14.

Turbulence

Brett Palos was thirteen when he and his sister moved into Philip Green’s house in St John’s Wood with their mother. Tina Green’s son was different in temperament and looks from his future stepfather. Calm and polite, Palos had sandy hair, a shy smile and a slim physique that gradually swelled to include a Mayfair paunch as he grew older. Despite the differences, he always looked up to Green. He was among the last to leave the party when Tom Jones and Earth, Wind & Fire played at PG50 in 2002, staggering around in a sparkly jacket with a couple of friends, holding up a number-ten sign purloined from one of the tables, joking, ‘Out of ten, we give it ten.’

Green was reported to have footed the £1 million bill for performances from George Benson and Lionel Richie when Palos married his girlfriend, Magda Ramadan, in Marrakech in 2006. Three years later, Palos joined the board of Taveta Investments, Arcadia Group’s holding company. ‘This is a family business,’ Green told the Daily Mail. ‘Brett has a great relationship with my kids, so hopefully as life develops he is going to be their guide.’

Palos dabbled in deals of his own, buying and selling an office-supplies company called ISA Retail and the O2 shopping centre on Finchley Road in London. He went into residential property investment with the corpulent trader Bruce Ritchie, one of Green’s closest friends, and he made an unsuccessful takeover bid for the car dealership Lookers with the octogenarian East End property wheeler-dealer Jack Petchey. But by 2015, when Palos was forty, he was still nowhere near Green’s league. At the point of the BHS sale, he and his stepfather did a silly deal for a few million pounds that quickly boomeranged back at them.

On 6 March 2015, less than a week before Green sold BHS to Dominic Chappell for £1, he let a company co-run by Palos buy the freehold of BHS’s well-located Ealing store for £6.9 million. Thackeray Estates, Palos’s business, then sold the freehold on for £10 million three months later, pocketing a £3 million profit that would have belonged to BHS had the department store held on to the property a little longer. It was a fact that lay dormant in the Land Registry’s records until I received a tip-off. No law had been broken, and in the grand scheme of Green’s billions £3 million was a paltry sum, but it illustrated just how hard the family had shaken the piggy bank upside down before passing it on. According to a former insider, the small circle of people in Arcadia who knew about the transaction were very nervous of its hitting the press. One of Palos’s colleagues at Thackeray Estates, Charles Thompson, told the commercial estate agent handling the £10 million resale to keep it secret. When she asked why, he wrote, ‘I think you know why …’

When I put it to Green in October, he was almost plaintive. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked. ‘We could be allies.’ When that plea had no effect, he turned to scorn. ‘People buy and sell buildings all day long,’ he said. ‘Do you think we would knowingly sell something for £7 million we could have sold for £10 million?’ Green insisted the transaction had been carried out on an arm’s-length basis and that it had been approved by Chappell, although Chappell later told Parliament he’d had no idea the buyer was Palos. Chappell claimed that when he challenged the billionaire after the story broke, Green told him, ‘Well, that’s show business.’

Green threatened to seek an injunction, but the facts were set out in black and white on Land Registry documents. The article, ‘Quick BHS Profit for Green Stepson’, caused the tycoon more trouble than I realized at the time. Green had assured the Pensions Regulator there had been no recent property transactions at BHS involving any members of his family. On the Friday before our publication, his company secretary, Adam Goldman, hurriedly had to contact the watchdog to correct the position. It cannot have pleased the already-suspicious regulator.

By now, the relationship between the billionaire and the Sunday Times had descended into a state of war. Green had bombarded Dominic O’Connell and Martin Ivens with complaints. He repeatedly tried to call Rebekah Brooks, News UK’s chief executive, and Rupert Murdoch, its ultimate proprietor, to no avail. Rival journalists on other papers expressed amazement that I was being allowed to take on Green. One gave me a snippet of information that contributed to a front-page story on BHS. ‘There’s no way my editor will let me print it, so you may as well have it,’ he said with a shrug. Green claimed the business community was ‘mortified’ by his treatment, although that didn’t tally with the many emails of encouragement we were receiving. And however bad things had become, they were about to get a lot worse. The pension crisis Green had tried so hard to submerge was rising steadily to the surface.

