Man who bought BHS for £1 gets six years for tax evasion

DOMINIC CHAPPELL, the man who bought the failing high street chain BHS from Sir Philip Green for £1 in 2015, has been jailed for six years for tax evasion.

Instead of paying what he owed to the Inland Revenue, Southwark Crown Court heard Chappell splashed out on a yacht, a Bentley, holidays to the Bahamas and even valuable Beretta guns.

Chappell denied cheating the public revenue in relation to his bankrupt finance company, Swiss Rock, claiming he was “utterly broke” due to the scale of BHS’S underfunded pension scheme.

He said he would have paid his tax had BHS not collapsed and accused Sir Philip of lying to him. The court heard he had failed to pay £350,000 VAT, £164,000 corporation tax and £86,000 income tax between 2014 and 2016.

Jailing him for six years, Mr Justice Bryan said Chappell had engaged in “conduct designed to cheat the revenue”. The court heard how BHS had been losing £1 million a week and had a pension deficit of up to £500 million when Chappell’s consortium bought it from Sir Philip in 2015. The firm limped on until April 2016 when it finally collapsed with the loss of 11,000 jobs.

Chappell told the court he was not an accountant and had been “simply too busy” to sort his business dealings, blaming others for letting him down.

He said of the BHS deal: “It was a lifechanging catastrophe. I should never have touched it with a barge pole. We were given forged and misleading documents by Pricewaterhousecoopers. I was lied to by Sir Philip, as was my board. This catastrophe has cost me my marriage, my money and my reputation.”

Trevor Burke QC, Chappell’s defence counsel said Sir Philip, who had run BHS for 15 years, effectively thwarted attempts to rescue it by failing to sort the pension deficit as he had promised.

But Mark Bryant-heron QC, prosecuting, said Chappell never intended to pay tax, instead using the cash “to fund his lifestyle”. Last year Chappell was banned from running a company for 10 years, and in January the Pensions Regulator ordered him to pay £9.5 million into the BHS pension schemes.