11.

Enter the Charlatan

The figure trudging through Mayfair towards Paul Sutton’s rented mews house in December 2013 looked unimpressive to Madeleine Legwinski, the footballer’s ex-wife who had put her divorce settlement into B52 Investments. Legwinski was stepping out of the front door with Sutton and his girlfriend, Nicola Tarrant, when Dominic Chappell approached in a jacket and jeans, carrying an overnight bag. A brown-haired, jowly man in his late forties, he resembled an overfed version of the actor Hugh Bonneville. ‘He looked scruffy,’ Legwinski said. ‘I didn’t pay any attention to him at all. It was not like, “Oh, wow, this is a businessman.” ’

As Sutton would later tell Parliament, Chappell was ‘down on his uppers’. His last project of any note, a property development on the Isle of Wight called Island Harbour, had gone bust, triggering massive losses for his lender, Anglo Irish Bank. After that he had effectively been sacked from an oil-storage depot in Spain for allegedly misappropriating more than €360,000 (£300,000). Chappell had been made bankrupt at least twice. He and Sutton had first met on the Isle of Wight in 2007, although they later disagreed as to the exact circumstances. Chappell, who was trying to build luxury holiday homes around a marina on the River Medina, said that he ‘didn’t know him from Adam’ until Sutton ‘literally just turned up, wanted to buy a house, then four or five houses, then he wanted to buy the whole project. He pissed me around for a few weeks and we put him down as a timewaster.’ Sutton claimed he had put down a deposit of £160,000 for some of Chappell’s properties and lost the money. ‘I looked at suing him, gave up and put it behind me,’ he said.

Whatever the truth, Chappell repeatedly tried to get in touch with Sutton between 2010 and 2013, when he sent a string of Facebook messages to Natalie Tarrant, the sister of Sutton’s girlfriend, Nicola. Chappell later said that Sutton was ‘a contact, and I heard he was doing great guns [sic]’. In truth, Chappell was desperate for any kind of work. He was fighting to keep his small terraced house in Dorset from the clutches of his most recent bankruptcy trustee, and he had a wife and two young children to support. He looked up to Sutton, whose Mayfair home had a swimming pool in the basement and a Rolls-Royce parked outside. After meeting Sutton for coffee in December 2013, Chappell started working as the fraudster’s dogsbody, driving him to meetings and answering his emails (like Sir Philip Green, Sutton distrusted computers). Sutton was later less than complimentary about his understudy. He said, ‘He would wait … outside BHS or outside wherever I was, and he gradually got more and more involved with me and the team.’ To Sutton, Chappell was useful at first ‘as long as he could drive a car and go into meetings. With the greatest respect, he wasn’t that important in what I was doing.’

Having been educated at Millfield public school in Somerset, Chappell was blessed with a more polished exterior than Sutton. He had a kind of country squire’s charm and a plummy accent, but the two men’s family backgrounds were not so different. Chappell’s paternal grandfather was a bricklayer. His father, Joe, was a rough diamond who was born in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, and grew up in Shepperton. In the early 1970s, Joe was part of a crowd of self-made businessmen who used to drink at the Peggy Bedford, a long-since-vanished pub near Heathrow airport. One of the group described him as ‘a dealer in everything’ and ‘a ducker and a diver … He gave himself these airs and graces, but as far as I could see he was into all sorts of things.’ Joe had property interests, and he was later said to be involved in the oil trade in Libya. He married Alexandra, the well-heeled daughter of a manager at the Jack Barclay Bentley dealership in Mayfair, and they had two sons – Dominic, born on 28 November 1966, and Damon, born on 26 June 1968.

