The Fall of Britain’s Most Hated Businessman | Investigators

What part are you missing? -Leave! -Wait wait wait. -There is no need for violence. -Just go. We are asking you questions! I thought it was abhorrent that this group of pirates were basically taking advantage of the situation for their personal gain while everything was collapsing around them. Green started calling, being very aggressive and fucking and blinding, saying, "I'll push you out a window," that kind of thing. And that's where the fun and games began. The collapse of BHS was not just the loss of 11,000 jobs. It also triggered one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent years.

Over the years, Sir Philip had paid himself millions of pounds in dividends from BHS. It didn't help him to have been given a new £100m superyacht during this whole thing. So, while he claimed that he couldn't afford to pay pensions, he floated around the Mediterranean on Lionheart. At the center of it all, this man, Sir Philip Green. I'm going to call the police. Sky News chased him down and caught him on a dock somewhere, where there was a confrontation. Why are you on vacation when they think you should solve the pension deficit? You will leave? Why don't you just answer a couple of questions?

Leave! -You have a-- -Get off! It's going to go in the . I'm Oliver Shah and I'm a Sunday Times journalist. I became the paper's retail correspondent in about 2013 or 2014. Philip Green was a key player back then. It's easy to forget now, but he owned a big part of the high street with Arcadia: Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge, BHS. You know,

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of the chains I have from Burton on down have been on the street for 100 years. They are still here. Philip Green was always a fascinating character. He identified early on that making cheap versions of what people wanted was a good way to make money.

So he became, in a way, one of the first people to identify fast fashion in the UK with this store called Bond Street Bandit, which bought cutting-edge items from designer brands. At the time, in the 80s, this was a fairly new idea. You know, it was expensive to go buy these big names. So when I arrived as a retail correspondent, in 2013 or 2014, I made my first call to introduce myself and dialed his number, and he answered immediately. And I said who was he, he would be covering retail. And there was a little pause and he said, "Well, you'd better come see me, right?" And then I went to Berners Street, where Arcadia had its headquarters.

And as a rite of passage, I went to see it and it was decorated, you know, with lots of shiny black surfaces, black and white photographs of Philip Green and Kate Moss posing like a celebrity couple at events. He was quite fatherly and had bright eyes. And we ended the meeting, and he extended his hand and said, “Well, don't forget your Uncle Philip.” And that was my introduction to the world of quid pro quo involving Philip Green. Sir Philip Green, you must have met before. From the beginning, Philip Green and his wife, Tina, showed a taste for celebrities.

They understood that combining celebrity with business was a good way to burnish their own credentials. So Philip Green teamed up with a who's who of the big names of the '90s. Kate Moss was obviously his muse on Top Shop. She has to be sexy. He has to be nervous. You can relate to Kate Moss wearing that. She became a common figure in the front row of fashion shows, hanging out with Anna Wintour. He famously hooked up with Simon Cowell, the creator of X Factor. And he would appear on the red carpet with a whole variety of people, he would throw parties on the ship, he would invite people to spend the weekend on the ship.

And he really liked to organize extravagant parties. So PG50, as his 50th birthday party was called, had Tom Jones playing, had Earth, Wind & Fire, had Rod Stewart. All of this took place in a five-star hotel in Cyprus. I have known Philip, Sir Philip, for a very long time. Can he go wrong? No absolutely not. The less time he spent in the UK, the more time he spent partying in Miami and on the boat in the Mediterranean and around the world. And he increasingly distanced himself from high street trends in the UK. He was always very incredulous of the online phenomenon, he lived off his Nokia phone, he never owned a smartphone, so he really isolated himself from all these changing winds that were starting to reshape the UK.

And I am not a computer man, I am not a man of the Internet, nor of myself, nor of email. I am a man who likes to see people. Felipe Verde. Let's find Philip Green. Describe the brand in Twitter terms. Give us the hashtag. I do not know anything about that. It's not what I do. I have a team that does all that. No, I think we're in pretty good shape. In March 2015, Philip Green suddenly announced the sale of BHS for £1 to a consortium called Retail Acquisitions. And as part of this, this new consortium would take care of the 11,000 employees and 20,000 pensioners.

