12.

Keys to the Plane

June 2000, just after the first dot-com bubble burst, should have been a daunting time to launch a web business, but Nick Robertson was not the type to fret. The great-grandson of the tailor Austin Reed had grown up in comfortable Surrey and left Canford boarding school in Dorset with three A levels (two Ds and an F). Robertson, a boozy, bantering man’s man with a Cheshire Cat’s grin and a love of Chelsea, had worked in advertising sales and co-founded a product placement company, ‘putting cans of Pepsi on EastEnders and so on’. In 2000, he and his business partner, Quentin Griffiths, spun a new venture out of their interest in celebrity. ‘I came across this statistic in a TV guide,’ Robertson later explained. ‘A lamp appeared in Friends and NBC got 28,000 calls or something ridiculous about where the lamp came from.’ The business born from that moment of inspiration was AsSeenOnScreen, a website that connected viewers with products featured in their favourite films and TV programmes. You could type in ‘Mission Impossible’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’ and find Oakley sunglasses or Samuel L Jackson’s ‘Bad Mother Fucker’ wallet. At first, Robertson and Griffiths hoped the brands would be prepared to pay for the publicity, but ‘of course they weren’t’ because ‘that was the early days of the internet and nobody was willing to pay anything for anybody [sic]’. Robertson owed a profound debt to the company’s first buyer, Lorri Penn, who came from Topshop. Penn set him up on a blind date with her best friend, Jan, who eventually became his wife. She also guided AsSeenOnScreen towards fashion.

Asos, as the company soon became known, transformed itself from a tacky online version of Heat magazine, where shoppers could copy the looks of Victoria Beckham and Coleen McLoughlin, into a credible destination where mid-market brands such as Superdry and Tommy Hilfiger sat alongside Balenciaga and YSL. A self-described ‘armchair sportsman’ who proudly said that he owned only one suit, Robertson was an unlikely clothing tycoon, but he gave shoppers what they wanted: choice and easy delivery. ‘We weren’t retailers and we weren’t fashion people,’ Robertson told an interviewer in 2014. ‘We weren’t even internet builders. We were entrepreneurial and we were solving a very different problem – how do customers want to shop online? Well, they want as much choice as they can have.’

Asos was set up with less than £3 million of seed funding from Robertson’s Monaco-based brother, Nigel, who had made £29 million from co-founding the online phone book Freepages, and some of Nigel’s friends, including Andrew Regan, a corporate raider who once tried to break up the Co-operative Group. A little more than a year after its creation, it floated on the stock market valued at £12.3 million. In 2004, Asos turned a maiden profit and launched its own womenswear range, and in December 2005 it survived the worst fire in Europe since the Second World War when an oil depot exploded near its warehouse outside Hemel Hempstead, destroying most of that Christmas’s stock (luckily, it was comprehensively insured). Asos launched online catwalk videos in 2006 and moved into an art deco former Carreras cigarette factory in Camden a year later. The pub opposite, the Lyttelton Arms, became known as the Asos Arms thanks to the stream of fashionable twentysomethings heading to the bar from 3 p.m. in the summer months, when Robertson instituted a policy of ‘doss Fridays’.

Sir Philip Green told anyone who would listen that it would never work. ‘Do you know how high their returns rate is?’ he would scoff. ‘It’s 40 per cent. It’ll kill them.’ But in 2005, Asos poached Miss Selfridge’s merchandising director, Rob Bready. A stream of others followed him from Arcadia Group. Green refused to put Topshop clothes on the Asos platform as long as the poaching continued, and Robertson refused to stop poaching. Green would ring him and shout, ‘Stop nicking my cunting staff, you fucking cunt.’ Robertson, who was happy to play the belligerent retailer at his own game, would tell Green to fuck off and hang up. Their rivalry was not always particularly serious. When Green heard about the Hemel Hempstead fire on one of his morning calls with the City analyst Richard ‘Ratty’ Ratner, he gave Robertson the name of his favourite insurance assessor to help Asos negotiate the maximum possible payout. (As well as being altruistic, Green might well have been hoping for a cut of the proceeds.)

By 2008, when the old-fashioned high street was reeling from the recession, Asos was valued at £200 million. With sales of £81 million, it was still smaller than Topshop’s Oxford Street flagship store, but the website had 3.4 million monthly visitors and it was growing quickly. In 2015, the year Robertson stood down at the age of forty-seven, its sales crossed the magic £1 billion mark. By then, the business he had co-founded a decade and a half earlier was valued at more than £3 billion.

Asos was among a wave of new companies that operated without costly store estates and shop-floor staff, allowing them to offer sharper prices than their traditional rivals (Robertson estimated that Asos was 25 per cent cheaper than Topshop on comparable products). They were also able to change ranges and react to trends quicker. The leader was Amazon, founded in Seattle by the Princeton graduate and former hedge-fund analyst Jeff Bezos. Having started life as an online bookseller, Amazon morphed into a distributor of everything from car parts to pet food, pioneering cloud-computing infrastructure along the way with Amazon Web Services and producing inexpensive digital devices such as the Kindle e-reader and the Fire tablet. Like Robertson, Bezos was an entrepreneur rather than a retailer who had earned his spurs on a market stall and spent a lifetime painstakingly building contacts in the supply chain. Amazon’s powerful shareholders were happy to make short-term losses in the interests of long-term market-share gains. By 2015, consumption in Britain was stagnant, so every pound spent online was a pound taken away from the high street. Over the same period, value retailers like Matalan and Primark had become more aggressive, forcing the likes of Marks & Spencer and Next to drop their prices. Department stores such as Allders, C&A and Littlewoods had already perished under the squeeze. If Green, the king of the high street, was unable to protect BHS from these formidable new predators, how would anyone else?

On the morning of 12 March 2015, six and a half weeks after the Sunday Times announced BHS’s impending sale, I was on a flight back to London from a conference in France. As the plane dipped down on the descent into Gatwick, my iPhone went berserk with text messages. Then it rang. ‘Have you fackin’ seen this?’ said the grainy voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s a joke. He’s losing it, I reckon.’ It was one of my favourite contacts, an old-school broker who knew Green well and even sounded like him. He relayed the news that was flashing up on websites everywhere: Green had sold BHS for the token sum of £1 to an unknown consortium called Retail Acquisitions. As the wheels touched onto the tarmac, a text message arrived from Dominic O’Connell, my boss at the Sunday Times. He had secured an exclusive interview with the tycoon that afternoon to explain the deal. ‘I think he’s nervous,’ he said. I asked if I could come. ‘Subject to negotiation!!’ O’Connell replied. ‘I’ll let u know.’

