Playboy ex-racing driver and bankrupt who took home £25m
ON the deck of the tall ship Lord Nelson in Southampton Harbour six months ago, BHS owner Dominic Chappell looked as though he did not have a care in the world.
His chubby face was split by a huge grin as he pledged to hand over £25,000 to charity on behalf of the High Street chain – though, even as he beamed with selfsatisfaction, it was hurtling towards ruin.
‘He seemed like a lovely chap, and yes, we did get our money shortly afterwards,’ said Duncan Souster, chief executive of the Jubilee Sailing Trust, which helps disabled people take to the sea.
Mr Souster is one of the lucky ones: not everyone who has done business with Chappell would share the view that he is ‘a lovely chap’. Nor, for that matter, has the BHS owner always honoured his financial obligations.
However worthy the cause, his 11,000 employees at BHS may baulk at their employer handing over cheques to charity as they are left facing uncertainty over their jobs and their pensions.
But just who is Dominic Chappell? When Sir Philip Green, the former owner of BHS, sold out to him last year for a token £1, the City was utterly baffled.
Few had heard of the 49-year- old former public schoolboy with a taste for racing cars, ski slopes and yachts, or of his investment company, Retail Acquisitions.
But it soon became clear that Chappell had arrived at BHS with a trail of creditors behind him – not to mention a secret investment company set up in Panama shortly after he took over the retailer.
He has been insolvent no fewer than three times: once through an Individual Voluntary Arrangement that allows debtors to avoid going bust by reaching agreements over their borrowings,He has also and had twice three through County bankruptcy.Court Judgments against him for personal debts.
It emerged last night that under his stewardship more than £25million has been transferred out of BHS and into his Retail Acquisitions company over the past year.
This sum includes nearly £5million for management fees and salaries to Chappell and his associates. It also includes an £8.4million loan made by BHS to Retail Acquisitions, around £1.5million of which went to Chappell. These revelations will incense BHS staff and suppliers who are owed money. Former business associates, however, say the latest disaster is all too predictable. ‘I am not at all surprised at what has happened at BHS. When I heard he had taken over, I gave him about a year,’ says one man, whose business lost heavily in a marina development on the Isle of Wight that resulted in Chappell’s second bankruptcy in 2009. The Island Harbour Marina development went under owing £24million to Anglo Irish Bank. ‘He would arrive in his helicopter and we would have to chauffeur him to our office. He did me a lot of damage – fortunately my business was strong enough.’ His chequered finances have not, however, prevented Chappell from enjoying all the trappings of a tycoon. Shortly after taking over BHS, he bought a yacht, Maverick 5, as well as taking delivery of a Range Rover and having a skiing holiday with wife Rebecca in the upmarket Austrian resort of Kitzbuhel. He is understood to live in a substantial rented house in Dorset and to have put in several offers to buy lavish local properties.
Chappell was brought up in Sunbury-onThames in Surrey and went to the £11,550-aterm Millfield school in Somerset. He claims to have been a racing driver and to have driven in the Le Mans 24-hour race.
His financial misfortunes started early. He became insolvent for the first time at just 29 in 1996, when he entered an Individual Voluntary Arrangement. He claimed this happened because he gave a personal guarantee to a Formula One team that failed.
In late 2005, he was bankrupted by estate agent Foxtons over an unpaid fee related to the sale of a £1.2million flat in Fulham, southwest London. He was discharged a year later.
Yet another business failure came when his father Joe’s property company went into administration in 2008. Dominic is listed as a director between 1993 to 2005 and the firm was finally dissolved in 2013 owing £230,000 to taxpayer-backed Lloyds Bank.
His fellow directors at the time of the BHS takeover include 77-year- old Keith Smith, who is remembered in City circles for his time as a director of broker Nabarro Wells, where he acted as an adviser to a firm called Langbar, one of the most notorious frauds in the Square Mile in recent years.
Almost inevitably, there is a Panama connection. It emerged that Chappell is a joint owner of Clarberry Investments, a company incorporated in the tax haven last year shortly after he purchased BHS. His partner in Clarberry is Paul Sutton, who has been convicted of fraud in a French court and who introduced Chappell to Sir Philip Green.
‘He did me a lot of damage’