The brothers grew up in Sunbury-on-Thames, a leafy commuter town in Surrey. Both boys went to Millfield, but they took diverging paths. Damon went into the City and worked as a broker at the Rothschild Partnership. He developed a cocaine addiction, ran up thousands of pounds in debts and ended up in court after going on a four-day crime spree in an attempt to pay off his dealer. In July 1998, Southwark Crown Court heard how Damon had spent £13,266 on a cloned American Express credit card provided by his tormentor, including £4,800 on a watch and £1,480 on a dress from Harrods. He had apparently been caught after a suspicious shop manager called the police while he tried to buy a £2,900 Rolex. According to the Birmingham Post & Mail, Damon’s barrister said his behaviour was ‘completely out of character’ and explained, ‘He was a City boy leading a typical City lifestyle – staying out late, going to clubs, drinking champagne and snorting cocaine.’ Damon was given a two-year suspended sentence on the condition that he promised to repay the credit-card company in full.

Dominic stuck close to Joe and tried to follow him into business. Father and son were made bankrupt together at Slough County Court in June 1992, when Dominic was twenty-five. The London Gazette listed his occupation as ‘car salesman’. (Chappell later claimed those bankruptcies were annulled. The official receiver could not absolutely confirm that, although he said all the costs were paid and the petitioning creditors had their deposit returned.) In 1993, Chappell joined the board of his father’s property company, and between 1994 and 1995 they ran a service station between Heathrow and Slough, which was later closed. Chappell was also an amateur racing driver. He took part in the Le Mans 24 Hours race four times as a factory works driver in the 1990s, and competed in Formula Two and Formula 3000 with his own team, Apache Racing. In 2001, in the wake of the first dot-com boom, Chappell tried to launch a breakaway championship that would stream live camera feeds from inside the cars to viewers. He raised £800,000, but the Interactive Sportscar Championship folded after its first race at Donington Park. A technical glitch meant there was no cockpit streaming. Almost half the cars failed to arrive, and there turned out to be no prize money.

The failure of Chappell’s subsequent Isle of Wight property development, which saw Anglo Irish Bank (and ultimately Irish taxpayers) lose roughly half the £24 million it lent, was followed by the Spanish oil debacle. In 2009, Chappell and two partners bought an oil-storage depot in Cadiz out of administration through a new company called Olivia Petroleum. The facility, Istamelsa, owed about €8.5 million to creditors ranging from crew members and suppliers to social security and tax offices. Chappell and his backers planned to pay off the debts at a discount and end up with a valuable asset, free of claims. But he was pushed out in 2012 after €368,000 of allegedly unauthorized payments came to light. Internal documents showed that Chappell, a keen sailor, had spent €23,855 on the company’s credit card at places such as Desty Marine and X-Yachts in Southampton. He also appeared to have sent thousands of pounds to his wife, Rebecca, an attractive blonde almost twenty years his junior. In November 2011, the company removed his power of attorney, and in April 2012, one of his partners, Stephen Rodger, emailed him, ‘You cannot deny the level of your deceit as we have very clear evidence of this … I am sorry that this has ended in this way but you have just run yourself out of time and you have deceived Rob [the other partner] and I at every turn.’

(When the story finally came out in 2016, Chappell denied having misappropriated any funds from Istamelsa. He said the credit-card payments to yacht companies had been for ‘safety gear for the dock workers – things like lifebuoys, lights, fluorescent jackets, blah blah’. He said of Rodger, ‘I did a very, very good job down there and I’ve been fucking shafted by this fat cunt who I will severely deal with when I see him.’)

By the time he arrived in 2013, Sutton’s new driver barely had a better CV than his scandal-ridden boss, but Chappell was nothing if not self-confident. It ran in the family: his father had social aspirations too. Joe claimed to have been an extra in the 1976 war film Shout at the Devil, and he bought an obscure aristocratic title to use on business cards, calling himself ‘His Excellency Count Joseph Chappell de Lys et Marino’. The Chappells pronounced their surname ‘Chappelle’, with more than a touch of Hyacinth Bucket, the Keeping Up Appearances character who insisted her last name was a homophone of ‘Bouquet’. Alongside his chauffeuring duties, Sutton put Chappell in charge of developing a business plan for Containasuite, the B52 subsidiary set up to mimic Snoozebox. Soon he was doing more. ‘He’s a very personable person, and before we had got a long way down the road he was very much involved with the guys who were working for me,’ Sutton later said. ‘It just snowballed from there.’