Chappell had been using jargon like ‘rightsizing’ to describe his plans for BHS’s two pension schemes ever since he bought the business. In our emergency interview in March 2015, he had said, ‘It’s been here for 20 years, it’s been the wrong size for 20 years. It’s got to be dealt with.’ In July, Retail Acquisitions instructed Grant Thornton and Olswang to begin work on a new version of Green’s Project Thor restructuring, using the codename Project Vera, but it went onto the back-burner while Chappell and Eddie Parladorio concentrated on their plan to asset-strip BHS’s international and online businesses. As 2015 moved into 2016, the pension deficit became a more pressing concern. Any kind of restructuring would obviously require a big cheque from Green. There were two problems: Project Vera would be more expensive than Project Thor because of movements in gilt yields, and Green would not countenance paying anything until the Pensions Regulator abandoned its investigation into him.

Chris Martin, the chairman of BHS’s pension trustees, was desperate to rescue the funds. On 21 January 2016, he had a phone conversation with Green. Martin recorded in his notes, ‘SPG was clear that he thought a solution could be found but only if tPR agreed to discontinue their investigations as part of a settlement.’ Martin asked ‘SPG’ whether he would be willing to join a round-table meeting with the regulator and the trustees to hammer out a peace agreement. He thought a £120 million payment from BHS’s former owner might seal the deal. ‘SPG indicated that he would not want to do so unless he knew that tPR will discontinue,’ Martin wrote. ‘SPG also noted that in his view, the £120 million would not have to be paid at once.’

Green was not as insouciant as he came across to Martin. Between late January and early February, he deluged the pensions minister, Baroness Altmann, with twenty-two text messages, some sent as early as 5.30 a.m. He seemed to be seeking her support for his tussle with the regulator. When Altmann’s officials advised her that it would be inappropriate to intervene because of the watchdog’s active investigation, Green texted, ‘This is crazy we need a solution.’ A few days later, he added, ‘Ros I hear what you are saying but I am sorry to say you are behaving exactly like the regulator which is wholly unacaetable [sic]. Not your fault you are with totally incompeteanant [sic] people. I am happy to wait till wed night after which I will go where I have to go. This is not a threat but I have to look after our business.’

The stand-off between Green and the Pensions Regulator killed Project Vera, and with it any hope of making the two BHS funds more sustainable. On 3 February, the barrister Dominic Chandler sent an email around BHS’s board members wondering whether they should tell the regulator that Green’s attitude was ‘a reason why Vera is no longer available’.

The company was already sliding towards a more radical solution. Chappell was planning to put it through a form of insolvency known as a company voluntary arrangement (CVA), which allows a business to rid itself of certain liabilities and renegotiate rents. Property costs were BHS’s biggest single handicap. In Clydebank, it was tied into a rent of £440,000 a year when the local market rent was £240,000. In Monks Cross, York, it was paying £830,000 against a market rent of about £500,000. Whenever Darren Topp or his predecessor, Richard Price, had tried to reason with landlords under Green, they had run into the obstacle of their boss’s conspicuous wealth. A former executive said, ‘It was always difficult. You’re sat in front of a landlord, going, “This store loses half a million pounds a year, we need the rent to come down.” People would look at you as if to say, “Well, the business can’t afford it but the bloke who owns this business has got a lot of money.” ’ It had been apparent to Michael Hitchcock, the interim finance director, that BHS needed to go through a CVA as soon as he arrived, but Chappell had dallied – again, because of his fixation with the international and online businesses.

In January 2016, BHS engaged the accountancy firm KPMG to carry out a CVA under the codename Project Pipe. The planning was complicated by the growing tension between Retail Acquisitions and the management team. On 4 January, Hitchcock circulated a Christmas trading update showing that like-for-like sales had fallen by 2 per cent, leaving BHS £20 million behind budget. Later that month, Chappell emailed Parladorio, ‘There is a lot of arse covering going on … Michael and Darren were at the helm, if we had that cash we would be good to June or even the end of the year!’ He added angrily, ‘We as RAL [Retail Acquisitions Limited] backed the BHS management in THERE [sic] turnaround plan and they are fucking miles off.’

In response to Topp’s hiring of Hitchcock, Chappell appointed his own finance director, a rambling, ruddy-cheeked accountant called Aidan Treacy. The childish one-upmanship led to clashes and confusion. Hitchcock was interim finance director of BHS. Treacy became finance director of Retail Acquisitions, its parent company. They contradicted each other in emails and Treacy openly criticized Hitchcock for choosing KPMG to do the CVA when Grant Thornton had pre-existing knowledge of BHS. Despite the dysfunctional atmosphere, the process lurched forward. BHS had 164 stores. The intention was to keep seventy-seven as they were, cut the rents to market levels in forty-seven and close or substantially renegotiate rents for the other forty. BHS needed 75 per cent of all its creditors – not just landlords – to approve the restructuring.

