgement that such individuals have a very high test to meet if they are to succeed in gagging a regulator, whose report is of interest to so many citizens.”

He added that the committee “will be writing to the Insolvency Service to ask them to reopen their investigation into BHS’s former directors in light of the FRC’s findings.”

An FRC spokeswoman said the regulator would “consider the detailed judgement before we publish our report. We hope to do this as soon as possible in the public interest.”