One of the ‘guys’ working with Sutton was Eddie Parladorio, a balding hard-man libel lawyer who looked like a nightclub bouncer and once dated the TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson. Parladorio had known Sutton for about a decade, and Parladorio’s law firm, Manleys, had sometimes stepped in to threaten Sutton’s victims with legal action when they became vocal about their losses. Sutton referred to him as ‘a good chap’. Keen to be involved in the BHS takeover, Parladorio offered the use of his office near Oxford Street as a bunker. Parladorio would become the crucial thread linking Chappell to Sutton as the story unfolded.

Green told Sutton that he would need to find a well-known retailer to front the transaction, so Sutton approached LEK, a firm of management consultants. A log of meetings kept by three partners at LEK showed how Chappell gradually supplanted Sutton as the person calling the shots. The first meeting took place in June 2013, before Sutton and Chappell came together. According to LEK, Sutton came alone and ‘claimed to have known the Green family for many years, having initially been involved in helping facilitate their move to Monaco’. Sutton said their children ‘went to the same schools’ and boasted that he ‘was viewed as a safe party for Sir Philip to do business with in the context of this sensitive proposal, based on his long relationship with Lady Green and the family’. Sutton apparently also told LEK that Green was under pressure from Leonard Green & Partners, Topshop’s American private equity investor, to get rid of his weaker Arcadia brands. If BHS could trade for a few years under a new owner, Sutton explained, it would absolve the Green family ‘of responsibility for any future failure, and associated reputational damage’. Chappell was first introduced to LEK as Sutton’s ‘business associate’ in February 2014. He went along to LEK’s offices again in April.

By that point, Chappell and Sutton were almost equal partners. They stalked the high street like a pair of tubby vultures, looking for dying companies to feed on. In May, they tried to buy parts of Paul Simon, a furniture retailer that had gone into administration. Sutton asked Chappell to lead the bid, which failed. Sutton also urged Chappell to deploy his public-school charm on B52’s disgruntled investors to dissuade them from going to the press while the BHS talks were at a tentative stage. When they received complaints from Virginia Withers, the farmer in Somerset, Chappell paid her £1,000 from a joint account with Sutton. Chappell also posted a blank cheque from his Halifax account to Withers’ friends Richard Clarke and Scott Rogers, promising that they would be able to fill it in for an unbelievable amount as soon as the BHS deal closed. When Madeleine Legwinski kicked up a fuss, Chappell forwarded her an email from Green’s PA, telling her: ‘Conformation [sic] on the BHS deal with SPG.’ He sporadically paid her children’s school fees, although his cheques sometimes bounced, and he paid part of the rent on her Chelsea maisonette for a month. Chappell also put smaller payments directly into Legwinski’s bank account.

Chappell later said that he made these payments because the likes of Withers and Legwinski were driving Sutton ‘nuts’ and he wanted to ‘keep the whole show on the road’, but he was distinctly less generous after he bought BHS. In September 2015, as Legwinski continued to pester him, Chappell demanded the return of more than £48,000 and ordered her to ‘CEASE AND DESIST’ from all contact, adding, ‘Failure to do so will result in legal action.’

In January 2014, Chappell and his father set up a company called Containa Ventures. In April, they changed its name to Swiss Rock Plc – almost the exact same name as Sutton’s BHS bid vehicle. Chappell and Sutton’s roles in the deal were about to switch. In May, Green pulled the plug on his talks with Sutton. The convicted fraudster later blamed the envelope delivered to Green’s Monaco apartment, claiming that it was part of a blackmail plot by his girlfriend’s family. Chappell said it was because Topshop’s boss had heard that Sutton was ‘hoodwinking a lot of people that he was a big-time property player and that he had a very close relationship with Philip Green’. The end result was the same. Sutton said he took Chappell in to see Paul Budge, Green’s finance director, and told Budge, ‘I have to stand down. The whole team is there. You’ve met all my guys. Dominic is coordinating it and you’ll be working with them.’