Chappell had stayed in touch with Paul Sutton for the duration of his time at BHS. However, other than throwing him a few thousand pounds through a company called Capital Management, which received £730,000 from Retail Acquisitions, he had genuinely cut the fraudster out of the financial rewards of the deal. On 3 March, a day before the CVA was due to be announced, Sutton caught wind and leaked it to the press out of spite. The CVA blew the BHS story wide open. Until then, common interest had bound the protagonists together. In the heat of the media glare, the ties melted. The enmity between Green and Chappell caught fire. So did the mistrust between Retail Acquisitions and BHS. That day, a contact who was closely involved in the unfolding events called me with a tip that proved to be a turning point. For almost a year, insiders had been telling me that Green was under a Section 72 investigation by the Pensions Regulator. The billionaire had repeatedly blocked the story by denying it outright – even getting his company secretary, Adam Goldman, to ring my editor and explain why it would be impossible for the watchdog to make a claim on Arcadia.

The contact now told me that Green had made an £80 million settlement offer to the regulator, which had been rejected. He provided a specific detail that allowed me to confirm it with other sources: £40 million of the offer was in cash and the other £40 million was the charge Arcadia held over BHS’s stock and the Cribbs Causeway store near Bristol. Green tried to deny it, but when he realized it had been confirmed elsewhere he tacitly acknowledged its truth. ‘Just write that I’m keen to help find a solution,’ he ordered. John Ralfe, a pensions expert, provided a punchy quote. ‘This deal is coming back to bite Sir Philip Green,’ he said. ‘He was wrong to think that by selling BHS he was, with one bound, free of its huge pension problems.’

The story, ‘Green Faces £80 Million BHS Pensions Bill’, led the Sunday Times business section on 6 March 2016. It had an almost audible impact. For the first time, it revealed that Green was at loggerheads with the Pensions Regulator. More importantly for BHS’s 20,000 pension savers, it reported that the funds were being dumped as part of the CVA. They were going into an assessment period for entry into the Pension Protection Fund, the industry-backed lifeboat. During that state of limbo, benefits for 13,000 members would be cut by at least 10 per cent to the PPF’s basic levels. I awoke to a furious text message from Monaco. ‘Morning why would i [sic] think you could change,’ Green typed. ‘I am unclear why you bother to phone, ask questions and then just write what you want.’ The next day, Green rang to announce that he no longer wished to speak to me. It was like a teenage break-up. He followed it with a scrambled text message, ‘Oliver to be a b4 [sic] person in life you have to apoligse [sic] when you are wrong clearly you dont [sic] see that … If you cant [sic] see that hey ho be lucky.’

Chappell and his cronies were mirthful. The fuse that had been lit with Chappell’s dubious reputation a year earlier was burning down towards the powder keg of Green’s pension liabilities, and for once Retail Acquisitions was not the main target. ‘Would love to be a fly on the wall as young Phil tucks into his Cinnamon Grahams,’ Eddie Parladorio chortled over email to Chappell. Green’s excoriation was all the more welcome for them because, two days earlier, The Guardian had broken the crucial revelation that they had taken millions of pounds out of BHS via a loan at the point of the deal. It was the first hard evidence that Chappell’s lavish lifestyle was being funded from the dying store chain’s money. ‘What spending spree?’ Chappell protested in an email to BHS’s PR adviser when The Guardian approached them for comment. ‘Exactly – conspiracy theory,’ the communications man replied.

Richard Caring also watched his former business partner’s travails with satisfaction. Their friendship had long since soured into a state of resentful rivalry, to the extent that Caring would ask the crew on his superyacht to program the details of the Greens’ Lionheart into its automatic identification system so they could steer away and avoid it. The rag trader-turned-restaurateur was cruising with a group of friends when the story emerged. To scare and amuse his guests, Caring instructed one of the boat’s crew to mock up a version of the Daily Mail’s website with a spoof exposé of their holiday, which he printed out on A4 paper and distributed at breakfast. The headline exclaimed, ‘Caring Parties on his 65 Metre Superyacht While BHS Burns’. The article said, ‘Obviously, neither Philip Green nor Richard Caring have much concern for their staff’s pension dilemma. Caring is currently throwing another “wild party” on his yacht, Silver Angel, in the Seychelles. Extravagance, wine, women and song are abundant on this “supposed” diving trip. Party guests Arun Nayar, the textiles tycoon; Mark Steinberg, the owner of Chelsea Harbour; and several other celebrities are amongst the “devil-may-care” crowd!’ There was a quote from an imaginary BHS pension trustee, who said it was ‘bloody disgusting how these people behave!!!’. The piece was illustrated with a photograph of Caring and his friends having fun in Mexican fancy dress, complete with stick-on moustaches.

