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Former chief executive Keith Cochrane says Carillion had not been paid for the huge job it was carrying out in Qatar for 18 months.

Surely the firm should have made provisions earlier on this job sooner, he's asked?

"I sought to achieve a settlement," he says, but the ups and down of negotiations ultimately failed, he adds.

Mr Khan is not having a good time at the Committee. Witness this earlier exchange...

Frank Field: "Were you surprised the whole thing crashed?"

Khan: "I was surprised with the outcome that came to pass."

Rachel Reeves: "Were you asleep at the wheel?"

Frank Field: "He was asleep somewhere else."

Earlier, former CFO Emma Mercer said she had found slightly more aggressive accounting when she returned to the UK to take up the post.

But Zafar Khan, her predecessor, said he was "not aware" of any change in policy. "I don't believe we were aggressive," he says.

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Zafar Khan is asked: "Do you wish you had taken different decisions - or taken them sooner? And if so, what?"

Mr Khan searches for an answer. Finally he says: "To my mind one of the issues that contributed was the fact our debt had grown over the past few years. Essentially.

"That combined with the number of challenges we faced, in terms of four large contracts underperfoming significantly, in terms of the market, and the construction market in the UK," he mumbles.

Zafar Khan is forced to wriggle. He's asked: "You've been described as the person calling the shots."

Khan says: "I don't know where that description comes from".

Zafar Khan is quizzed again about the company's approach to booking its contracts.

"There was no effort in the time that I was in the business, in any part of it, to push people to come up with a more aggressive position," he says.

Zafar Khan is challenged: "It's your job, surely to have in place procedures to stop this happening..."

He responds with a resigned shake of the head. "The business was operated with everything you'd expect to see in it."

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Earlier, former Carillion CFO Zafar Khan was challenged over the quality of Carillion's record keeping. It's put to him that the Insolvency Service said the company's standard of record keeping was incredibly poor. But Mr Khan says he had no issues with the standard of record keeping.

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Emma Mercer was Carillion's CFO from September 2017 to January 2018. She was asked whether she had encountered an aggressive accounting approach at the company.

Says that when she returned from working in Canada to take up the role of CFO, she found a "slightly more aggressive" trading of contracts than she had seen previously at the firm.

"Let's be clear, the business got itself into this position," says Mr Cochrane.

But he's quickly corrected by Frank Field, who says: "The business didn't; it doesn't have an identity. The directors did."

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Mr Cohcrane has defended the board's actions.

"Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, should the board have been asking further, more probing questions - perhaps. But from our perspective, against the backcloth of the management environment and the information we received, we believed there was no basis at that time for not accepting the views that management put forward," he told MPs.

Mr Cochrane says the company started a review of its contracts in May last year. He says they were aware there were a number of challenging contracts, but were certainly not aware of the "quantum" of such contracts.

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Former executives of Carillion are being quizzed by MPs over the company's collapse

In opening comments, Carillion's former chief executive Keith Cochrane said he was "truly sorry" for the collapse of the company.

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The amount of money spent at UK retailers rose by 0.6% in January from a year earlier amid "a tough trading environment", the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has said.

However, there was a split between sales of food and non-food items, with the former doing better as shoppers focused on buying essentials.

"Rising food prices continued to inflate sales growth and absorb the lion's share of shoppers' squeezed budgets, while sales of non-food items struggled in January," said BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson.

"The going remains bumpy as consumers are still seeing wages fall in real terms," she said. "Although inflation will ease a bit this year these pressures will remain."

Connor Campbell, financial analyst at Spreadex, comments on the market.