I raced from the airport to BHS’s faded headquarters on Marylebone Road, scanning the Arcadia press release along the way. It was light on detail, particularly about Retail Acquisitions, but it quoted Green as saying, ‘One of my clear objectives in identifying a purchaser was ensuring their desire to take the business forward.’ O’Connell was waiting outside the boardroom on the second floor, his usually inscrutable expression tight with tension. We both had the sense this was going to be an awkward encounter. After what seemed like an eternity, the double doors to the boardroom swung open and Sir Philip Green stood before us, arms outstretched, a showman’s grin on his face. ‘The boys!’ he called out.

Green led us inside and barked to his PA for a pot of tea. BHS’s boardroom was a monument to the past. There was a wall covered with yellowing newspaper cuttings celebrating his bygone glories (‘Arcadia’s Place in Green’s Dream’; ‘High Noon on the High Street’; ‘King Phil’). There were framed photographs of Green receiving his knighthood and posing with Kate Moss, miniature models of his private jet and helicopter, and bookshelves lined with folders of more articles. The tycoon reached for a doughnut from a plate in the middle of the table and leaned back. Silhouetted by the pale light streaming in through a huge window, he looked like an old bull at rest. Green was about to turn sixty-three. He said he was feeling ‘sort of happy-sad’, but I had the feeling the balance tipped towards the former. ‘I think my birthday present was a disposal as opposed to a purchase,’ he said with an indulgent chuckle.

We began on a reflective note. ‘Fifteen years, right?’ Green remarked about his time owning BHS, in a low voice that implied we were being drawn into his confidence. ‘I left school at sixteen and started work. So that’s too long ago – forty-seven years ago. This has been owned for a third of my whole working life. It’s a long time.’ O’Connell remarked that BHS had made him wealthy. ‘It wasn’t about that,’ Green corrected him. ‘It’s nice to pick things up, make them work. On the back of BHS, enabled me to do Arcadia. On the back of Arcadia, enabled me to raise the money for M&S. So I think each building block, if you like … You know … And with hindsight or foresight we’d all be doing something different, wouldn’t we? Buy, sell, swap.’ He nodded laconically towards the recorder on the table. ‘We’ll come to that further on in your tape.’

The interview was textbook Green. He descended into riddles and vagueness whenever he wanted to avoid answering questions. He meandered off constantly into politics and showbiz, boasting about his connections. There was a story about a dinner featuring Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, who was two months away from his first (and last) general election. ‘He’s the speechmaker, so he gets all these papers out of his pocket,’ Green recounted. ‘I said, “You can’t make a speech without writing it all down?” He sort of looks at me. I said, “Come on, son, I’m confiscating all those notes.” And I did, and to be fair he actually spoke OK.’ Somehow that strayed into Green’s views on the dearth of talent in the business world. He said that Tidjane Thiam, the outgoing chief executive of the Prudential, was ‘the shrewdest man in this country’. ‘Nice, quiet, goodbye, fuck off, I’m off to the hills,’ Green said. ‘Bravo. I sent him a text to say, hey’ – he clapped four times – ‘good for you. Tripled the share price. No big noise. You look at all these other jokers. Couldn’t hold a candle to the guy, could they?’

At this point, Green was still immensely powerful. He expected interviewers to be deferential, and he repeatedly steered us away from details of the BHS deal. Dominic Chappell’s name was not yet in the public domain. The only figure attached to Retail Acquisitions was its chairman, Keith Smith, a former stockbroker (and, as it later transpired, Chappell’s uncle). Smith had played a walk-on role in one of the most infamous stock-market stories of the mid-2000s, when a company called Langbar collapsed in a £365 million fraud involving non-existent bank deposits in Brazil and the Netherlands. (At the time, Smith said he did not know about the wrongdoing, and he was not implicated in any subsequent investigations.) Green was hazy about the individuals operating behind Smith. ‘They’re people, and they’ve been sitting with the management for the past three weeks, four weeks, working through different scenarios,’ he said. Green insisted BHS had been cleaned up in advance of the sale and that the buyers were ‘not walking into a shipwreck’. ‘Yesterday was D-Day,’ he said, ‘so I said to my team, are we buying or selling? And there was a split vote. Because when we actually saw what we were selling and the shape it was now in, it’s the sort of thing I’ve bought all my life.’

It got more interesting when O’Connell asked about BHS’s pension funds. Green turned staccato. ‘[The buyers] met with the chairman during the process,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s calm. There’s no dramas. But you can take any pension fund at a moment in time and crystallize what the loss could be. You know, it’s only a loss if you crystallize it.’

Remembering his sensitivity about the January story, I tried to provoke him further. I asked what would it mean for his reputation if the chain were to go bust under its new owners. The question had the desired effect. The mood immediately darkened. ‘Am I really going to get into that debate?’ Green snapped, shooting O’Connell a warning look. ‘You can say that about anything. If you buy my house and it falls down, is it my fault? As far as I’m concerned, in terms of the actions we’ve put in place, there’s no reason they should get in trouble. Now, where they get to – I’m not the driver. If I give you my plane, right, and you tell me you’re a great pilot and you crash it into the first fucking mountain, is that my fault? If you get lucky and you cross the mountain in the first fucking six months but one night you fall asleep and hit the wall, is that my fault? I know what they’re getting today is 100 per cent clean. No skeletons. Tidy. Clean.’

O’Connell pointed out that newspapers might choose to see it differently. By now, Green was exasperated. ‘People buy companies,’ he growled. ‘Some they win, some they don’t. I can’t have something wrapped around my neck. I can’t not sell anything in case somebody gets into trouble with it. I can’t take BHS back to Storehouse now, can I?’

As we left, Green’s long-suffering head of PR, Tania Foster-Brown, stressed that Sunday was his birthday. ‘You’ll make PG happy on his big day, won’t you?’ she said pointedly.

There was no doubt in my mind that something was wrong. The retail analyst Richard Hyman provided an astute quote. ‘So with all his skill and nous, [Green] has thrown in the towel,’ he said. ‘It is not a matter of finding someone with more money and management skills than Philip. This is not a turnaround. Its natural constituency no longer exists.’ One of the more credible BHS suitors spurned by Green told me, ‘£1 is way too much for that business. It’s worth about minus £300 million.’ And the contact who had called as my plane landed that morning made a prophesy that reverberated in my mind for a long time. ‘If he had put a proper retailer in there it would have a semblance of a chance,’ he said. ‘But as it is, it’s hopeless. Philip Green’s power base will wane from now on. If he doesn’t watch it, he will be in front of a lot of people for a long time trying to explain what he’s done here, because he does have a responsibility.’