Chappell organized a fine-wine tasting event for senior staff at Vintners Hall in the City to celebrate the ‘important milestone’ of the impending CVA. He had to withdraw the invitation almost immediately when Sarah Gillett, BHS’s head of HR, pointed out that 500 redundancies had been announced that morning. ‘The timing of this feels very inappropriate,’ she said. Somehow, BHS muddled through to the crunch vote on 23 March 2016. It was held at the drab Novotel in Hammersmith, west London. I spoke to two typical creditors, Rakesh and Rita Verma, a genial couple in their late fifties who ran a business in Wembley making bean bags and cushions. ‘We’ve been dealing with them for twelve years,’ Rakesh said. ‘I still believe it’s a British brand and it can survive provided discipline is exercised on buying and costs.’

The CVA was passed with a thumping 95 per cent approval rate. BHS seemed to have given itself a fighting chance. Retail Acquisitions and Aidan Treacy sought success bonuses of £500,000 and £250,000 respectively, but they were vetoed by the BHS board. Chappell may have been irritated, but in any case he was not there to celebrate. Four days earlier, he had flown to the Bahamas with his family for another three-week holiday on board his yacht.

Until the CVA, most of Fleet Street had either ignored the BHS story or played along with Green’s narrative. Now, other papers started to see the significance of the pension deficit. The Financial Times was the first. ‘The Pensions Regulator needs to extract more than the £80 million he has reportedly offered so far,’ wrote Jonathan Guthrie, the Lombard columnist. ‘Otherwise, the weakness of the system created to protect promises regarding final salary pensions in the wake of the pensions scandal at Mirror Group will be starkly apparent.’

I was walking along Oxford Street – appropriately enough, past Topshop – when I was rung by a friend. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said with glee in his voice. He directed me to a specialist website for superyacht enthusiasts. The site had details and photographs of Project FB 262, a 295-ft boat being built by the Italian yard Benetti with a price tag of £100 million. Apparently, it was the biggest yacht Benetti had produced since Nabila, made for the late Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 1980. The soon-to-be-owner of the new Lionheart was none other than Sir Philip Green. Buying a new superyacht with its own gym and helipad at the outset of a pension crisis was guaranteed to be a PR disaster.

I called Green. ‘Oh, please,’ he groaned. ‘Fuck off, OK? Fuck off. All right?’

It turned into our longest and most exhausting bout yet. I marvelled as Green ducked and weaved, skilfully moving from aggression and threats to righteous indignation and self-pity and then back to anger, all the while throwing out disorientating facts and numbers that made my head spin. I put it to him that it was an unfortunate time to take delivery of a superyacht, given the state of the BHS pension funds. ‘And what’s one thing got to do with the other?’ Green demanded. ‘First of all, I’m not, anyway. Where are they related?’ Before I could answer, he interrupted, ‘When did you last move your house?’ I paused, bemused. I told him I didn’t see the connection. ‘Well, exactly!’ Green shouted. ‘So what somebody does years ago – what the fuck’s that got to do with the pension?’ ‘You can imagine how it’ll look,’ I said. ‘It’ll look like that because that’s how you want to paint it,’ Green growled. ‘Continue. This is going to end up with the lawyers – you know that, don’t you? But go on. Carry on.’

Further probing revealed that he was denying the story on a technicality. It was Tina who had ordered the boat. She had done so four years earlier, hence the confusing reference to ‘what somebody does years ago’. ‘This is my family,’ Green said. ‘My wife wants to do what she likes. Right? She hasn’t robbed any banks. And if by any chance she’s got a boat to sell and she buys a new boat, right, what’s the big deal?’ Then he lowered his voice and sounded genuinely wounded. ‘What is it that you want to achieve?’ the tycoon asked. ‘That I’m a bad guy? It’s very personal, isn’t it. It’s all very personal.’ I pointed out that Green’s family and businesses were inextricably linked, given Tina’s ownership of Taveta Investments, Arcadia’s holding company. He roared back into full blast. ‘She can do what she likes!’ he shouted. ‘Is she putting anybody in jeopardy if she wants to change her boat? Why don’t you take a picture of my car? I’ve got a car – is that all right, or shall I go round on a fucking bike?’

