Category Archives: Philip Green

The foreign royals and billionaire tax exiles collecting UK’s furlough millions

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Read the list of super-rich claimants, from Saudi princes to Dubai monarchs, tax exiles to the UK’s richest

Glympton Park is a sprawling, 2,000-acre estate featuring an 18th-century stately home, nestled in the verdant Oxfordshire countryside near Woodstock.

It was bought for £8m in 1992, by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the senior Saudi royal whose past roles include ambassador to the US. He is said to have spent £42m on renovations, including a pheasant shoot and bullet-proof glass on the driveway to thwart would-be assassins.

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Philip Green is the Scrooge who haunts millions of garment workers | Meg Lewis

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The fallen tycoon leaves behind a mountain of debt, much of it owed to exploited people in Asia earning as little as £4 a day

The collapse of Arcadia in the lead-up to Christmas, and with it the demise of Sir Philip Green’s controversial reign over the UK high street, has a Dickensian feel to it. Over the years, Green has embodied the role of billionaire boss, brazenly handing his wife a tax-free £1.2bn dividend in 2005 (four times the actual annual profits made by the company), while relaxing on his luxury yacht in Monaco. He has rarely showed concern for the workers propping up his empire.

The stark prospect of 13,000 workers losing their jobs and an estimated £350m pensions deficit during a global pandemic is more than enough to constitute the bleak reality of Christmas present, and Arcadia’s collapse will send further shockwaves throughout the fashion industry. Already, news has emerged that Debenhams faces liquidation as JD Sports pulled out of rescue talks, a knock-on effect following the closure of Arcadia’s concession outlets in the department retailer.

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The rock star of retail: how Topshop changed the face of fashion

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With its celebrity collaborations and turbo-charged launches, Philip Green’s Topshop brought fun and drama to the once uninspiring business of clothes-shopping. We chart the rise and fall of the pandemic’s most glamorous corporate victim

“What’s this I’m reading in the paper? It’s a load of absolute shit, that’s what it is. What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid or what? I’ve never read so much rubbish in my life.”

It was February 2010, and I was at my desk in the Guardian office. Philip Green didn’t need to introduce himself. His habit of bellowing down the phone was unmistakable, and I had just written an article about how I was falling out of love with Topshop after a decade being in thrall to its shop floor. Green never did take kindly to criticism of the golden child of his Arcadia empire.

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‘My life became a disaster movie’: the Bangladesh garment factory on the brink

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One factory owner tells how coronavirus cancellations by UK brands have seen him struggle to pay wages

As high streets across England opened this week and hundreds of people jostled through the doors of clothing shops, thousands of miles away in Chittagong, Bangladesh, Mostafiz Uddin is worrying about how to pay his workers’ wages.

At Denim Expert Ltd, the sustainable clothing company he founded in 2009 as a sustainable apparels clothing company, hundreds of boxes of jeans are crammed against walls and packed to the ceiling. These boxes contain 38,000 pairs of Burton jeans, worth more than £200,000 that were ready for shipment in early March. But as the UK went into lockdown that month, an email pinged into his inbox that tore his life apart.

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Arcadia Group cancels ‘over £100m’ of orders as garment industry faces ruin

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As owner of brands including Topshop and Dorothy Perkins cancels unshipped orders, thousands will be left without income, warn rights groups

The Arcadia Group, which owns brands including Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge, is estimated to have cancelled in excess of £100m of existing clothing orders worldwide from suppliers in some of the world’s poorest countries as the global garment sector faces ruin.

According to data from the Bangladesh Garments and Manufacturing Association (BGMEA), the Arcadia Group has cancelled £9m of orders in Bangladesh alone.

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