Sir Philip Green (born 15
March 1952) is a British
billionaire
businessman who owns some of the United Kingdom's largest retailers, including the Arcadia Group. He is Britain
's ninth richest person with assets worth around
£4.43bn in 2008. He owns 2300 shops in the UK and his
assets currently control 12% of the UK clothing retail market,
making his empire the second-largest in the sector. The
leader,
Marks and Spencer, has
been the target of three unsuccessful takeover bids from
Green.
He is also the co-owner of media company
Greenwell Entertainment, a coalition
with music mogul
Simon Cowell.
Biography
Philip
Green was born into a Jewish family on 14
March 1952 in Croydon
, in South
London, and has a sister, Elizabeth, five years his senior.
The family
moved to Hampstead
Garden Suburb
, a middle-class enclave in north London, and at the
age of nine he was sent to the now-closed Jewish boarding school
Carmel
College
in Oxfordshire.
When his father died of a heart attack, Philip was in line to
inherit the family business at the age of twelve. After leaving
boarding school at 15, he worked for a shoe importer before
travelling to the US, Europe and the Far East. It was on his return
that he set up his first business with a £20,000 loan, importing
jeans from the Far East to sell on to retailers in London.
In 1979, Green bought up the entire stock of ten designer label
clothes sellers who had gone into receivership for extremely low
prices. He then had the newly-bought clothes sent to the dry
cleaners, got them put on hangers, wrapped them in polythene to
make them look new, and then bought a place to sell them to the
public.
Amber Day
In 1988, he became Chairman and Chief Executive of a quoted company
called "Amber Day", a discount retailer. The shares performed well,
but then suffered a series of profit downgrades; in 1992 he was
forced to resign by the company's leading institutional
shareholders. He has not led a quoted company since. Ever since, he
has relied upon a close group of like-minded entrepreneurs,
including
Tom Hunter (a sports shoe
millionaire and one of the richest men in Scotland) and the
Barclay brothers, to
help fund his buccaneering forays into the UK's
High Streets.
1990s
In the early 1990s Green bought the department store chain
Owen Owen which at the time had about 12 branches
trading under the Owen Owen and
Lewis's
brand names.
During his ownership most of these department
stores were sold to other operators including Debenhams and Allders
or were
closed leaving only the Liverpool branch trading as Lewis's
remaining. In 2004 this remaining store was sold off to
David Thompson.
In 1995 he linked with Tom Hunter to buy sports retailer Olympus as
part of a merger. The price was £1, plus the assumption of £30
million in debt. Green and his partners sold the company three
years later to
JJB Sports for £550
million. Green walked away £73 million richer. That encouraged the
Barclay brothers to back him in the £538m acquisition of the Sears
retail chain (a different Sears from
Sears, Roebuck and Company) in
1999. The subsequent disposal programme (including selling some of
the assets, ironically, to Arcadia) raised £729m and confirmed his
reputation as a man who could deliver within the retail
sector.
BHS, Arcadia, Topshop
Green came to public attention in 1999 when he attempted to make a
£9 billion hostile bid for
Marks and
Spencer. However the leaking of the bid forced up M&S's
share price. The board of M&S were also hostile to the bid and
sought to block it. Eventually Green gave up and purchased the
ailing retail chain
British Home Stores for £200
million. His takeover came when everyone else had dismissed the
company as a failing brand and unfixable. Green put up £50 million
of his own money and borrowed another £150 million to seal the
deal. Green completely turned the company around, rebranded it as
BHS, and the chain is now thought to be worth
over £1.2 billion. Since he took over, profits have tripled to over
£200 million a year.
Next, Green purchased the
Arcadia
Group, which owns well-known High Street chains such as
Burton,
Dorothy Perkins,
Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit,
Topshop/
Topman and
Wallis in 2002. Recently he has
added the Etam chain to the group. Green paid £850m, and repaid the
£808m he borrowed to finance the deal in two years, a move that
stunned commentators when it was announced. The
Arcadia Group has been enormously profitable,
and currently has pre-tax profits of around £380 million.
When
The Guardian newspaper investigated a proposed
takeover of
Safeway in 2003, Green
responded to queries about Arcadia's accounts by insulting and
swearing at the journalists.
On 20 October 2005 Green awarded Arcadia shareholders a £1.3
billion dividend. He and his wife are joint owners of 92% of the
group, and therefore received £1.17bn - the largest payout to an
individual in British corporate history.
Other activities
Green has
pumped more than £6m into education, of which the bulk has gone
into The Fashion Retail Academy, a form of specially-funded
further education establishment in
the United
Kingdom, for which he is the major sponsor. It now
has over 200 students. Green is a generous supporter of the
industry charity
Retail Trust.Green was
knighted on 17 June 2006.