There was back-slapping and celebration on both sides immediately after the deal. Paul Martin of Grant Thornton described it as a ‘great result’ for the accountancy firm. Having stayed up for two nights straight with their lawyers, Chappell’s exhausted team went for a bottle of champagne at the Landmark hotel across the road from BHS’s head office. Green called Chris Martin, chairman of the BHS pension trustees, and berated him for ‘jeopardizing’ the sale by telling Chappell the company’s contributions might have to rise. Green then congratulated himself for having ‘put the ball in the net on [my] own without twenty-seven advisers’. Tina Green was so delighted she personally gave a special bonus to Paul Budge, Arcadia’s finance director, as a gesture of appreciation for the long nights he had spent away from his family. Just over a fortnight later, Anthony Gutman, the Goldman Sachs banker, sent an ingratiating email to Chappell. ‘Congratulations on getting the deal done,’ he said. ‘You deserved it – you were consistent throughout and stuck to your word.’

The warm messages belied the chaotic way the deal had clattered through its final stages. Chappell’s lack of money had started to rattle his advisers at Grant Thornton and Olswang in late February, but they decided to press ahead with their due diligence because stopping might have threatened the timing of the transaction. On 3 March, Eddie Parladorio remarked that ‘the pressure on fees is becoming intense’, and on 5 March, Paul Martin of Grant Thornton complained to Chappell that ‘a sizeable team’ had spent three weeks analysing BHS with no sign of a fee arriving. ‘This has now become a point of principle and trust,’ he typed. Martin warned that unless some money materialized the following morning, he would walk away. ‘I am very disappointed that we have reached this position,’ he added. ‘It is a first for me.’ The next day, with still no fee in sight, Martin warned Chappell that he would boycott an important 11 a.m. meeting unless Grant Thornton was paid. Chappell managed to whip Martin on by promising his accountancy firm an enormous success bonus a few days later. On 13 March, after the deal closed, Grant Thornton and Olswang were still waiting to be paid. Stephen Bourne, one of Chappell’s non-executives, urged the others, ‘We cannot pretend that this is not damaging all of our reputations … Things are kicking off, we don’t need this grief and will be in a stronger position when this is done.’

Green had come under a different kind of pressure. Chris Martin, the trustees’ chairman, had reacted badly to the initial news of a sale in January, describing it as ‘not entirely consistent’ with Green’s previous plans. Martin chased Green’s advisers throughout February. On 4 March, a few days before the sale to Chappell, the Pensions Regulator called an urgent evening meeting at BHS’s Marylebone Road offices. The watchdog sent a team of five, led by Geoff Cruickshank, its head of intelligence. They wanted to know who was behind Retail Acquisitions, and they again mentioned the phrase Green dreaded – ‘moral hazard’. The regulator had no power to block the deal, but Green knew it could open a retrospective investigation that would cause him a serious headache. The meeting was a disaster. In the conservative language of the regulator, it ‘broke up with Sir Philip Green requesting time out to discuss matters with his advisers’. In the words of another source, the tycoon ‘started screaming and shouting and stormed out’. The regulator sent Green a follow-up letter the next day, which he ignored. They had no further contact until the sale news broke.

As late as 5 March, less than a week before the Chappell deal, respectable bidders were still making approaches for BHS. Alteri Investors, an offshoot of the US hedge fund Apollo, wrote a polite letter to Green. Alteri’s team included Tony Brown, Green’s erstwhile lieutenant, Clem Constantine, a former head of property at M&S, and Jonathan Feldman, the brother of David Cameron’s chief fundraiser, Lord Andrew Feldman. (The Feldmans were big suppliers to BHS and Arcadia through their family’s textiles company, Jayroma.) Like Retail Acquisitions, Alteri offered £1, but it wanted substantial upfront funding from Arcadia to cover several years’ losses and working capital. Green said no. He rushed onwards with Chappell.

Stephen Bourne captured the madness of the first few days in his notebook. At 8.30 a.m. on Thursday 12 March, the morning Retail Acquisitions’ takeover was announced, the new owners had fifteen minutes of quiet with ‘SPG before he started talking to staff’. They regrouped at the Landmark hotel, then returned at 10 a.m. for the ‘mass chaotic arrival of all and sundry’. At 2 p.m., there was a meeting at the Landmark where Chappell tried to cut the fees for his three non-executives (they ‘all resisted’). Bourne then stayed behind with BHS’s incumbent management team ‘to discuss [the] shambolic first day – they want to know who all these people are!’ He ‘left with SPG after watching him abuse [an] FT journalist on his mobile’.

By the second day of Chappell’s ownership, Bourne was already getting worried. He noted that Chappell had immediately ordered ten new Apple Macs when there weren’t even ten people in his team – making a ‘terrible impression in a cash-strapped business’. Bourne complained in his notes about ‘erratic behaviour’, a ‘cast of weird advisers swimming around’ and a ‘lack of clarity on all sorts of issues’. Over the weekend, he told Chappell his priority should be ‘to recover from [the] bad impression made so far’ and warned him that ‘everything he says or does is being watched intensely’. Chappell was an hour late for their 8.30 a.m. meeting the following Monday. ‘I don’t think I can work with this guy for long,’ Bourne wrote.

The theme developed as the second week progressed. Retail Acquisitions was shaken by a couple of negative press stories – first by a ‘disastrous’ interview with its chairman, Keith Smith, who told the Sunday Telegraph that ‘it will be at least two years before we will see it coming back to profit’, then by an ‘appalling’ Property Week article about potential store closures. Chappell reacted badly. Bourne noted that Retail Acquisitions’ boss ‘lost it’ on a conference call with Bell Pottinger, his PR firm, insisting that ‘he was giving no information and we should reply to nothing’. Chappell stormed out of the room. Bourne stayed behind and ‘calmed things’.

The other pressing issue was credit insurance. Suppliers to retail companies like to insure their goods in the months between accepting order and receiving payment in case the retailer goes bust. In very risky cases, credit insurers refuse to provide cover for a particular company’s suppliers. Two of the biggest insurers, Coface and Euler Hermes, had pulled cover for BHS in the run-up to Green’s £1 sale, meaning that a number of suppliers were refusing to ship products without upfront payment. A company can limp on in that situation, but having to pay for goods in advance puts severe strain on its cash flow – and BHS’s finances were already stretched. Chappell had been under the impression that Green would use his clout to bring the credit insurance back online – if necessary, by providing some kind of bond – but according to Bourne’s notepad, it was ‘all [Dominic’s] problem now’ and Green had ‘walked away’. The tycoon also seemed to be insisting that Chappell put up some of BHS’s best properties, including its Oxford Street store, as security for the HSBC overdraft he was arranging. That meant Retail Acquisitions would be unable to use them to obtain any other loans. The billionaire seemed to be keeping Chappell on as tight a leash as possible.

Instead of focusing on these problems, Chappell appeared to be ‘desperate’ to get his hands on cash to pay unspecified ‘costs’. He did not seem to understand the restrictions Green was placing on him. Bourne described watching Chappell ‘cheerfully’ announce that he had agreed to give HSBC security over BHS’s Oxford Street flagship store, assuring the room that Green would ‘sort out’ HSBC when they needed to sell the property. ‘Everyone looked incredulous,’ Bourne wrote. ‘I asked him what he meant exactly. He babbled the same line.’

