Sir Philip Green, the former billionaire owner of the Topshop empire, was named in the House of Lords as the businessman at the centre of a scandal over the use of non-disclosure agreements to suppress allegations of bullying, sexual harassment and racial abuse of staff.
The naming came after an eight-month investigation by The Daily Telegraph, which had been prevented from publishing details about the businessman by an injunction. Green had spent a reported £500,000 on seven lawyers and a series of non-disclosure agreements to keep the allegations secret. No publication could name him or his companies in connection with the scandal, nor report what he was accused of doing or how much he had paid alleged victims to sign the NDAs.
The dam broke when the Labour peer Lord Peter Hain used parliamentary privilege, which protects MPs and peers from defamation claims for statements made in Parliament, to name Green in the House of Lords. The MP Jess Phillips had previously threatened to name the businessman in the Commons but said she would only do so with the agreement of the alleged victims.
Green had long been one of the most flamboyant figures in British business, famous for lavish birthday parties attended by celebrities from Kate Moss to Gwyneth Paltrow, and for ruling his Arcadia retail empire, which included Topshop, with an iron fist. But his reputation had already been badly damaged by the collapse of BHS, the department store chain he sold for £1 to the former racing driver Dominic Chappell. The sale left a pension black hole of around half a billion pounds, and a parliamentary inquiry concluded that Green had extracted vast sums from the company while leaving its pensioners exposed.
The NDA revelations added a further layer to his downfall. Campaigners argued that the case exposed how wealthy individuals could use libel law and secret settlements to suppress allegations of serious misconduct, and it fuelled calls for reform of the use of non-disclosure agreements in cases involving harassment and discrimination. The Solicitors Regulation Authority later warned lawyers against using NDAs to conceal wrongdoing.
Green denied the allegations of unlawful behaviour. But the naming marked the end of his standing in British public life: his knighthood, awarded in 2006 for services to retail, became the subject of repeated calls for forfeiture, and Arcadia itself collapsed into administration in 2020, with its brands sold off and thousands of jobs lost.
The episode remains one of the defining British business scandals of the late 2010s, a case study in how the combination of parliamentary privilege, investigative journalism and the MeToo movement could pierce even the most expensive legal armour.