In May
2007 after the disappearance of Madeleine
McCann in Portugal
, Green
donated £250,000 as a monetary reward for any useful public
information. He also provided the McCanns with the use of
his private jet to allow them to fly to Rome
for a
Papal visit and back in time to put their twins
to bed. Green intends to increase the reward money to £1
million for the safe return of Madeleine.
He was reportedly the BBC's first choice to front the UK franchise
of
The
Apprentice, however during that period in 2004, he was
busy with Arcadia's attempted takeover of Marks and Spencer.
Personal life
A UK
resident, Green is based during the week at a London hotel,
spending the weekends with his South
African wife Christina and their children Chloe and Brandon in
an apartment in Monaco
.
Green
plays tennis with Prince Albert
of Monaco and counts as his friends, David and Simon Reuben, Lord Hanson, Philip
Colbert, Tom Hunter, Mohamed al-Fayed of Harrods
, Bill Kenwright,
David Goodman, Simon Cowell, Michael
Winner and the Indian tycoon Vijay
Mallya.
Among Green's more extravagant items are a 208ft/£32 million
Benetti yacht
Lionheart and a £20
million
Gulfstream G550 private
jet . For his birthday, his wife bought him a solid gold
Monopoly set, featuring his very own
acquisitions.
Green has been described as "flash".
For his son's
Bar Mitzvah in 2005, he spent £4 million
on a three-day event for over 200 friends and family in the
French
Riviera
. He also hired
Andrea Bocelli and
Destiny's Child to perform.
For his 50th birthday
he flew 200 guests in a chartered Boeing
747 to a hotel in Cyprus
for a
three-day toga party, where they were serenaded by Tom Jones and Rod
Stewart, who was reportedly paid £750,000 for a 45-minute
set. For his 55th birthday he flew 100 guests
8,500 miles in two private jets from London
Stansted Airport
. They arrived at the exclusive Maldives
resort of Four Seasons: Landaagiraavaru, an eco-spa
on a private Indian
Ocean
island.
His business hero is the late
Sir Charles
Clore, who built the Sears Plc UK retail empire from next to
nothing in the 1950s and 1960s.
Football involvement
He is a keen football fan and is a
Tottenham Hotspur supporter. He is heavily
involved with
Everton Football Club due
to his friendship with chairman Bill Kenwright, but has no
intention of formally investing in the club. He arranged for
another friend, Planet Hollywood's owner
Robert Earle to purchase shares
from former director
Paul Gregg during a
struggle for control of Everton in 2004.
He offers business
advice to the club alongside Tesco
CEO Terry Leahy and helps negotiates player transfer
fees with agents.
Criticism
Tax avoidance
Taveta Investments, the company used to acquire Arcadia in 2002, is
in the name of Green's wife, a Monaco resident, avoiding millions
of pounds in tax that would be payable if a UK resident owned the
company. When Green paid his family £1.2bn in 2005, it was paid for
by a loan taken out by Arcadia, cutting Arcadia's corporation tax
as interest charges on the loan were offset against profits. In
comparison, staff at Arcadia were told in 2005 that members of its
final salary pension scheme must increase contributions by half and
work five years longer to qualify for the same payout.
Asset stripping
There have also been accusations that Philip Green is an
asset-stripper as seen with his experiences
with
Owen Owen and the purchase of the UK
arm of
Etam which have seen a wide sell-off
of stores. Philip Green denies this accusation.
Worker rights
Arcadia has been criticised for the pay and conditions of both
overseas and UK workers by anti-
sweatshop
groups such as
Labour behind the
Label,
No Sweat and the student
activist network
People &
Planet.
References
-
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/2499137/Cowell-to-Phil-his-boots-in-TV-deal.html
-
http://www.retail-week.com/retail-trust-raises-over-1631m/1975420.article
- Harry Potter Author Adds To Reward |Sky
News|MADELEINE
- Finding
Madeleine
- The Apprentice is to real business what Monopoly is
to property - Telegraph
- Profile: Philip Green: The fastest billionaire is
on his Marks - Times Online
- Philip Green's Lionheart Yacht - Luxist
- BBC NEWS | UK | Billionaire hires Destiny's Child
- Pack your shorts, it's time for Sir Philip Green's
birthday party | Business | The Guardian
- Entrepreneurs - Times Online
- Peston, Robert Who Runs Britain pp.97-98
- Spotlight: Day in the life of a deal maker -
International Herald Tribune
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