The fraudster stepped into the shadows and the charlatan stepped forward.

The summer of 2014 went quiet as Green and his advisers worked on Project Thor, the radical plan to restructure BHS’s two pension funds. On 4 September, the Pensions Regulator demanded details of Green’s BHS dividends. On 5 September, Project Thor was put on hold for three months, with the trustees given the strange mixture of excuses ranging from the Scottish independence referendum to geopolitics and Christmas trading. Within a fortnight of that decision, Adam Goldman, Arcadia’s company secretary, gave Dominic Chappell a non-disclosure form to sign so he could enter talks to buy BHS. Chappell had never even been into one of its stores. ‘I actually knew nothing at all about BHS,’ he later told the BBC.

There was a wobble almost immediately. Paul Budge, who was leading the sale process for Green, thought that Chappell might have leaked news of the talks to a third party. They had what Chappell called a ‘straight no BS discussion’, which he followed up with an email saying, ‘I was very put out that my integrity has been put in question at this early and delicate stage with you and SPG, and can ensure [sic] you of Swiss Rock Plc best intention at all times.’ Budge replied, ‘Thanks for this. My PA emailed to set up a time for a catch up.’

Chappell changed the takeover’s codename from Project Albion to Project Harvey, but he essentially copied the business plan laid down by Sutton. An early briefing note said that his intention was to appoint the Swiss retailer Peter Graf to the board and draw on the expertise of BHS’s existing management team. Through one of his father’s friends, a foppish Swedish businessman in his late fifties called Lennart Henningson, Chappell met a financial advisory firm, RiverRock Securities, which agreed to act for him. Paul Sutton accompanied Chappell to the first meeting with RiverRock in October. Eddie Parladorio recruited two non-executive directors – Mark Tasker, head of the commercial department at the law firm Bates Wells Braithwaite, who happened to be a childhood friend, and Stephen Bourne, former head of corporate finance at the accountancy practice BDO Stoy Hayward. Parladorio, Tasker and Bourne agreed to negotiate huge fees from Chappell for their services, including success bonuses for completing the deal, annual salaries of £180,000 for one day a week and a free Range Rover Vogue 4.4 each. The total came to almost £1.5 million, to be paid by BHS. Bourne emailed the other two to say that it did seem ‘a huge amount for three non-execs – invaluable as we are, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get’.

It was agreed that Tasker and Bourne would take stakes of 2.5 per cent each in the BHS bid vehicle. Parladorio would receive 5 per cent in recognition of three years’ unpaid work that he had done for Sutton on various projects. A sense of camaraderie developed among the motley crew as they set out on their unlikely quest to buy BHS from the king of the high street. Tasker, a bald, mole-like lawyer, joked on email that he would like Hugh Grant to play him in the Hollywood version of their adventure. He said Parladorio would be played by Russell Brand, Bourne by Dame Judi Dench and Chappell by Russell Crowe or Dolph Lundgren ‘(if still alive)’.

Also in October, Chappell replaced Sutton as the main point of contact for the consultants at LEK, and in November his Swiss Rock bidding team hired the accountancy practice Grant Thornton and the law firm Olswang as further advisers. Bourne, who handled the first meeting with Grant Thornton, told Chappell on email that its lead partner, Paul Martin, was ‘very excited’. Bourne said he had explained to Martin that the deal was happening ‘because of your [Chappell’s] relationship with PG, no competition and a desire to see the business go to good hands’. Tasker reported that David Roberts, the lead Olswang partner, was ‘tingling’ with excitement. On Olswang’s recommendation, Swiss Rock engaged the PR firm Bell Pottinger to handle press inquiries. Bell Pottinger was tasked with developing a ‘script’ on Chappell’s dubious background. All the advisers agreed to work on a ‘contingency’ basis, meaning there were no upfront fees – which was just as well, because Swiss Rock had no money.