Bourne was an experienced corporate financier. On Friday 20 March, eight days after the champagne celebration in the Landmark hotel, he jotted down his multiplying doubts about the deal. He went through a list of troubling facts and concluded, ‘[Green] knows [Dominic] needs the properties, just like he knows BHS needs credit insurance. Makes no sense.’

Bourne asked himself, ‘Is it all a set-up? But who gains?’

The seeds of an epic row between Sir Philip Green and BHS’s new owners had already been sown. The tycoon’s restrictive attitude towards credit insurance and the property portfolio were the first visible shoots, but the roots went back to the point of the sale. Green’s decision to hold on to Marylebone House rather than sell it cheaply to Retail Acquisitions had stripped Chappell’s team of the £10 million profit they had expected to use to pay their advisers’ fees.

The buyer that Chappell had lined up for Marylebone House was Alex Dellal, a secretive and sharp thirty-one-year-old property dealer with cold brown eyes. Dellal was the grandson of ‘Black Jack’ Dellal, the late trader who had known Green in his Amber Day incarnation. Chappell had been introduced to Dellal by his father’s friend, Lennart Henningson. The connection was tenuous: Henningson had once been married to a cousin of Dellal’s aunt. The Swedish businessman had occasionally brought deals to the patriarch Black Jack in years gone by.

To recap: the original agreement had been for Green to sell Marylebone House to Chappell for £35 million, then for Chappell to trade it on to Dellal for £45 million, creating £10 million of ‘equity’ for Retail Acquisitions to invest in BHS. Two days before the deal closed, Green abruptly changed his mind. He thought he could get £53 million for Marylebone House from another well-known property player, Sir John Ritblat. He promised to split the upside with Chappell at a later date, but in the meantime he still wanted Chappell to put £5 million of equity into BHS. Chappell had no money. In desperation, he begged Dellal for a short-term loan of £5 million. Dellal’s offer was eye-wateringly expensive. He said he would lend the money for two months. The total repayment would be £6 million, including a first instalment of £2 million within just a week. The loan was to be secured against BHS’s distribution centre in Atherstone, Warwickshire – so Chappell would effectively be buying the chain using its own assets. Eddie Parladorio, Retail Acquisitions’ legal adviser, told Chappell he thought Dellal was ‘ludicrously and disgustingly greedy’. Parladorio also warned that ‘the proposed structure will be transparent to SPG because of the requested property charge’. But Chappell had no other options. He took Dellal’s money.

Dellal had placed £35 million in an escrow account with Olswang in February (Chappell needed to show Green that he had the funds ready to buy Marylebone House). When Green withdrew Marylebone House from sale, Chappell suggested that Dellal use the money to buy BHS’s second headquarters building, North West House, instead. Dellal later described it as a ‘silver medal’. It was next to Marylebone House and it was a similar size. On 11 March, Dellal paid £32 million for North West House, granting BHS a two-year grace period before it had to leave. BHS desperately needed the cash, but it only ever received £25 million of the proceeds. Chappell diverted £7 million to Retail Acquisitions. He used the money to pay success fees of £1.2 million each to Grant Thornton and Olswang. He also paid himself and his team generous bonuses. Chappell took £1.8 million, Parladorio received £460,000 and Mark Tasker and Stephen Bourne got £387,500 each. The rest went on interest payments to Dellal and other fees. Rather than invest money to help revitalize the ailing chain, Chappell and his friends ripped out cash straight away. Tasker and Bourne, who by then had decided to help with the acquisition stage only, stood down as directors as soon as the deal went through.

Dellal did very well out of Chappell. BHS defaulted on his £5 million ‘equity’ loan almost immediately and suffered a penalty charge when it finally sold the Atherstone distribution centre. And having paid the cheap price of £32 million for North West House, Dellal traded it on for a £6.5 million profit two months later. A week after Dellal told him of the profit, Chappell texted, ‘Just in case you forget. Rolex yacht master 2 stainless steel with white face blue bezel.’ A few days later, Chappell texted Dellal again, ‘Did you find the shop?? Begins with Ro and finishes with ex.’ Dellal texted back, ‘Ha. Not yet. You’re ruining the pleasure of giving you a gift! It was on my list either way only now I know what you want. I want a gift too!’

In his Sunday Times interview on the day of the deal, Green had said there were ‘covenants’ that meant Chappell’s crew were ‘not allowed to take any money out’. BHS’s £7 million loan to Retail Acquisitions obviously broke those covenants – although David Roberts, Chappell’s lead lawyer at Olswang, seemed to think Green himself had suggested that BHS should bear the cost of advisers’ fees. ‘SPG said that we should merely invoice BHS,’ he wrote in an email. Green later told Parliament that he was under the impression the £7 million had been deposited with the Bank of China to help Retail Acquisitions secure a line of credit. Whatever Green’s level of knowledge about the murky transactions taking place, he must have developed a nasty feeling about Chappell when some of Paul Sutton’s victims started contacting him, asking for restitution. Madeleine Legwinski, one of B52 Investments’ creditors, sent an email to Green’s PA, Katie O’Brien, explaining how she had been ‘financially ruined’ and forwarding correspondence showing Chappell boasting about the BHS deal. Green quickly grew uncomfortable.

In return, Retail Acquisitions began to feel bitter towards Green. His blatant disregard for the Pensions Regulator rapidly backfired. The watchdog immediately launched an investigation into his £1 sale of BHS, sending more than 120 aggressive legal notices to the various parties involved under Section 72 of the Pensions Act. The regulator’s enforcement team demanded the disclosure of thousands of documents. The Section 72 targets ranged from Tina Green to Joe Chappell and included every conceivable adviser and counterparty.

Eddie Parladorio believed that Retail Acquisitions had been treated like ‘mushrooms’ by Green over the extent of the pension deficit (‘kept in [the] dark and fed shit’). He complained via email about how they had been ‘forced to do the deal at breakneck speed with all the SPG special twists and turns’, leaving them dealing with ‘painful and distracting firefighting’ on problems including relations with an ‘angered Pensions Regulator who was clearly smarting from historic issues’. An atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust rose up between Green and BHS’s new owners. At one of the first BHS board meetings under Retail Acquisitions, a lawyer friend of Eddie Parladorio’s called Dominic Chandler passed around a handwritten note warning that Green’s team might have left ‘covert listening devices’ in the conference rooms. It suggested they adjourn to another location. According to minutes of the session on 25 March, when they were outside, Chandler told his colleagues he had met a security specialist who had said ‘that it had been widely understood within his industry that SPG had for some years employed a covert security team, and that he had, inter alia, installed listening devices in his business in order to listen in on staff discussions’. Retail Acquisitions paid £7,500 to have Marylebone House and North West House swept for bugs left by the tycoon’s aides, but they found nothing.

