 Tlo what's poppin? We are on twitch We're not live, but you can leave a like comment subscribe turn on your post notification bells Let's continue to grow the family from Chicago to the UK don't forget if We do a lot of you happen to miss it. This is where you can catch the highlights right behind me We do got merch appreciate everybody who bought some and we also got a patreon where we post Monday through Friday Today is Fresh meat you can catch that link underneath the in the description Just hit more and then click link tree and then all of that stuff will come up But this is from vice the fall of Britain's most hated businessman. I think I heard of him before But let's get into what vice be talking about man I thought it was abhorren that this bunch of pirates basically were milking it for their own personal gain while the whole thing collapsed around them Green started ringing out being very aggressive effing and blinding say I'll push you through a window this kind of stuff And that's where the the fun and games began The collapse of BHS wasn't just the loss of 11,000 jobs It also triggered one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent years Over the years so Philip had paid himself millions of pounds in dividends from BHS I didn't help him that he took delivery when you have so many BHS type stores in America Especially like in big cities, Florida Especially in Florida because Florida it Floridians kind of cheap even though they look like they rich they be cheap You 100 million pounds super yacht during this whole thing So while pleading that you couldn't afford to pay off the pensions he was floating around the med online heart At the center of it all this man, Sir Philip Green Sky News Pursued him and caught him on some dock side somewhere where there's a confrontation Why are you on holiday when they think that you're supposed to be sorting out the pension deficit go away? Why won't you just answer a couple of questions? I'm Oliver Shaw and I'm a journalist at the Sunday Times Science guy. That's Bill Naomi. I became the paper's retail correspondent in about 2013 or 2014 Philip Green was a key player back then it's easy to forget now But he owned a huge chunk of the high street with Arcadia top shop Dorothy Perkins miss Selfridge BHS, you know, most of the chains I own from Burton down. They've been in the high street for a hundred years. They're still here Philip Green was always a fascinating character He identified quite early on doing being cheap versions of what people wanted was a good way of making cash So he became in some ways one of the first people to identify fast fashion in the UK with this store called Bond Street Bandit And which was buying, you know end of line stuff from designer brands at the time in the 80s This was quite a new idea, you know, it was expensive to go and buy these big names So when I arrived as retail correspondent 2013 or 2014 I made my first call to him to introduce myself and Mia dialed his number and he answered straight away And I said who I was I'd be covering retail and there was a slight pause and he said well You better come and see me and you and so I went along to Burners Street where he had Arcadia's HQ and And then a bit of a rite of passage went up to see him and So this guy was like the godfather of knockoff not even knockoff like like a end of like marshals Well, you know, you gotta got marshals out there Or they buy the end of sale end of season stuff and they sell it for super cheap He was like the starter the godfather of that the starter Created lots of shiny black surfaces a black and white picture of Philip Green and Kate Moss Posing like a celebrity couple of events He was quite a vuncular twinkly eyed and we finished the meeting and he said he held his hand out He said Ryan don't feel your uncle Philip and that was my introduction to the world of Quid pro quo that was dealing with Philip green From the early days Philip green and his have this much plug he met the Queen and everything Oh Wife Tina showed a liking for celebrity They understood that blending together celebrity with business Was quite a good way of burnishing their own credentials So Philip Green associated himself with a who's who of big names of the noughties Kate Moss obviously was his muse at top shop. It's got to be sexy. It's got to be edgy. You can relate to Kate Moss wearing that he became a common sight at the front row of catwalk shows hanging out with Anna winter famously he attached. Oh, there's so many stores like this. There's a Charlotte LaRuce or whatever All dots like all of these stores that are similar to this Himself to Simon Cowell the X Factor creator And he would appear on the red carpet with the whole range of people throw parties on the boat Invite people to spend the weekend on the boat and He was very fond of throwing extravagant parties. So PG 50 as his 50th birthday was called. He had Tom Jones playing. He had earth wind and fire. He had Rod Stewart This was all hosted on a five-star hotel in Cyprus I've known Philip for a sir Philip for a very very long time. Can he go wrong? No, absolutely not less time Spent in the UK the more time he spent party in Miami and on the boat. That statement did not age well, apparently in the med and around the world and He became more distance from, you know high street trends in the UK He was always very unbelieving of the online phenomenon famously lived off his Nokia brick phone never got a smartphone So really sort of insulated himself from all these changing winds that were starting to reshape the UK That's sometimes what you got to do and like and when you're trying to make your own lane low-key You got to insulate yourself like like doing reactions I don't watch really nobody else's reactions because I don't want to you know fall into the same, you know, I'm saying Tumbler is them all, you know, I'm saying but it makes sense business wise I'm not an internet man myself or email man. I'm a man likes to see people Philip green Let's get Philip green Describe the brand in Twitter terms. It's the hashtag. I don't know about all of that. It's not what I do I've got a team that do all of that No, I think we're in pretty good shape. So March 2015 Philip green suddenly announced the sale of BHS for a pound to a consortium called retail acquisitions and as part of that This new consortium would take on the 11,000 staff 20,000 pensioners The pension fund had huge problems a big hole in it and the chain was losing loads of money So you