Green made a discreet call to Mike Sherwood, who was by then joint chairman of Goldman Sachs in Europe. The tycoon told the banker he was planning to sell BHS. Perhaps sniffing trouble, or perhaps because it was simply too small, Sherwood declined to act as a formal adviser. But he offered Goldman Sachs’ informal vetting services. Sherwood delegated the job to his right-hand man, Anthony Gutman, a slim, urbane investment banker with a neat salt-and-pepper beard. Paul Budge directed Chappell ‘to start the process with Goldman first’. Gutman told Budge that he would ‘await the call with eager anticipation!’ On 24 November, Chappell emailed Budge to announce that Swiss Rock was ready to make a formal approach. Budge had been through the gruelling and ultimately fruitless process of Project Thor, and he knew how valuable it would be for an unknown buyer to carry BHS’s pension nightmares away on his shoulders. At that point, Green was seriously considering putting BHS into administration as an alternative – a worst-case scenario that would have drawn immediate attention from the Pensions Regulator in terms of Green’s responsibility for the funds’ deficit. Budge emailed a group of colleagues, including Neville Kahn at Deloitte, ‘We have a prospective Father Christmas!’ From that moment, Arcadia codenamed the sale Project Rudolph.

Eddie Parladorio was suspicious of Goldman Sachs. ‘My instinct remains that GS will do what they want (which will likely not suit us) and the quicker they are out of the picture the better,’ he wrote in an email to the Swiss Rock team. But Stephen Bourne jotted down reassuring words from Anthony Gutman in his notebook, ‘We are the gatekeepers and we are here to open the gate.’ As its opening bid, Swiss Rock offered £1 for BHS, the ten Carmen properties and Marylebone House, one of the store chain’s two headquarters buildings. It promised to invest £120 million by raising money secured against the property portfolio. On 12 December, Gutman warned Budge that Swiss Rock had no retail experience, that the proposal was ‘lacking in detail’ and that Chappell ‘had a history of bankruptcy’. Budge instructed Gutman to reject the approach. But he added, ‘No doubt they will be in touch!’

Chappell immediately called Gutman, who relayed the conversation to Budge via email, ‘Spoke to him. Pushing v hard – saying can go faster, put more money in etc!’ Chappell also sent a desperate text to Budge, saying, ‘We just need a steer on what SPG wants … We are willing to work closely with SPG to ensure all are happy.’ The rejection caused dismay inside the Swiss Rock camp, which had been labouring under the impression that Chappell had a special relationship with Green. Parladorio described the news as ‘extremely disappointing’. He apportioned the blame to RiverRock and its boss, Joseph Dryer, a tubby American with slicked-back grey hair. Parladorio thought Dryer had been underprepared before presenting the proposal to Goldman Sachs. Dryer thought Chappell had exaggerated his closeness to Green. In an email to Lennart Henningson, Dryer accused Chappell of ‘changing the facts + forgetting what he has agreed to + not telling the truth’. RiverRock resigned as Swiss Rock’s merchant bank on 15 December. The news was greeted with satisfaction by Parladorio, who emailed Chappell, ‘Damn good riddance to the shambles / rip off clowns.’

Before Christmas 2014 melted into New Year 2015, Chappell reassured his team that Gutman had told him, ‘I am here to help and guide you to ensure that we all get what we want.’ He sent email after email to Gutman, promising to find £35 million of equity and £100 million of debt for BHS. Chappell had so little money he could barely afford to pay his own household bills, but he fancifully hoped the former Charles Vögele store boss, Peter Graf, would stump up the equity and cover the transaction’s £5 million costs. Chappell formalized his next offer on 8 January, but Green rejected it a week later because he was unwilling to throw the ten valuable Carmen properties and BHS’s Marylebone House building into the deal for free. He was also concerned about the lack of a ‘creditable’ (sic) retail leader. Chappell was back chasing the next day. His secretary told Budge that he was ‘prepared to peruse [sic] any opportunity necessary to reach an agreement’. Budge remarked to Gutman, ‘They won’t go away easily!’