None of this angst was visible to the outside world. Green had ostensibly sold BHS to a group of wealthy entrepreneurs who were committed to turning it around. The initial press reaction to the unconventional deal was muted, and apart from a smattering of articles trying to explain the backgrounds of the buyers using publicly available information, the story soon faded away. No doubt the billionaire used his media contacts to smooth its path.

BHS’s new owner, Retail Acquisitions Limited, was a shell company incorporated less than four months earlier. Its 90 per cent shareholder was a forty-eight-year-old called Dominic Chappell. None of my contacts had ever heard of him. Bell Pottinger, Chappell’s PR firm, said that he would be unable to provide a CV ‘at short notice due to other commitments’. However, it sent over a paragraph on his career highlights, which apparently included overseeing ‘a €20 million, four-year turnaround plan’ at a Spanish oil depot, ‘heading up the property and construction division of his family business’ and ‘acting as the [managing director] for the media-based start-up IMI Group’, the business behind the Interactive Sportscar Championship.

Chappell’s Companies House record was clean: he had no previous directorships. However, a deeper search showed this was because he had created a new record for himself. Under his old identity was a string of collapsed businesses. The most recent, Island Harbour, looked like some kind of property development on the Isle of Wight. On a whim, I typed Chappell’s name into Twitter. I spotted a lone message from an anonymous account questioning his credentials to buy BHS. I contacted the sender, who called me. By a stroke of luck, he had been closely involved in the financing of Island Harbour. ‘You get some borrowers who start out with good intentions and manage to get into trouble,’ the source said. ‘Chappell was just a different kettle of fish entirely. This is the first time I’ve heard of him since then and I nearly spilled my coffee. He struck me as a great bullshitter but I don’t think he has the credibility to pull off this kind of deal. He’s not in that kind of league whatsoever.’

My skin began to tingle with the feeling that turns all journalists into hopeless addicts: the intuition that there was a big story brewing. I suspected there was a direct relationship between the BHS pension deficit – the very mention of which made Green so twitchy – and Chappell’s obvious unsuitability to run a business of 164 stores and 11,000 staff. With no other leads, I decided to go through the phone book and cold-call addresses near Island Harbour Marina on the Isle of Wight. The breakthrough came in the form of a salty voice down the phone. ‘The most important thing you need to know about Dominic Chappell,’ it said, ‘is he’s a sociopath.’ My pulse quickened and I strained to jot down every word. ‘I didn’t know what that word meant until I met him,’ the voice continued. ‘If you Google it, you’ll find twenty points. Dominic Chappell ticks all the boxes. He’s a Walter Mitty, a Svengali.’

I had stumbled across the old harbourmaster who had managed the disastrous Island Harbour scheme for Chappell and his partners. As soon as possible, I caught a train to Southampton, crossed the Solent by ferry and took a taxi from Cowes to a marina on the Medina river.

It was a cool March day. Boats creaked and sighed in the dry dock. Sounds of sanding and tapping drifted through the air. Henry Hector was waiting for me in a quiet café decorated with cut-away pencil schematics of yachts, overlooking the marina. The harbourmaster was a whiskery, weather-beaten man in an old anorak. He spoke in a hoarse East End whisper.

‘I’ve ducked and dived, but I’ve lived an honest life,’ he said, by way of an introduction. Chappell, in contrast, was a ‘total reprobate’. The story came tumbling out: Hector had met Chappell through his brother, Damon, whom Hector had employed at a boat restoration business in Antibes while Damon was recovering from his cocaine affair. In 2005, Chappell and his father had come up with the idea of building luxury holiday homes around a marina. They alighted on a site being marketed by the property agency King Sturge on an offshoot of the River Medina, which cleaves between west and east Cowes. Island Harbour was not a prime location. It was almost a mile south of the Folly Inn pub, the point beyond which ‘anything on the Medina is considered Timbuktu’, in the words of a local. Back then, Hector said, it looked like ‘a swamp full of tiddly boats’. But in 2006, the property boom was nearing its peak, and unrealistic projects were all the rage. In June that year, a few days before The Prodigy, Foo Fighters and Coldplay headlined the nearby Isle of Wight festival in Newport, Chappell and his father agreed to buy Island Harbour from a local landowner, Syd Cavner.

Chappell partnered with an Irish builder, Kevin Clancy, who brought in Tom Barry, a former head of corporate banking at Allied Irish Bank. Chappell owned 50 per cent through Olivia Investments, his father’s holding company in Gibraltar. Clancy and Barry took 25 per cent each. Unknown to his partners, Chappell was an undischarged bankrupt at the time. Nonetheless, he became a director of their development company and played a lead role in its affairs, in breach of insolvency rules. Chappell ‘didn’t have a shilling’, Hector said, but the presence of Barry, a respected figure in Dublin, persuaded Anglo Irish Bank to lend the trio £24 million to buy the site and fund the development. Island Harbour came with planning permission for forty-eight holiday homes, seven of which had already been finished. Chappell’s team sought permission for a further 119 flats. They also wanted to build a restaurant and dredge the marina to put in new pontoons. Hector excitedly moved to the Isle of Wight and took up his new job as harbourmaster.

It was an expensive plan, and contractors on the island tended to charge a premium because the closest competition was on the mainland, but Chappell didn’t seem interested in controlling costs. The moment Anglo Irish’s loan arrived, Hector said, Chappell bought several Range Rovers. He leased a Eurocopter EC120 helicopter, which he flew back and forth from Dorset, and bought an X-41 racing yacht to sail at Cowes Week and the Rolex Fastnet. ‘He just blew the money,’ Hector said. ‘It was overspending – stupid beyond your wildest dreams.’

Chappell was charming and confident. He told the Daily Mail that buyers would benefit from ‘a sense of tranquillity’ at the marina, and he spun the locals tall tales about flying helicopters for the SAS. But Anglo Irish started receiving complaints from contractors who said they were not being paid. When the bank investigated, it found serious accounting irregularities. Money earmarked for contractors had been siphoned off for personal spending. Chappell’s mismanagement was compounded by the financial crisis of 2008, when the market for second homes dried up. Anglo Irish put Island Harbour into administration in 2009 – by which point just eighteen of the first forty-eight homes had been built. The bank considered pursuing Chappell, who had given a personal guarantee for the full £24 million, but he was saved by the scale of the economic crash. Anglo Irish was nationalized and the Island Harbour loan was transferred to Ireland’s ‘bad bank’, known as NAMA. Accounts for Island Harbour subsequently filed by the administrators showed that Irish taxpayers eventually suffered a ‘significant shortfall’. Kevin Clancy and Tom Barry lost several million pounds, and small contractors wrote off £885,000.