The pension fund had enormous problems, a big hole. And the chain was losing a lot of money, so you could see it didn't have a bright future. I immediately thought, "Why would this group of people want to take on this enormous burden of responsibilities?" And I looked into who was behind the retail acquisitions and the main character was a guy called Dominic Chappell. The crisis began when Sir Philip sold BHS to Dominic Chappell, a man with no retail experience, in 2015 for just a pound. The more he looked at it, the more he could see that this was going to be a great story.

In reality, he had no business credentials. He had a series of failed companies behind him. He was a former small-time racing driver. So I started researching his background and publishing articles showing that he was a guy with a very checkered history. The story snowballed from there. I looked at Companies House, where you can see someone's background and what they've done before. And there seemed to be a property scheme on the Isle of Wight. So I just opened Google Maps, opened the phone book and started calling some local businesses and cafes and asking who knew him. Someone said at one point, "You should talk to this guy." He was the former harbor captain.

And I got the guy's number and called him. And the first thing he said was, "Dominic Chappell, I wouldn't trust him to direct anything." Through him, I met a lot of other people who had dealt with Chappell, and the whole story came out of how he had borrowed a lot of money at the peak of the real estate boom around 2006, 2007, and had set out to He tried to build these luxury apartments but then he had wasted a lot of money on cars, boats, lifestyle, which turned out to be his modus operandi. Then that first story came out, and that's where my relationship with Philip Green really took a sixpence turn.

Because suddenly he could see that we were going to try to expose the fact that he was selling this company and trying to get rid of obligations to a guy who was a charlatan. For one thing, the rest of the press didn't really follow our stories, and I always thought that would be the case because Green had so many editors on speed dial that he'd be dialing frantically, trying to kill him. And so we continue to produce more and more stories about the antics of Dominic Chappell and these guys who bought the company. How they were doing again the same thing they had done on the Isle of Wight, you know, spending a lot of money on lifestyle, helicopters, boats, cars.

This was a company that was losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year and had many minimum wage employees. I thought it was abhorrent that this group of pirates were basically taking advantage of the situation for their personal gain while everything was collapsing around them. Former BHS owner Philip Green must now answer questions in Parliament about its management and profit-making while he was in charge. At some point in the select committee, he read a pre-prepared statement, which I found surprising. I wrote something down in my notebook because I thought I might forget it. So I... You know, whether it's right or wrong, and I thought about whether or not I should say it, but I'm going to do it.

He said: “My doctor has told me that envy and jealousy are incurable diseases. "I haven't done anything wrong." Well, the big question for Sir Philip Green is: will he return the profits he made from British Home Stores to the pension fund to help make up for some of the short

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s so these 11,000 workers can receive more of their pension? I'm going to call the police if you don't leave. Sir Philip, people want to know why you are on holiday when you think you are supposed to fix the pensions deficit. You will leave? Why don't you just answer a couple of questions?

Leave! -Do you have a message for them? -What part are you not understanding? -Leave! -Wait wait wait. -There is no need for violence. -Just go. We are asking you questions! That will go in the . Lower! Finally, in 2017, after virtually destroying his reputation, he paid al

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£400m to settle the pensions scandal. And that drew a line, to some extent, under the whole thing. And things were quiet for a while, but then you still had Topshop and Arcadia. And I suspected it would end up being a similar story again with BHS, as he had received huge dividends from BHS, huge dividends from Arcadia, famously £1.2bn tax-free to his wife, Tina, in Monaco from Arcadia .

And Arcadia finally went under during the COVID pandemic, and that was really the end for Philip Green as any kind of force on the high street. So, over the course of a few years, I put together all my reporting from The Sunday Times and various interviews and investigations that I did and wrote the book in 2018. And the book really summed up the whole scandal, so the BHS issue, the Troubles with Arcadia, the lifestyle, the behavior over the years. He would call me over and over again and some days he would say, "No one is going to read this fucking stupid book." And he offered me money not to write it.

He said: “Be a sensible person. I will donate the equivalent sum to a charity. If you stop writing it, we will all forget it. Otherwise, they will sue you.” Just as the book was coming out, The Telegraph produced a very in-depth investigation detailing how several staff had received huge settlements and signed confidentiality agreements to avoid discussing allegations of racial abuse and inappropriate sexual comments. And since then, Green has seen his reputation largely destroyed and he's become somewhat of a recluse and basically, as far as we know, he lives in Monaco and spends a lot more time on the ship.