As he tried to turn the thumbscrews on Chappell, Green called in a favour from the Sunday Times. One day in late January 2015, Dominic O’Connell, the business editor, took me aside in the newsroom and explained that Green had phoned in with a scoop: after years of speculation, he was ready to put BHS up for sale. At the time, we had no inkling of the drama unfolding behind the scenes with Chappell, or the true extent of the pension problem, which was at least partly driving it. Green demanded an unusual quid pro quo: in return for the exclusive, we had to agree not to mention BHS’s pension deficit. I checked the Companies House accounts. They showed a shortfall of £109.3 million – not ideal, but far from disastrous. Green’s sensitivity struck me as odd, and I noted it mentally, but I wrote the story as agreed. It ran on 25 January under the headline, ‘Philip Green Puts Struggling BHS Up for Sale’.

A few days earlier, unknown to us, Green had given the deal’s goalposts ‘a sharp eleventh-hour tug’, in the words of Eddie Parladorio. Having previously said that he would ‘take care’ of the pension funds, BHS’s seller now wanted Swiss Rock to make a contribution. He also wanted the buyers to pay millions of pounds for the Carmen properties and Marylebone House rather than receive them for free as part of the £1 purchase price. Chappell was already desperate to get his hands on BHS, and the press leak put him under new competitive pressure. It flushed out approaches from the private equity firm Sun Capital, the former Asda boss Andy Bond, a Turkish retailer called Cafer Mahiroglu and Tony Brown, a former Green lieutenant who was working with Apollo, a US hedge fund. Jason Kow, the head of a private property company called Queensgate, also expressed an interest. Chappell became frantic.

The news also caught BHS’s pension trustees and the regulator on the hop. Chris Martin, the trustees’ chairman, had been left thinking that Green was going to relaunch the Project Thor restructuring that month. He emailed a link of the sale story to Neville Kahn at Deloitte, asking, ‘Neville – I assume that this is just press speculation?’ Kahn replied that he ‘knew it was under consideration’ and added, ‘Have to say given the losses why wouldn’t he explore [it].’ The Pensions Regulator chased Martin, who sent a stream of increasingly anxious messages to Kahn and Paul Budge. Green’s acolytes were well aware of what was going on. ‘We have started down a road,’ Budge meaningfully emailed a group of colleagues ten days before the Sunday Times story appeared. But Martin was mostly kept in the dark as Project Rudolph hurtled forward. On the tricky issue of pensions, so too was Chappell. Green was ‘adamant’ that Chappell’s advisers at Grant Thornton should not be allowed to look at detailed information on the pension funds, speak to the trustees or sound out the regulator. Grant Thornton observed internally that this did ‘not bode well’.

Based on what they had been told by Budge, Chappell and his friends believed the pension problem would be fixable for a sum of £50 million, whereas in reality it would cost far more because the deficit had widened to an astonishing £571 million. Budge boasted to Anthony Gutman at Goldman that he ‘did not enlighten them re current values’, and when Chappell finally met Chris Martin, the trustees’ chairman was ‘surprised’ that due diligence on pensions was not ‘the focal point anticipated – particularly considering the schemes’ funding positions’. Chappell obviously did not understand the nature of the teetering liabilities he was about to take on.

After the Sunday Times story, events moved at a bewildering and breakneck pace. Green was suspicious that Sutton was still lurking in the background, pulling Chappell’s strings – or as Eddie Parladorio put it in an email to the group, ‘floating around in our midst’. For weeks, Parladorio had been trying to get Sutton to sign a statutory declaration promising that he would have no further involvement with BHS. Sutton finally signed it. If Green’s team had looked closely, they would have noticed that his given address was a cottage in the village of Winterborne Clenston in Dorset – inside the grounds of the Grade I-listed manor house Chappell had started renting (the first six months’ rent was covered by a loan from the landlord). Chappell continued to send updates marked ‘For your eyes only’ to ps@swissrockplc.com – an email address that looked distinctly like Sutton’s – and the fraudster rang Parladorio constantly for news.