Bruce Avey, an investigation officer from the Department for Business’s enforcement unit, looked into Island Harbour’s failure. Although nothing came of his work, the wider fallout was messy. Air & General Finance, the leasing company behind Chappell’s helicopter, tried to reclaim the aircraft when his payments stopped, but realized it had gone missing. The Eurocopter was eventually found at Redhill aerodrome in Surrey, minus its rotor blades. In October 2009, Chappell was made bankrupt by a particularly angry contractor. The Island Harbour administration also brought down the Chappell family’s sixty-two-year-old property company, Eyot (Walton-on-Thames), which had given some kind of cross-guarantee.

Hector had been amazed to hear the BHS news. ‘What’s concerning is that Dominic seemed totally incapable of running any company at all,’ he said. ‘My view is that he couldn’t run a penny machine in a toilet door.’ His view was corroborated by others who were involved with Island Harbour. John Peck, who ran a construction firm on the island, was owed £1.3 million for his work on the housing element when the development went bust. He was eventually paid by the administrators, who decided to finish the work. He remembered Chappell as a ‘smooth-talking guy’ who could ‘charm the pants off a nun’. ‘There were a lot of island businesses that fell foul of his spending,’ Peck said. Of Chappell’s miraculous reinvention as BHS’s new owner, he added, ‘How he manages to bumble from one thing to another amazes me – but then people must let him. If people are going to be foolish enough, he’s going to take advantage and asset-strip it or whatever, because I can just see that’s his style.’

When I returned to London, I tracked down the contractor who had bankrupted Chappell. Steve Frankham picked me up from Sidcup station in a peacock-blue Aston Martin Vanquish Volante. ‘It took me thirty-four years to afford it,’ he said as I climbed in. ‘If it wasn’t for Dominic Chappell it would have been twenty-five years.’ He cackled and put the pedal down. With his self-made tycoon’s tan, thick build and silver hair, Frankham was a jolly cove, but he was also obviously hard as nails. As we drove to his headquarters on a business park in south-east London, he advised, ‘He won’t be able to stop himself spending the money from BHS when he gets it – you watch. He’s flash. It’ll be boats, cars, helicopters all over again.’ Over tea at his office, Frankham explained how his eponymous building consultancy had been persuaded to lend Chappell £150,000 to help him clinch the purchase of Island Harbour from Syd Cavner. Chappell had only ever repaid £30,000. He had also failed to pay some of Frankham’s consultancy fees for work on the marina. Frankham, an ardent Chelsea fan, had been furious enough to spend a further £30,000 bankrupting Chappell on a point of principle.

Frankham’s finance director, John Gardner, rooted around in some paperwork and pulled out Chappell’s final bankruptcy report, drawn up by the accountancy firm BDO. It was dated 6 March 2015 – less than a week before he had bought BHS. It made for an astonishing read. Chappell had debts of £24.5 million, including the loan from Anglo Irish. According to his own pleadings, he had no assets at all. BDO had tried to seize his £300,000 terraced home in the grounds of Bryanston public school in Dorset. The house carried a £233,879 mortgage from Birmingham Midshires. In March 2013, Chappell had offered BDO a sum of £5,000 to walk away. Given the hassle involved, BDO had accepted. But Chappell hadn’t paid. The report said, ‘The trustee reluctantly concluded that it would be disproportionate to continue the action to trial as, even if it was successful, it would not result in a realization for creditors.’

Frankham provided a lethal quote. ‘[We] undertook considerable design work for Chappell and his companies in good faith and he reneged on his promises to pay us,’ he said. ‘We eventually proceeded to bankrupt him when other creditors [with claims] totalling over £25 million came forward in support of the petition. No creditor recovered a penny.’

The coup de grâce came from an Insolvency Service search. Chappell turned out to have been made personally insolvent three times. In 1996, at the age of twenty-nine, he had entered into an individual voluntary arrangement (IVA), an alternative to bankruptcy where a borrower agrees to repay fixed amounts to their creditors over a period of time. He had then been made bankrupt by the London estate agency Foxtons in 2005 over an unpaid fee on the sale of a £1.2 million riverside flat in Fulham, and again by Steve Frankham in 2009. Those facts would prove troublesome for Chappell when they emerged because he had given his advisers a signed assurance that he had only been made bankrupt once, in 2009. The professional firms had apparently not bothered to check their client’s claim with a simple search on the insolvency register.

Chappell sounded almost blasé when I finally got hold of him. ‘If you want to write a character assassination piece such as the piece you’re planning, c’est la vie,’ he said. Green was less sanguine. In an attempt to neuter criticism of Chappell in the Sunday Times, which he knew would rebound badly on him as BHS’s seller, he set up a last-minute interview with the new owner. Eddie Parladorio remarked in an email to some of the Retail Acquisitions team that the meeting was ‘not ideal’, but he accepted it was ‘probably the best way to try and take the sting out’.

It felt strange shaking hands with Chappell in BHS’s boardroom, now cleared of Green’s newspaper cuttings and trinkets. He was porky and unremarkable-looking, dressed in jeans and a navy jumper, but he had a public-school accent and the affable manner of an upmarket estate agent. He struck me as a deeply improbable saviour of a loss-making department store. Sitting on one of Green’s black leather sofas, Chappell said he wanted to ‘set the record straight’. ‘I’ve made some mistakes,’ he said. ‘I’ve really cocked a couple of things up on the way through but I’m an entrepreneur – we’ve got involved in businesses.’

Chappell tried to explain away the IVA (a personal guarantee to a Formula One team), the 2005 bankruptcy (a ‘stupid’ mistake) and the collapse of Island Harbour (Anglo Irish’s fault). He said the bank had illegally switched the £24 million loan from sterling to euros, causing a default, and added, ‘We were 90 per cent of the way through before bloody Anglo Irish started pissing around. We were on time, on track and on budget, and if Anglo are saying any different I’ll sue them.’ Retail Acquisitions’ leader said his team had put £10 million of their own ‘cold, hard cash’ into the BHS deal, including £5 million from Chappell himself – a ‘bonanza’ from his oil business in Cadiz. My ears pricked up when he mentioned that Anthony Gutman, co-head of UK investment banking at Goldman Sachs, had vetted them ‘to make sure we were correct and decent people’. As I turned to leave, Chappell called me back, grinning nervously. ‘Oliver, don’t be too hard on us, OK?’ he said. For a moment, I was almost won over by his charm.