The conversation degenerated. It went like this:

OS:    Your car probably didn’t cost £100 million.

SPG:  No – nor did a boat.

OS:    How much did it cost?

SPG:  I don’t know.

OS:    I don’t believe that.

SPG:  Sorry?

OS:    You must know how much it cost.

SPG:  I don’t know. I’m not involved in it. I’ve never been there.

OS:    Never been where?

SPG:  The shipyard.

OS:    You could still order it without going there.

SPG:  Sorry?

OS:    How can you know it’s not accurate if you don’t know how much the boat cost?

SPG:  I didn’t say I didn’t know how much it cost.

OS:    You just did.

SPG:  I said it did not cost £100 million, is what I said.

OS:    So how much did it cost?

SPG:  It’s none of your fucking business. How’s that?

We ended on a war footing. ‘It’s not a threat – it’s just I don’t have a choice but to call the lawyers, ’cos I’m not going to put up with you,’ Green said. ‘I’m just telling you now: you’ll get sued personally, and the Sunday Times.’ Green took great pride in his ability to manipulate the media. It was a sign of how desperate he had become that he turned to Schillings, the most aggressive libel law firm in Britain. Schillings denied the story that Green had essentially already confirmed. ‘Neither our client, nor anyone in his family has recently acquired or is about to acquire a yacht,’ the law firm stated. Unfortunately for Green, his comments had been caught on tape. The article ran on 13 March 2016 under the headline, ‘The £100 Million Boat Comes In – Just as BHS Pensions Need Bailing Out’. It included the first call for the tycoon to be stripped of his knighthood over the BHS pension scandal. Frank Field, the veteran Labour MP, said, ‘This raises the question: is he a suitable person to bear that emblem? The government should employ every power it has to get him to pay up.’

A source inside Green’s camp told me the thing he feared most was the Daily Mail picking up the story. He hated the Mail and its editor, Paul Dacre, who had the ability to pour petrol on a fire and turn it into a blazing inferno. At the end of March, exactly that happened. The Mail plastered the story across two pages of its Saturday edition under the headline, ‘A £100 Million Floating Gin Palace and the Pension Scandal That Could Scupper Sir Topshop’. The piece quoted a ‘friend’ of Green, who said it was ‘all bullshit’, that Field was ‘behaving like a complete arsehole’ and that he was ‘not about to be strong-armed by a load of tosser MPs’. It was hubristic in the extreme. Green seemed to have provided a full jerry can of petrol himself.

While Green was flailing in the growing media heat and BHS’s managers were concentrating on the CVA, Chappell was spiralling out of control, increasingly isolated from his Retail Acquisitions team. He had started 2016 in an upbeat mood, asking Eddie Irvine if he could leave his Princess V65 cruiser at the bottom of the ex-Formula One driver’s garden in Miami, adding, ‘If you want to use it no problem.’ He spent $41,000 (£28,700 at the time) on a tender, made inquiries about a third yacht – a higher-spec Princess V85 – and added a Bentley Continental GT Speed and a Land Rover Defender to his car collection. He sent pictures of the Bentley to his wife, Rebecca. She replied, ‘Tres chic mon Cher x.’

As the stress of the CVA process approached in March, Chappell went AWOL. He flew back and forth to Vancouver on a bizarre mission to open BHS stores in Canada, paying tens of thousands of dollars to a local consultant who happened to be an old friend. He made an even more fanciful £7 million takeover bid for the 116-year-old men’s suits retailer Austin Reed, at a time when his advisers were warning that BHS did not have enough money to make contributions to its pension funds or pay its usual levy to the Pension Protection Fund. Chappell was becoming detached from reality, but he was still humoured by Grant Thornton, which put a team of six accountants onto the Austin Reed deal, and Olswang, whose lead lawyer, David Roberts, cheered, ‘Roll forward RAL [Retail Acquisitions Limited]!’

Keith Smith, Retail Acquisitions’ chairman and Chappell’s uncle, must have had a better sense for how dangerously low BHS’s fuel was running as it tried to clear the next mountain range. In February, he quietly suggested to Chappell that they resurrect Project Herald, the plan to fashion a parachute by taking direct ownership of BHS’s profitable international and online businesses. Smith sent Chappell an email headed ‘Shellco’ – corporate slang for a shell company – setting out how they would use a new entity to buy the good parts of BHS, and then Retail Acquisitions itself. ‘Properly handled,’ Smith said, the process might also allow Retail Acquisitions to wipe out the millions of pounds of debt it owed to the faltering department store chain. Chappell took his uncle seriously enough to borrow a further £500,000 from Alex Dellal and spend $280,000 on Todex Corp, a shell company in Las Vegas, which he planned to rename RAL Global. But events moved too quickly.

