Simon Cowell insists he has never fallen out with Little Mix despite the band splitting from his record company.
It emerged last week that the four-piece girl group were leaving the music mogul’s Syco label after Cowell said he would no longer work with their management group.
Cowell has now said he did not fall out with Little Mix and told The Sun newspaper he will meet the band this week “just so they can hear it from me and I can hear it from them”.
He said: “Everyone’s like, ‘There must have been something massive and that’s why it collapsed’. Well, I can show you all the correspondence between me and the girls over the years, there’s never been an instance when we’ve fallen out.
“As I said in my email to them, I stand by the fact they are the hardest working bunch of girls I’ve ever worked with. They deserve everything they’ve got.”
Cowell added: “The only reason I got annoyed was that it’s easy to paint this picture of Syco as this dark, awful place where all we’re trying to do is rip artists off and make them unhappy.”
In the same interview, X Factor boss Cowell also discussed his relationship with Sir Philip Green, who was named in Parliament as the businessman at the centre of #MeToo allegations of sexual harassment and racial abuse.
Sir Philip denies the allegations. The Topshop boss owned a stake in Cowell’s business but it was last week reported he had agreed to walk away after Cowell made a bid to buy him out.
Cowell said it did not come down to money.
He told the paper: “He was part of the company but three years ago we just stopped talking.
“When it came to severing the ties, I wasn’t arguing about the money. You simply make a decision of who you want in your life and your business and it was my decision.”
Cowell, 59, told the newspaper he had started to put his principles before profits and was already looking forward to the future and being able to hand his business over to four-year-old son Eric.