Green rang that evening. His tone was somewhere between matey and menacing. I could hear glasses clinking in the background and imagined him having a sundowner in Monaco. ‘Why are you beating up my guy?’ he said, half-joking. He initially denied that Gutman had been involved, then relented when I mentioned what Chappell had told me. ‘Yeah, so what if he was?’ Green snapped. ‘I wouldn’t lie to you, would I? But do not print that. I do not want Goldman’s name appearing.’ He left me with a typical Green bon mot. ‘I’ll say to you what I always say to my lawyer at Linklaters,’ he grunted. ‘DFU. Right? You can work that out.’

The exposé ran on 29 March 2015, under the headline, ‘Revealed: The Trail of Disasters Behind Mystery Buyer of BHS’. I made sure that Goldman Sachs was mentioned prominently. The way Grant Thornton, Olswang, Goldman and ultimately Green had fallen for Chappell struck me as a remarkable example of groupthink. The most cursory investigation suggested he was thoroughly unfit to run a big business, yet they had all persuaded themselves the deal would work. Grant Thornton and Olswang were obviously desperate for fees. I expected that Goldman was trying to cosy up to Green, who wanted to rid himself of BHS’s losses and pension deficit. Chappell came across as a chancer looking for a way to fund his extravagant lifestyle. In the middle were BHS’s 11,000 employees and 20,000 pension-fund members.

The article met with stunned silence from Monaco, but it stirred up Chappell’s neighbours in Dorset, where he turned out to be nicknamed ‘ConDom’ for his tendency to borrow money and bounce cheques. After Millfield school, Chappell had lived in London, then moved to the Hampshire town of Lymington, where he was part of the yachting community. According to a former girlfriend, he left Lymington ‘owing money left, right and centre’ and set up home in Blandford Forum in the early 2000s. She said he had tried to embrace the country lifestyle, buying a horse and joining the Portman hunt in north Dorset, but his subscription payments had lapsed and he had gradually lost interest. One of his neighbours, a sculptor called George Bingham, rang out of the blue and told me that, prior to BHS, Chappell hadn’t had ‘a brass farthing’. Bingham recounted his own story about ConDom. Bingham was trying to sell his six-bedroom house in the Dorset village of Shillingstone in the autumn of 2011 when Chappell swept up the drive in a black Range Rover. After looking around, Chappell grandly offered £2.2 million on the spot. It was £300,000 less than the asking price, but Bingham conferred with his wife and – to Chappell’s surprise – they accepted. Bingham put down a £2,000 deposit for a rental property so that he and his wife could move out and complete the sale by Christmas, but Chappell missed the dates for exchange and completion, then went silent. In irritation, Bingham spent the first half of 2012 pursuing Chappell through the small-claims court for the £2,000 he had lost. Chappell missed the first hearing, but turned up at the second and told the judge he had been away working on an oil rig. Bingham eventually recouped his £2,000 from Olivia Investments, the holding company in Gibraltar run by Chappell’s father.

Other than calls from Bingham and a few other neighbours, the trail went cold for a week. Sometimes in those situations you have to pray for a new piece of information to arrive from left field. That is exactly what happened. The weekend after the first Chappell exposé, my uncle got married by Loch Lomond. As I staggered to bed in the early hours of the morning, I scrolled through my iPhone and spotted an intriguing email. The subject line was, ‘Chappell/Sutton/BHS’. The message said, ‘We can help you to know the real story behind it and who is the mastermind and what is going to happen.’ I Googled the sender’s name. He seemed to be a hairdresser based in Knightsbridge. It looked odd, but at that point I was open to any lead. A few days later I was sitting in the Capital hotel bar in Knightsbridge with George Vallossian and his wife, Melissa. Mrs Vallossian’s maiden name was Tarrant. She was a sister of Nicola Tarrant, the fraudster Paul Sutton’s girlfriend. Melissa, who was clear and straightforward, described Nicola as a brassy, good-looking blonde in her early fifties. She explained that Nicola had acquired a taste for money at a young age: in her early twenties she had been the mistress of the boxing promoter Frank Warren, who had showered her with couture from the designer Azzedine Alaïa and bought her a Porsche 911. Nicola’s name had come up in the attempted murder trial of Terry Marsh, the former prize fighter who was accused of shooting Warren outside the Broadway theatre in Barking in 1989. Marsh’s barrister, who was trying to suggest that a rival lover might have had a motive to shoot Warren, referred to her as ‘the flower girl’ because of the popular stall she ran at Romford market. (Marsh was acquitted at the end of the trial.) Nicola eventually married another man, Bradley Wetenhall. She reverted to her maiden name and became Sutton’s girlfriend when she and Wetenhall divorced.

Nicola Tarrant was Paul Sutton’s groupie. She had even helped him take money from members of her own family, including Melissa, who was owed about £130,000 from B52 Investments. Like others among Sutton’s victims, Melissa had received threatening letters from Eddie Parladorio’s law firm, Manleys. She and her husband, George, who spoke with a thick Lebanese accent, felt a moral obligation to stop Sutton. It was they who had delivered the dossier on his past to Green’s apartment block in August 2013. Now they handed me a brown envelope containing the same material. It was dynamite. The most important document was the 2002 French fraud conviction, which described how Sutton had siphoned off millions of francs from a company called Prestige and spent it on travel, restaurants, salaries for his children’s nannies and staff in villas in Monaco and St-Tropez. It also said he had sent millions of francs from Clamart III, the company that had owned the Bouygues building, to an Irish bank account ‘without justification’. Sutton had been found guilty of stealing or concealing corporate assets and sentenced to three years in jail, but the judgment said he was ‘en fuite’ – on the run. The dossier included a picture of Sutton looking puce-faced and shifty. Even the idea that Sutton had introduced Chappell to the BHS deal would be devastating.

George and Melissa Vallossian struck me as entirely honest people, motivated by a desire to expose what was happening. They explained that Sutton rarely put his name to deals, usually choosing to operate through puppets. They believed he was still pulling Chappell’s strings. ‘It’s wickedness, when you think of all those poor people’s pensions,’ Melissa sighed.

When I called Green and mentioned Sutton’s name, he immediately saw where it was leading. It was my first experience of his hair-trigger temper. ‘Bollocks!’ he shouted. ‘Total bollocks. He has no role. None. The first piece you wrote has already done enough damage.’ Chappell also tried to distance himself from Sutton. ‘In my view he’s a grade-A scumbag,’ he said. ‘I came to know him a year ago when he was talking directly to Philip. He owes me a huge amount and I’m suing him.’ Green’s denial was undermined by Bell Pottinger, Chappell’s PR firm, which sent over Sutton’s signed promise that he would have no further involvement with BHS. Green had clearly been concerned enough by Sutton’s presence to ask for it.

