One of the world’s leading golfers, Shane Lowry, has ended his sponsorship deal with the insulation company Kingspan after it was criticised for “persistent dishonesty” in the Grenfell Tower inquiry final report.
The Ryder Cup player wore the logo of the Irish construction materials manufacturer on his sleeve for more than seven years but did not respond to previous calls to end the “deeply upsetting and deeply offensive” deal from the bereaved and survivors of the 2017 fire that claimed 72 lives.
Kingspan made some of the combustible foam insulation used on the west London council block tower, and the inquiry found last week that its development and marketing of the product was marked by “deeply entrenched and persistent dishonesty … in pursuit of commercial gain coupled with a complete disregard for fire safety”.
The Guardian reported last week on the efforts made by the families and victims’ group Grenfell United (GU) to put pressure on Lowry to end the deal. GU said it wrote to him several times over the past three years urging him to stop and alerting him to evidence about Kingspan’s conduct emerging from the public inquiry, but he did not respond.
In a statement on Tuesday, Lowry said: “Kingspan and I have mutually agreed to discontinue our sponsorship relationship, which we believe to be the right decision for all concerned at this time. Neither party will be commenting further.”
According to the public inquiry’s final report, Kingspan, a company with an €8bn-a-year turnover, “knowingly created a false market in insulation for use on buildings over 18 metres in height”. It did this by claiming a fire test showed it could be used in any building taller than 18 metres when this “was a false claim, as it well knew”. Tests of the material in 2007 and 2008 “on systems incorporating the then current form of K15 were disastrous” but it kept selling, and “made a calculated decision to mask, or distract from, the absence of supporting test evidence”.
“We spent the last three years trying to persuade [Lowry] to cut his ties with Kingspan,” said Karim Mussilhy, the vice-chair of GU, whose uncle Hesham Rahman died in the fire. “We presented the evidence from the inquiry. We are relieved he has finally cut his sponsorship, but it has been a challenge trying to get him to listen. There were plenty of opportunities to take a moral position and say that ‘as a sports person I don’t want to be involved with an organisation that’s under these sorts of investigations’. Yet he never responded to any of our communications.”
Lowry, 37, has won nearly $27m (£20.6m) on the golf course since he turned professional, according to the Spotrac website. In 2021, the survivors and bereaved successfully campaigned to persuade the Mercedes Formula One team to drop Kingspan as a sponsor of its car, which was driven by the British seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton.
The prime minister, Keir Starmer, announced last week the government would “write to all companies found by the inquiry to be part of these horrific failings as the first step to stopping them being awarded government contracts”.
Responding to the public inquiry report last week, Kingspan said the findings made clear “that the type of insulation (whether combustible or non-combustible) was immaterial, and that the principal reason for the fire spread was the PE ACM cladding, which was not made by Kingspan”.
It said: “Kingspan has long acknowledged the wholly unacceptable historical failings that occurred in part of our UK insulation business. These were in no way reflective of how we conduct ourselves as a group, then or now. While deeply regrettable, they were not found to be causative of the tragedy.”