Michael Hitchcock had resigned as temporary finance director on the eve of the CVA vote in protest at Retail Acquisitions’ shambolic ownership. His antagonism with Aidan Treacy, his rival finance director, had come to a head in January, when Treacy approved a £90,000 BHS loan to Chappell while Hitchcock was away on a skiing holiday. Chappell, who had apparently needed the money to meet a personal tax bill, repaid it in ten days after the BHS board took legal advice. Hitchcock pressed on for another two months, but he finally lost patience during a board meeting on 21 March. Even with the rent cuts promised by the CVA, BHS needed £100 million of new funding to survive. Chappell’s team was supposed to have arranged £60 million from Gordon Brothers, a tough American lender usually seen as a last resort for the destitute, £30 million from various property sales and £10 million from security deposits tied up in letters of credit.

Hitchcock realized the patchwork could not possibly come together. The terms being offered by Gordon Brothers were so strict that BHS would almost certainly breach them in weeks, allowing the US firm to take control. The property deals were also a mess. Retail Acquisitions had been supposed to sell BHS’s Oxford Street flagship lease in 2015 to raise funds for the turnaround. Chappell had promised that it would bring in up to £90 million, but it was now about to be sold to Abu Dhabi’s royal family for £55 million – well short of what BHS needed. Hitchcock apologized to Darren Topp and terminated his consultancy contract.

Topp made another alarming discovery. Chappell had sent more than £1 million of the proceeds of BHS’s Oxford Street disposal and a separate sale of its Sunderland store straight to Retail Acquisitions’ bank account. The amounts, £600,000 from Oxford Street and £440,000 from Sunderland, had been earmarked for VAT payments the cash-strapped store chain needed to make. Topp called an emergency board meeting on 5 April. Chappell admitted that he had instructed lawyers to divert the money without board permission. He agreed to return it after condemnation from his fellow directors, including Keith Smith, but Topp still threatened to resign. He emailed Chappell, ‘Following our board meeting I have left the office as I need some time to go and consider my position. I would appreciate you allowing me that time.’ Topp stepped back from the brink, but he made a discreet call to Green. Topp warned his former paymaster that the management team had lost confidence and was close to walking out. Green, who already knew about the latest crisis in BHS’s finances, became desperate.

Paul Sutton lobbed another grenade into this combustible situation. It was the week of the Panama Papers, when a huge leak from the law firm Mossack Fonseca hit the press. Any headline involving Panama had special currency. Desperate for revenge on Chappell, the fraudster contacted me through an intermediary and provided details of Chappell’s shareholding in Clarberry Investments, the Panamanian company they had established the previous year. Sutton also told me that Chappell had used £1.5 million of BHS’s money, via Retail Acquisitions, to pay off the mortgage on his parents’ house in Sunbury-on-Thames. A separate source called in with the story of Topp’s emergency board meeting and the £1 million missing from the property sales. The emergence of the latter facts in particular sent panic through Chappell’s team. Eddie Parladorio emailed the others, ‘There must be a phone tap or DC’s room is bugged or emails must be being hacked as I cannot imagine any board member going to Shah with such fresh news – this is a very close and very under cover leak!!!!’

The three-pronged scoop on 10 April 2016 was met with incredulity by creditors and landlords who had just voted for the rent cuts. BHS was in utter chaos. A few days later, Chappell and Parladorio almost came to blows in the Marylebone Road headquarters. According to a BHS executive who witnessed it, the pair had a violent row about ‘some fairly nasty people in London’ who had threatened Parladorio’s wife over money they believed Chappell owed them. Parladorio was said to have shouted at Chappell, ‘My family’s at risk!’ The witness said, ‘I thought he was going to break the table at one point. He whacked the table with his hand and then he flung the door open and smashed the side of the wall.’

Green was beside himself. Retail Acquisitions’ tenure had been a year of uninterrupted bungling and scandal. The £100 million finance package Chappell had promised to deliver was in tatters. HMRC was threatening to issue a winding-up petition and there was a shortage of money to pay the coming month’s wages. The tycoon decided it was time to cauterize the wound. He called in his outstanding £35 million debt and pushed BHS into administration.