The Fall of Britain’s Most Hated Businessman | Investigators

Which bit are you not understanding? -Go away! -Hang on, hang on, hang on. -There’s no need for any violence. -Just go away. We’re asking you questions! I thought it was abhorrent that this bunch of pirates, basically, were milking it for their own personal gain while the whole thing collapsed around them. Green started ringing up, being very aggressive, effing and blinding, saying, “I’ll push you through a window,” this kind of stuff. And that’s where the fun and games began. The collapse of BH

S wasn’t 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 that he took delivery of a new £100 million super yacht during this whole thing. So while pleading that he couldn't afford to pay off the pensions, he was floating around the Med on Lionheart. At the center of it all, this man, Sir Philip Green. I'm going to call the police. Sky New

s pursued him and caught him on some dockside somewhere, where there was a confrontation. Why are you on holiday when they think that you’re supposed to be sorting out the pension deficit? Will you go away? Why won’t you just answer a couple of questions? Go away! -Have you got a-- -Get off! It’s going to go in the [beep]. [INVESTIGATORS] I’m Oliver Shah, and I’m a journalist at The Sunday Times. 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 huge chunk of the high street with Arcadia: Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge, BHS. You know, most of the chains I own from Burton down have been in the high street for 100 years. They’re still here. Philip Green was always a fascinating character. He identified quite early on doing cheap versions of what people wanted was a good way of making cash. So he became, in some ways, one of the first people to identify fast fashion in the UK with thi

s store called Bond Street Bandit, which was buying end of line stuff from designer brands. At the time, in the 80s, this was quite a new idea. You know, it was expensive to go and buy these big names. So when I arrived as retail correspondent, 2013 or 2014, I made my first call to him to introduce myself and dialed his number, and he answered straight away. And I said who I was, I’d be covering retail. And there was a slight pause, and he said, “Well, you better come and see me, hadn’t you?” An

d so I went along to Berners Street, where he had Arcadia’s HQ. And a bit of a rite of passage, went up to see him, and it was decorated, you know, lots of shiny black surfaces, black and white pictures of Philip Green and Kate Moss posing like a celebrity couple at events. He was quite avuncular, twinkly-eyed. And we finished the meeting, and he held his hand out, and he said, “Right, don’t forget your Uncle Philip.” And that was my introduction to the world of quid pro quo that was dealing wit

h Philip Green. Sir Philip Green, you will have met before. From the early days, Philip Green and his wife, Tina, showed a liking for celebrity. They understood that blending together celebrity with business was quite a good way of burnishing their own credentials. So Philip Green associated himself with a who’s who of big names of the noughties. Kate Moss obviously was his muse at Top Shop. It’s got to be sexy. It’s got to be edgy. You can relate to Kate Moss wearing that. He became a common si

ght at the front row of catwalk shows, hanging out with Anna Wintour. Famously, he attached himself to Simon Cowell, the X Factor creator. And he would appear on the red carpet with a whole range of people, throw parties on the boat, invite people to spend the weekend on the boat. And he was very fond of throwing extravagant parties. So PG50, as his 50th birthday was called, he had Tom Jones playing, he had Earth, Wind & Fire, he had Rod Stewart. This was all hosted on a five-star hotel in Cypru

s. I’ve known Philip, Sir Philip for a very, 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 Med and around the world. And he became more distanced from high street trends in the UK. He was always very unbelieving of the online phenomenon, famously lived off his Nokia brick phone, never got a smartphone, so really sort of insulated himself from all these changing winds that were starting to res

hape the UK. And I'm not a computer man, I’m not an internet man, myself, or email man. I'm a man who likes to see people. Philip Green. Let’s get Philip Green. Describe the brand in Twitter terms. Give us the hashtag. I don’t know about all of that. It’s not what I do. I’ve got a team that do all of that. No, I think we're in pretty good shape. So March 2015, Philip Green suddenly announced the sale of BHS for a pound to a consortium called Retail Acquisitions. And as part of that, this new con