Retail Acquisitions instructed the law firm Harbottle & Lewis to send my employers an aggressive, four-page letter accusing me of ‘operating under a grave misunderstanding’. Green also leaned hard on my editor, Dominic O’Connell, to kill the story. O’Connell retreated into a private room to take the tycoon’s call on his mobile phone. When he emerged half an hour later, O’Connell sent me a Google Chat message saying the piece was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and that it would be scrapped. I argued and begged until O’Connell changed his mind again. From that moment on, O’Connell backed the BHS story with increasing resolve. As soon as he heard the article was going to run, Green called me back. ‘Take a look in the mirror!’ he screamed. ‘There are 11,000 jobs at stake here. This is going to get very ugly, Oliver. I’ve never had a fight with the Sunday Times, but I’ll fight if that’s what you want.’ He conveniently seemed to have forgotten about his shouting match with John Jay in 2000 and his out-of-court settlement with the paper over the story of Tina’s Marks & Spencer share-buying the same year.

The scoop, ‘Fraudster’s Links to the £1 Sale of BHS’, ran on 12 April 2015. I awoke on Sunday morning to a missed call from Green. It seemed cowardly to avoid him, so I rang back and submitted myself to ten minutes of uncontrolled rage. ‘What is your fucking ambition here, apart from being a smart arse?’ he shouted. ‘You are going to fucking bankrupt this company, and when you do I’m going to sue you and the Sunday Times.’ Green added, ‘If I was Chappell I wouldn’t bother with lawyers. I’d come round to your office and punch you on the fucking nose.’ Then he abruptly changed gears and became almost friendly. ‘Anyway, why did you use an old picture of Sutton?’ he demanded. I couldn’t help laughing.

‘We are where we are,’ Green concluded with a sigh. ‘I know it’s not personal. I know it’s the game. But leave it. Leave it, seriously, or this is going to get ugly.’

The next week, Green tried to contact Martin Ivens, the Sunday Times’ editor, but was told that he was too busy to speak. ‘He will be busy when I’ve finished with him,’ Green promised. ‘I’m gonna call Rupert [Murdoch] … because this is unacceptable. This has got to stop.’

Bell Pottinger resigned as Retail Acquisitions’ PR adviser a few days later. Chappell had lied to the firm about his bankruptcy record. On top of that and the Sutton revelations, one of Bell Pottinger’s partners happened to be friendly with George Bingham, Chappell’s neighbour-cum-enemy. Bingham had warned the PR man, ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole – with a dead rat tied to the end.’ Bell Pottinger stepped down with a terse statement saying that its work was now ‘complete’.

The trail went cold again. But Steve Frankham, the contractor who had bankrupted Chappell, quickly proved to be accurate in his prediction. Unseen by anyone beyond his immediate circle, Chappell was splashing money around like water. One of his first actions as BHS’s new owner was to buy a dark green Range Rover. Less than three weeks after picking it up, he made inquiries about buying an SE Tech Discovery from the same dealership, Hunters in Southampton. When in London, he stayed at the five-star Landmark hotel opposite BHS’s headquarters, where he spent almost £1,000 over three nights alone in April 2015. He took his wife, Rebecca, skiing in the Austrian resort of Kitzbühel and bought a Swan 42 racing yacht, which he called Maverick 5. Chappell had team polo shirts made with BHS’s logo on the back. Grant Thornton and Olswang were so eager to curry favour with him that they agreed to sponsor the boat with £65,000 and £50,000 respectively. David Roberts of Olswang also invited Chappell and his wife to watch Madonna at the law firm’s box at the London O2 arena.

Chappell paid £8,000 for lifetime membership of 10 Castle Street, a new private club near his home in Dorset, where he spent £4,442 in a single day for a BHS board lunch. He organized races for Maverick 5 at Round the Island and Cowes Week, bantering on email with his teammates, ‘Great crew for this one, so let’s not get to [sic] pissed the night before (like last time).’ There were shooting weekends with friends in the Scottish Borders and Wales and trips to events such as Royal Ascot. Despite its distressed finances, BHS’s new owner seemed to think he was entitled to a tycoon’s lifestyle – and he was egged on by his colleagues. A typical email from Eddie Parladorio to Chappell in June 2015 said, ‘Hope First Class treated you kindly, that the champagne flowed and the pillow was fluffy.’ In the same message, Parladorio mentioned that he was about to have breakfast with Paul Sutton.

These extravagances might have remained secret had a surreal coincidence not given the BHS story a new lease of life. One of my contacts was a banker who occasionally gave me advice and tips on stories. One evening in March 2015, he was sitting in the bar of a hotel in central London when he got chatting to an attractive woman in her early thirties. Rebecca Chappell explained that her husband was about to buy the BHS department store chain from Sir Philip Green. They stayed in touch, and over the next few months she excitedly relayed how Dominic had paid himself enough to buy them two Range Rovers, a long-overdue family skiing holiday and a yacht. I happened to tell this contact the story of my emergency interview with Chappell in the BHS boardroom, and how he had cut the meeting short because he needed to fly off and meet suppliers. My banker friend spluttered with laughter. ‘Yeah, suppliers of snow, maybe,’ he said. That was the weekend the Chappells had gone to Kitzbühel.

The information he gave me formed the basis of the third scoop, published on 7 June 2015, ‘New Owner of Loss-Making BHS Enjoys a Life on the Ocean Wave’. It included a quote from Chappell, who said, ‘There’s no difference in my pattern of behaviour since I bought BHS, and if you’re trying to suggest I’ve had a lot of money from BHS, that’s not the case.’

Green was incandescent yet again. ‘What do you expect him to do, ride a bike to work?’ he bellowed down the phone on the Friday before publication, when I mentioned Chappell’s new Range Rover. ‘I’m gonna come round there and smack you in the fucking mouth!’ A few hours later, another threatening letter arrived from Harbottle & Lewis. Retail Acquisitions’ aggression was being fuelled by Eddie Parladorio, its legal director. He had already remarked in an email to Chappell that he would like to ‘put a dent in Shah’. He approved the Harbottles letter, saying that he was itching ‘to teach this chap (and his employers) a lesson’. Chappell forwarded a copy to Green’s PA, Katie O’Brien. Parladorio then reassured Chappell, ‘They know we are watching them with machine guns ready.’

The letter was full of the usual bluster. ‘Our clients are tasked with turning around a once-great British brand,’ it said. ‘You should allow our clients to pursue that aim.’ However, one section stood out. Headed ‘Your Communications with Third Parties’, it included comments I had made to Green about Chappell being a ‘liar’ and a ‘spiv’. The billionaire had clearly filleted our conversation and passed bits out of context to Chappell’s lawyers for ammunition. I felt a red mist descend. I texted Green, ‘Surprised you didn’t mention your repeated threats of violence to me down the phone.’ I went out for a run to relieve the stress. When I came home, my phone was glowing with a string of missed calls from a hidden number. I rang Green back. It was the only time I ever heard him sound contrite. ‘Oliver, I apologize,’ he said, his gravelly voice suddenly warm. ‘You know, I only lose my temper because I care.’