Sir Philip Green sold British Home Stores for £1 in 2015; a year later it collapsed with 11,000 jobs lost and a £571 million hole in its pension fund. The saga destroyed the reputation of the man once hailed as the king of the British high street.
Green, who left school at 16 to make his fortune in the London rag trade, built the Arcadia empire, home to Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge, and for a time could do no wrong. In 2005, Arcadia paid a £1.2 billion dividend to his Monaco-based wife Tina, one of the biggest payouts in British corporate history. Prime ministers courted him and supermodels wore his brands.
In March 2015, Green sold BHS, which he had owned since 2000, to Retail Acquisitions, a vehicle led by the former bankrupt Dominic Chappell, for a nominal £1. Eleven months later, BHS collapsed into administration with debts of £1.3 billion, including the £571 million pension deficit. Some 11,000 employees lost their jobs and 20,000 pension fund members faced cuts to their retirement benefits.
A parliamentary inquiry branded Green the 'unacceptable face of capitalism', accusing him of extracting vast dividends while starving the business of investment and then dumping its pension liabilities on an unsuitable buyer. The Pensions Regulator concluded his main motive for the £1 sale had been to avoid the pension deficit. MPs passed a motion calling for him to be stripped of his knighthood, a campaign that only subsided when Green agreed in 2017 to pay £363 million into the BHS pension scheme.
Chappell, who siphoned off millions from BHS before its collapse, was later jailed for six years for tax evasion. Green, meanwhile, faced fresh humiliation in 2018 when he was named in Parliament as the businessman behind a legal injunction suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and racial abuse against Arcadia staff. He denied the allegations.
The final act came in November 2020, when Arcadia itself collapsed into administration with 13,000 jobs at risk, its brands picked over by online rivals. Topshop, once the crown jewel of the British high street, was bought by ASOS. The man who had vowed to steal market share from Marks & Spencer ended his retail career as a symbol of greed, asset-stripping and the death of the high street he once ruled. His Monaco-based fortune remained largely intact, but in Britain his name became shorthand for everything the public had come to resent about the age of the asset-stripper.