sortium would take on the 11,000 staff, 20,000 pensioners. The pension fund had huge problems, a big hole in it. And the chain was losing loads of money, so you could see it didn’t have a bright future. Straight away, I thought, “Why on Earth would this group of people want to take on this huge load of liabilities?” And I looked into who was behind 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 w

ith no retail experience, in 2015 for just one pound. The more I looked into him, the more I could see this was going to be a big story. He had no business credentials, really. He had a string of failed companies behind him. He was a former racing driver, small time. So I started investigating his background and running articles showing that he was a guy with a very checkered history. The story snowballed from there. I searched on 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 very simply got Google Maps up and got the phone directory up and started calling a few local businesses and cafes and asking about who knew him. Someone said at one point, “You should speak to this guy.” He was the old harbor master. 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 run anything.” Through him, I met a lot of other peo

ple who’d dealt with Chappell, and the whole story came out about how he’d borrowed a load of money at the peak of the property boom around 2006, 2007, had set out trying to build these luxury flats but had then squandered a load of money on cars, boats, lifestyle, which turned out to be his modus operandi. So that first story came out, and that’s where my relationship with Philip Green really turned on a sixpence. Because suddenly he could see we were going to try and expose the fact that he wa

s selling this company and trying to get rid of the liabilities to a guy who was a charlatan. To begin with, 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 would be frantically dialing around, trying to kill it. And so we kept on producing more and more stories about the antics of Dominic Chappell and these guys who bought the company. How they were doing the same thing again they’d done

in the Isle of Wight, you know, spending a load of money on lifestyle, helicopters, boats, cars. This was a company that was losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year and had lots of employees on minimum wage. I thought it was abhorrent that this bunch of pirates, basically, were milking it for their own personal gain while the whole thing collapsed around them. Former BHS owner Philip Green, must now answer questions in Parliament about his management and profit-taking while in charge. At so

me point in the select committee, he read out a pre-prepared statement, which I found astonishing. I wrote down something on my pad because I thought I might forget it. So I’m-- You know, whether it’s right or wrong, and I thought about should I, should I not say it, but I’m going to. He said, “My doctor has told me that envy and jealousy are incurable diseases. I’ve done nothing wrong.” Well, the big question for Sir Philip Green is: Will he pay back the profit that he made out of British Home

Stores into the pension fund to help offset some of the deficits so that these 11,000 workers can get more of their pension? I’m going to call the police if you don’t go away. Sir Philip, people want to know why you’re on holiday when they think that you’re supposed to be sorting out the pension deficit. Will you go away? Why won’t you just answer a couple of questions? Go away! -Have you got a message for them? -Which bit are you not understanding? -Go away! -Hang on, hang on, hang on. -There’s

no need for any violence. -Just go away. We’re asking you questions! That’s going to go in the [beep]. [Arguing] Get off! Eventually, in 2017, after he pretty much destroyed his reputation, he paid almost £400 million to settle the pension scandal. And that drew a line, to a degree, under the whole thing. And things went quiet for a while, but then he still had Topshop and Arcadia. And I did suspect it would end up being a similar story again with BHS, as in he’d taken huge dividends out of BHS

, huge dividends out of Arcadia, famously £1.2 billion 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 pulled together all my reporting from The Sunday Times and various interviews and research I’ve done and did the book in 2018. And the book really summarized the whole scandal, so the BHS issue, the problems with

Arcadia, the lifestyle, the behavior over the years. He would ring me again and again, and some days he would say, “No one’s going to read this effing stupid book.” And he offered me money not to write it. He said, “Be a sensible fellow. I’ll donate the equivalent sum to a charity. You stop writing it, and we’ll all forget about it. Otherwise, you’ll get sued.” Just as the book was coming out, The Telegraph produced a very in-depth investigation detailing how several staff had been paid big set

tlements and had signed NDAs to avoid talking about allegations of racial abuse, inappropriate sexual comments. And since then, Green has seen his reputation largely destroyed and has become something of a recluse, and basically, as far as we know, lives in Monaco and spends a lot more time on the boat.