'Sir' Phillip Green making a fortune while BHS workers worry about their jobs

[Gingermum]

There he was, all tanned and lardy while the papers announced he had sold BHS for £1 and personally stood to make £400 million while others, afflicted with a conscience were trying to save the jobs of the staff. Apparently a Tory MP has asked for an 'urgent enquiry' because Green is the 'unacceptable face of capitalism.' A bit like all the 'urgent enquiries' into the atrocious greed shown by the Banks and the City, the actual cause of our current austerity slough.

He took over the firm when it was stable and doing well, has milked it and now, with it in liquidation and a large pension gap of £571 million, he buggers off to sit on his yacht with his 'good friend Kate Moss'. having personally profited by approximately £400 million. Ladies and gentlemen - this is the kind of person the Tory party protects.

Psychopaths are over represented in positions of power, I don't know Mr Green or his personality type, just stating stats.

He is a disgusting parasite. End of. Greedy and grasping fat bastard.

He is also a tax exile. A cunt of the highest order, IMO.

Technically, it's his wife, who is a Monaco resident, who is a tax exile - PG takes a relatively low salary and pays huge dividends to her.

It looks as if he might get his come-uppance - that £400 million he took out of the company has left a very nasty hole in the pension fund and the insurers will not fill it without exploring all their options. There are going to be some tricky questions to answer and he has already offered £80 million as a pre-emptive move which suggests he must feel he holds some responsibility for the pension gap. If he has raided the piggy bank, then it shows utterly cynical and sickening business practices.

He needs to lose his knighthood as a matter of urgency.

He's already under scrutiny for refusing to pay any Arcadia staff the living wage. And his dubious internships. He should be strung up.

Arcadia *cleaning staff! Not all staff.

It's terrible.

Pension pots need to be more strictly protected, but it probably suits the Government to keep them shaky so people continue to invest in property and stoop house prices from falling,

What a cesspit we live in.

He was always a grasping avaricious twat. Nobody from any governing party has ever robustly challenged him. He does what he wants.

Models etc only hang out with him because he's rich. Pathetic.

If having fortunes like his means playing dirty and screwing people over. I think I would rather be poor. I do not know how some people have no conscience.

Kate Moss should be ashamed of herself, shagging that callous bastard - if he wasn't filthy rich, she wouldn't look at him

Bigchoc
Shagging??! Surely he only paid her money to be photographed coming out of elite nightspots together. No shagging surely.

Yes agree. That 100 million yacht thingy will have to go back.
And he will have a terrible time with the MPs...the horror a slap on the wrist (should be prison if true). He lives in Monaco so I doubt he has any idea of the goings on here.
Top shop has rather gone down hill of late so maybe that will be the next causality.

You can't take money out of the pension pot! So wherever he took the £400 million, it wasn't from there...

Cocktail - I thought that as well but the pension fund was in surplus when he took over the company and it is now between £300 and £570 million in the red depending on whose report you read. Something has gone badly wrong with it while he was in charge (and raking away anything he could). I believed that, post-Maxwell, pension pots were ringfenced - could it be the missing money didn't get to the pension fund in the first place? I am puzzled and the fact that PG has offered £80 million does imply some shenanigans.

It is pretty much the same as happened to MG Rover when the Phoenix consortium took it over.. cheep buyout then liquidation a short while after.

The same happened to another big retail group, (Phones 4U?). Taken over by a finance group who fleeced the business whilst paying themselves huge salaries and putting their staff on thr dole.

I would like to see some form of lifting the veil and going after the personal wealth of directors in such cases. Make it very clear that stitchg up the workforce will result in personal bankruptcy for the directors. It would take some careful working out to sort genuine cases from the likes of Green... but it would be very wirthwhile.

The £400M was dividends taken from BHS when it was profitable. None of it came from the pension fund. The main reason for the pension fund's difficulties is the financial crash in 2008.

When Green sold BHS for £1 he effectively gave it a dowry of £400M in the form of write offs, etc. He has reportedly offered £80M towards the pension fund but the regulator may go after him for more, possibly up to £280M using their anti-avoidance powers.

The evil Philip Green is the man who gave the thick end of £500,000 to the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital.

Which while a very generous donation and not something he was obliged to give, was worth at least that to him in PR terms. I wonder how many hospital departments could have been funded during the years he was avoiding tax by channelling vast dividends through his family who are residents of Monaco.

Clearly people are free to spend their money as they wish but that charitable donations does rather pale into insignificance when compared to the £3 million and £50 million (I double checked the reports because I couldn't quite believe the figures) he spent on his 60th and 50th birthday parties.

All that spending provides jobs.

While he didn't come from poverty he has built up his fortune by his own risk taking. BHS provided a lot of work in the 15 years he owned it. But like many other businesses it didn't keep up with the trends so it has died.

If you want to criticise tax schemes then criticise the MPs who over the years have complicated the tax system beyond all understanding, shown a tendency to bitch and moan in committees, while not actually doing anything to fix the tax system.

Well the charitable donation to the Marsden would have meant a sizeable tax dodge somewhere.

Part of the reason that BHS didn't keep up with trends is that a business needs investment to do that - both financial and I'm terms of vision. It is very obvious that PG provided neither and was much more interested in taking what he could from the business (although he seems not to have asset-strippedq hire as egregiously as David Chappell).

Yes, of course MPs are responsible for setting the principles of the tax system but that doesn't mean that it's ok to avoid tax in quite as wanton a manner as PG has done/continues to do. I'll say again, he's not offeringto pay back £80 million to the BHS pension pot because he's a diamond geezer.