could see it didn't have a bright future straight away I thought you know why on earth with this group of people want to take on this huge little liabilities I looked into who is behind retail acquisitions and the main character was a guy called Dominic Chappelle The crisis began when Sir Philip sold BHS to Dominic Chappelle a man with no retail experience in 2015 for just one pound The more I looked into him the more I can see this is going to be a big story. He had no business credentials really He had a string of failed companies behind him He was a former racing driver small time So I started investigating his background no lie. He looked like a failure. He looked like a fall guy That's what that looked like like like a you you the goofy that bought it for a dollar and had to put millions of dollars Into it and people was gonna get mad at you that guy the running articles showing that he was a guy with a very checkered history the story snowball from there I Searched on company's house where you can see some of the background and what they've done before And there seemed to be a property scheme on the Isle of Wight so I just Very simply got Google Maps up and got the phone directory up and started calling a few Local businesses and cafes and asking about who knew it Someone said at one point you should speak to this guy. He was the old harbour master I got the guy's number called him and then the first thing he said was Dominic Chappelle I wouldn't trust him to run anything Through him I met a lot of other people who'd dealt with Chappelle and the whole story came out about how he'd borrowed a lot of money the peak of the property boom around 2006-2007 Had set out trying to build these luxury flats, but it then squandered a load of money on cars boats Lifestyle, which turned out to be his modus operandi. So he got to capping. He told he told people he was gonna invest their money But got to capping He looked like a slime ball to all these people look like slime balls No, so that first story came out and that's where my relationship with Philip Green really turned on a sixpence because suddenly he could see We were going to try and expose the fact that he was selling this company and trying to get rid of the liabilities to a guy who was a charlatan To begin with the rest of the press didn't really follow our stories And I I always thought that would be the case because Green had so many editors on speed dial that he would be frantically Dily around trying to kill it So we kept on producing more and more stories about the antics of Dominic Chappelle and these guys who bought the company How they were doing the same thing again They done in the Isle of Wye, you know spending a load of money on lifestyle Helicopters boats cars. This is a company that was losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year Had lots of employees on minimum wage I thought it was abhorrent that this bunch of pirates basically were milking it for their own personal gain while the whole thing Collapsed around them former VHS owner Philip Green must now answer questions in Parliament about his management and profit taking while in charge At some point in the select committee who went out a pre-prepared statement, which I found astonishing Did you know you can increase your revenue with Snapchat ads? Just ask Manscaped He said my doctor has told me that envy and jealousy are incurable diseases I've done nothing wrong. Well the big question for so guilty. You're guilty But people come out and say that at right off tap. You're guilty Philip Green is Will he pay back the profit that he made out of British home stores into the pension fund To help offset some of the deficits so these 11,000 workers can get more of their pension No So Philip people want to know Why you're on holiday when they think that you're no he rich he got all white socks with black shoes just not just never cared Supposed to be sorting out the pension deficit go away. Why won't you just answer a couple of questions away? Have you got a message for you? We're asking you questions That's gonna go in the Eventually in 2017 after he pretty much Destroyed his reputation. Let's get negative paid almost 400 million pounds to settle the pension scandal and that That drew a line into the oh he paid. They must have been on his ASS They had to be Agree under the whole thing And things went quiet for a while, but then he still had Topshop and Arcadia And I did suspect it would end up being a similar story again with BHS as in he'd taken a huge dividends out of BHS Huge dividends out of Arcadia famously 1.2 billion pounds Tax-free to his wife Tina and Monaco from Arcadia and Arcadia finally went under during the COVID pandemic And that was really the end for Philip Green as any kind of force on the high street So when you're a sleazeball in business, you can get you can get short-term gratification But in a long haul it's not gonna work because people are gonna find you out There's no way that you could be a sleazeball in business and not get found out. There's too many accountants There's too many lawyers. There's too many people. You're sliming out like it's not gonna work So a few years I pulled together all my reporting from the Sunday Times and various interviews and research I'd done And did the book in 2018 and the book really summarized the whole scandal So the BHS issue and the problems that Arcadia the lifestyle the behavior over the years He would ring me again and again and some days he would say no one's gonna read this effing stupid book And he offered me, you know money not to write it. He said be a sensible fellow Alternate the equivalent sum to a charity you stop writing it and we'll all forget about otherwise you'll get sued Just as the book was coming I would have took that money and still wrote the book slimed him back out. You hear me out and the telegraph produced a very in-depth investigation detailing how several staff had been paid big settlements and had signed NDAs to avoid talking about allegations of racial abuse inappropriate sexual comments and since then Green has seen his reputation Largely destroyed and has become something of a recluse and basically as far as we know lives in Monaco and Spends a lot more time on the boat You know what my bad Dell you are nothing like that man. You got morals and you would never do that you from the hood Secondly this dude's probably still rich. That's tough man. TLL. Leave it like comment subscribe turn it up post notifications. I'm gone