By 3 February, Chappell thought Swiss Rock was back on the front foot, and he emailed his colleagues to say the BHS deal was ‘ours to loose [sic]’. Parladorio doubted they were ‘getting anything even remotely approaching a straight bat from SPG and his motley crew of merry men’, but as the dance carried on, both sides softened their positions. On 12 February, Chappell went in to see Green at Arcadia’s offices. Until that point, ‘SPG’ had directed the action through his functionaries, although he and Chappell had been in constant contact over the phone, often ‘going at it hammer and tongs’, as Parladorio put it in an email to several of the bid team. Now Green descended from the clouds and agreed the outlines of a deal with Chappell face-to-face. Paul Budge emailed Chappell that evening, ‘SPG confirmed as far as he’s concerned the handshake cemented this and he’s done … Look forward to working with you to a successful outcome.’

The document that emerged, headed ‘Points of Principle’, required Chappell to run BHS as a going concern for at least three years, and promised him first refusal over Arcadia’s other non-Topshop brands in return. It asked Chappell to invest £10 million of new equity into BHS, although it simultaneously said that he would be allowed to buy the Marylebone House headquarters building from Green for £35 million. Marylebone House was owned directly by the Green family through a company in the British Virgin Islands, Wilton Equity. It was worth a lot more than £35 million. Chappell had already lined up a buyer who was prepared to pay £45 million, so Green was effectively providing Chappell with £10 million of equity for free by allowing him to keep the profit. Grant Thornton referred to this internally as a ‘gift’. Green had apparently dropped his two main objections to Chappell’s bid: Swiss Rock still had no money and no credible retail leader. But, significantly, Chappell had agreed to take on BHS’s pension liabilities.

On 26 February, Green ordered Chappell to ‘lose the Swiss reference’, perhaps because the newspapers were full of headlines about tax evasion following a huge leak from HSBC. Swiss Rock became Retail Acquisitions. The level of scrutiny applied to Chappell by Green’s lawyers at Linklaters was captured in a handwritten note of a phone call with their opposite numbers at Olswang. Linklaters faithfully jotted down Olswang’s descriptions of Chappell as an ‘honest guy + entrepreneur’ whose only fault was that he was an ‘eternal optimist’.

Over the next fortnight – despite cries of alarm from BHS’s pension trustees, the regulator and some of Chappell’s own advisers – he and Green pushed the deal forward. On 6 March, Chappell threatened to walk away as a glimmering of uncertainty broke through, but Green hauled him back, then pushed him across the finishing line in a ferocious meeting that evening. The goalposts were given another sharp last-minute tug. Chappell had tried to line up £120 million of debt from a hedge fund called Farallon Capital, but he had failed. Green turned to HSBC and its head of commercial banking, Ian Stuart, an old friend whom he sometimes saw for dinner in Barbados when they were both there for the Christmas break. Green organized a £70 million loan from HSBC so Chappell could buy the Carmen property portfolio. He also promised to set up a separate £25 million HSBC overdraft for BHS. Green suddenly changed his mind about selling Marylebone House to Chappell – in typical fashion, because he thought he could get a higher price than the £45 million Chappell had obtained. Green’s reversal meant that Chappell’s £10 million of equity evaporated. The tycoon said he would split the increased profit from the property with BHS’s new owner at a later date. Paul Martin, Grant Thornton’s lead partner, emailed a colleague, ‘One of those “legendary” meetings you get in a career. Wonderful theatre. Basically put a deal together that should get done on Mon/Tues.’

Five days later, on 11 March 2015, Sir Philip Green sold BHS to Dominic Chappell. As they gathered in the boardroom on Marylebone Road, Green contemptuously turned to Chappell’s lawyers from Olswang and asked, ‘Why are you all here? I can fucking do this deal myself.’ Eddie Parladorio wonderingly emailed two friends: ‘Just to let you know we are sitting with Sir Philip Green at this moment signing off and acquiring BHS Group.’ The final completion statement was handwritten on a single sheet of A4 paper. In the end, the deal was completely funded by Green. Chappell was literally buying the department store chain for £1 – although he jauntily gave Green £2, ‘just so he could show a profit’.