Lady Shifty, tax exile who trousered hundreds of BHS millions
Today ‘Sir’ Philip Green is to be grilled in the Commons over the BHS scandal. As his new £100 million yacht sets sail, meet . . .
To MEMBERS of the champagne-fuelled elite who regard it as highlight of their annual social calendar, something didn’t feel quite right about this year’s Monaco Grand Prix.
Yes, the weather was dreadful. And yes, all that noisy car racing was predictably dull. But the real issue came with events taking place, or rather not taking place, in the harbour where local billionaires park their super-yachts.
For the first time in as long as anyone could remember, the celebrity-stuffed annual Grand Prix party, hosted ‘at Home’ by Monaco resident Lady (Tina) Green was unceremoniously cancelled. And at short notice, too!
Lady Green, wife of the British High Street tycoon Sir Philip Green, has for years invited local chums to join a smattering of starry guests on board the yacht where she lives.
Last year’s Perrier- Jouet-fuelled proceedings were jollified by an eclectic array of the rich and famous, including Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, one Direction star Liam Payne, and footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
This time, the glittering bash was to be far bigger and better than usual, doubling up as a ‘yacht-warming’ party at which the high-living Lady Green, who is worth around £3.2 billion, could show off her latest floating home, a palatial and brand spanking new 300 ft behemoth called Lionheart.
‘Tina was scrambling to get the yacht ready for an opulent launch party during the Grand Prix at the end of May, which along with the film festival in Cannes marks the beginning of the Med’s summer season,’ reports a fellow socialite. ‘Everyone at the Monaco Yacht Club was buzzing about it. But a few weeks before the big weekend, it was suddenly cancelled.’
To blame was a series of events playing out in Westminster, some 900 miles, via private jet, from the sun- dappled marina that the blonde billionairess calls home.
There, amid mounting public anger, MPs were slowly but surely starting to unpick the scandal that was the imminent demise of BHS, the High Street department chain which was about to collapse with the loss of 11,000 jobs, leaving a £570 million hole in the pensions of more than 20,000 past and present staff members.
Lady Green, who is the nominal owner of almost all of Sir Philip’s businesses, had gained the control of the firm in 2000 before off-loading it last year for the nominal sum of £1, thereby escaping any liability for its pension deficits.
Though BHS made just £ 78 million in combined profits during the period (and by the time of the sale was haemorrhaging cash at a rate of tens of millions of pounds a year), Lady Green’s husband had arranged for her to quietly extract hundreds of millions of pounds in dividends and other payments from the ailing firm during her tenure.
All of which had suddenly turned the £100 million Lionheart into a football pitch- sized public relations problem.
The vessel, one of the biggest projects ever undertaken by Italian shipyard Benetti, had taken four years to build to Lady Green’s exact specifications.
It’s the third yacht they own: a smaller one, Lionchase, now serves as a home for their children Brandon and Chloe, while its predecessor Lioness V is currently available for charter for €420,000 (£350,000) per week, and was last night to be found off the coast of Mergellina, near Naples.
The new vessel can sleep up to 12 guests in six cabins, along with 28 members of crew (equating to more than two flunkies per resident), and boasts three elevators, a plunge pool, hot tub, helicopter pad, indoor beauty salon, outdoor barbecue, and a fleet of jet- skis moored, James Bondstyle, in an internal bay area deep in the hull.
By a twist of fate, this symbol of wealth and excess was scheduled to make its maiden journey from Benetti’s shipyard in Livorno just over a month ago — at exactly the moment at which the fate of BHS and its low-paid staff was starting to generate ugly headlines.
As a result, the public unveiling of the new yacht was put on hold.
Instead of a lavish launch party, an emotionally bruised Lady Green was left to call friends from an opulent penthouse at the swish Roccabella building in Monte Carlo, complaining that it was ‘the first Grand Prix that she’d had to miss out on in 15 years’.
The yacht was quietly put away in the Benetti shipyard, where it remained until last week, when it joined the other yachts in that town’s marina. ‘Tina is terrified of being pictured in the papers partying and drinking champagne, and is distraught at all the coverage in the UK press portraying her and Philip as villains,’ says one.
Normally a regular on the party circuit, both in the UK and Monte Carlo, Lady Green has not been seen in public since March 23, before the BHS scandal broke, when she dressed in her trademark leather trousers and plunging top, with a diamond necklace jangling on her bosom, to attended a charity film premiere in London’s Mayfair.
It’s a sad state of affairs for someone who has for years enjoyed very publicly living the high life, once telling an interviewer: ‘There is no excuse for omitting flowers from your life or your boat!’
The temporary retirement from the glamorous party circuit must also be hard to stomach for a woman who once boasted that she and Sir Philip like to go shopping in a pair of ‘his and hers’ Bentleys, adding that previous birthday presents to her husband have included a £7 million Gulfstream jet and a £250,000 solid gold Monopoly set.
Today, her long ordeal is set to continue, with Sir Philip’s eagerly awaited appearance in the House of Commons to give evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee.
Expected to start just after 9 am (provided the sometimes volatile tycoon comes good on his pledge to show up), the hearing is likely to see MPs spend around three hours picking over the gory details of the BHS affair.
Regardless of whether Lady Green attends — Sir Philip has asked for two chairs to be reserved so that unnamed supporters can sit immediately behind him — the committee is also likely to ask some awkward questions over her unconventional role in his business affairs. They
’Tina is terrified of being seen partying and drinking’
revolve around a unique arrangement by which almost all of Green’s assets, including the Arcadia Group — his retail firm which owns Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge — are ultimately held in Lady Green’s name.
The reason is tax avoidance. For while Philip is a British taxpayer (who lives at the Dorchester Hotel in London from Monday to Friday), she remains a full-time resident of Monaco, where income tax is a handy zero per cent, and corporation tax is non-existent.
This means that many dividend payments which are taken out of the companies in Sir Philip’s empire end up being exempt from UK tax.
In 2005, for example, Lady Green famously received £1.2 billion, the biggest single- person dividend payment in British corporate history, from Arcadia — the parent company of BHS — in this manner, escaping £300 million of tax in the process. (In an interview shortly afterwards, Sir Philip jokingly referred to the cash as ‘housekeeping money’.)
For Philip, the only downside would be if he and Tina were to divorce: