Sir Philip Green became the face of one of Britain's most notorious corporate collapses when BHS, the department store chain he sold for £1 in 2015, went into administration a year later with debts of £1.3 billion, a pension deficit of £571 million and 11,000 jobs at stake.
Green, once celebrated as the king of the high street, had owned BHS for 15 years through his Arcadia empire, which also included Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge. In 2005 Arcadia paid a dividend of about £1.2 billion to the family's Taveta vehicle, a payment that later became central to criticism of how money had been taken out of the businesses.
The buyer in 2015 was Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt with no retail experience, whose Retail Acquisitions vehicle took control for a nominal pound. Parliamentary committees from both the work and pensions and business briefs investigated the collapse and concluded that greed and disregard for corporate governance had led to BHS's demise, calling it the unacceptable face of capitalism. The committees said Green, Chappell, directors and advisers had all done well from the story, while employees and pensioners lost.
Green was grilled by MPs in a televised hearing, promised to sort the pension problem, and in 2017 agreed to pay £363 million into the BHS pension scheme under a settlement with the Pensions Regulator — a deal the regulator described as a strong outcome for members, and which gave pensioners a better result than the Pension Protection Fund would have done.
The story did not end there. Arcadia itself collapsed into administration in 2020 as the high street shifted online and the pandemic closed stores, putting more than 10,000 further jobs at risk. Its brands were sold off, with Topshop eventually moving into new ownership structures involving online retailer ASOS and other investors.
There were also calls for Green to be stripped of the knighthood he received in 2006 for services to retail, and later reporting about non-disclosure agreements and allegations about his behaviour towards staff further damaged what remained of his reputation. Green has largely withdrawn from public life in Britain since.
A decade on, BHS remains the case study reached for whenever British business debates short-term extraction versus long-term stewardship. A famous name, a £1 sale, a pension fund left short and a billionaire paying hundreds of millions to settle the argument: the ingredients still define how the public judges the era of buccaneering retail capitalism.