Prince Harry’s polo pal comes a cropper
Chairman of failed Carillion empire has extensive SA links
● The bright green lawns and crisp white mansions at Val de Vie private estate, near Paarl, speak of wealth, success and privilege.
But hot on the heels of the Steinhoff crash and news that the disgraced CEO of the furniture company, Markus Jooste, has put his R15-million Val de Vie plot on the market, the community is reeling from another business scandal.
Two years after welcoming Prince Harry to Val de Vie for a glittering polo event, estate homeowner Philip Green is at the centre of a British company crash that has put 43 000 jobs on the line.
Green, chairman of collapsed construction and outsourcing company Carillion, has deep roots in South Africa that go back as far as 1976, when he spent three months in the country while studying.
South Africa, the Western Cape in particular, has been the perfect playground for the billionaire, with its wine estates and polo events in close proximity to impoverished communities where he can spread the love.
Carillion was the UK’s second-largest construction giant, and made its fortune by winning government contracts and then outsourcing the labour — until its £1.6-billion (about R27-billion) debt came back to bite it this week.
It’s all a long way from November 2015, when Green paraded around Val de Vie with Prince Harry at the biggest one-day charity polo event in the world. It was held in support of Sentebale, a charity the prince set up in Lesotho during his gap year in 2006 to help vulnerable children.
Green is the chairman and co-founder of Sentebale, and he and his wife, Judy, are the founders and main patrons of Hope Through Action, a charity that supports the creation and running of sports NGOs in South Africa.
Now that his empire has come crashing down, will the two charities on the tip of Africa still be on Green’s to-do list?
When contacted by the Sunday Times, Sentebale said it had no comment on the chairman’s fall from grace.
Hope Through Action also declined to comment.
Green has been a dab hand at spinning business gains on South African soil into claims of anti-apartheid struggle credentials. In 1976, when the mining industry was bankrolling the apartheid government, Green came to South Africa for three months. Studying for his MBA, he also worked at an engineering firm that supplied building materials to the mines.
It was here that he likely got a taste of the bags of money to be made from massive building contracts issued by the government — a business model that would ultimately see the likes of Carillion mushrooming.
But, in interviews about that first trip to South Africa, it is 1976’s role in the fight for freedom that he latches onto.
“I saw Soweto when the schoolchildren rioted,” he has said.
By 1994, Green was the African head of logistics group DHL. “We distributed the election papers for South Africa’s first democratic election,” Green said in a glossy magazine. “I sat behind Nelson Mandela at the 1995 World Cup Rugby.”
But it was also in 1994 that he was found to be “in breach of trust” by the pensions ombudsman in his native UK.
This week, the Socialist Workers Party in the UK slammed Green for saying that “the more money you’ve got, the more you should give away”, given that so many jobs were hanging in the balance.
That’s not the only irony haunting Green: in 2011, he was appointed by then British prime minister David Cameron as an adviser on “corporate responsibility”, and also headed a “business integrity committee”.
Simon Basketter, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party, said Carillion received government contracts worth more than £1-billion a year.
The company is one of the largest suppliers of services to the public sector, overseeing hospitals, schools, prisons and the building of many public transport facilities.
In July last year Carillion issued a profit warning, admitting its shares had collapsed by 90%. Despite this, a week later the British government awarded the company contracts worth £6.6-billion.