Lady Green, party-loving superyacht queen who pocketed £400m BHS cash
As 11,000 BHS staff fear for their future, Philip Green’s wife lives on a gin palace in a tax haven. No wonder she’s smiling
AS SHE shimmered through the throng of party guests gathered in a 12th-century palace, Lady (Tina) Green was in her element. The 66 - year- old billionairess wore a striking black designer dress and a breathtaking selection of jewellery, as well she might.
What woman would not want to look her best to meet Hollywood royalty Robert Redford, who was visiting the tiny tax haven of Monaco that Lady Green calls home?
Not to mention real royalty, as Monaco’s reigning monarch, Albert II, and his statuesque blonde wife, Princess Charlene, were also in attendance at the charity gala dinner.
More prosaically, a large contingent of business people nibbled at the canapes, though what they lacked in glamour they made up for with their vast wealth.
‘Tina knew most of them by their first names. A lot of them happen to be her neighbours — people she views as close friends,’ said a guest at the soiree last September.
‘She adores the social whirl and glamour, and especially meeting superstars like Robert Redford. It’s one of the main reasons she has based herself in Monaco.’
Well, there is that. There is also the fact that Monaco — once memorably described by the writer Somerset Maugham as ‘a sunny place for shady people’ — has a handy zero per cent rate of income tax.
The accommodating attitude of the Monegasque authorities allows her to enjoy the enormous fortune she has drawn from her husband Sir Philip Green’s retail empire without having to deal with HMRC.
Naturally, there is nothing illegal or improper about Lady Green setting up home on a superyacht moored off Monte Carlo.
But one could forgive the 11,000 BHS employees whose jobs and pensions are at risk — and who have no option but to pay the income tax due on their meagre wages — if they take a dim view of the decadent trappings of her Monaco lifestyle.
It is estimated that, since 2000, Philip Green has paid £400 million in BHS dividends to his wife. ‘I think it’s totally disgusting that Sir Philip can take hundreds of millions of pounds out of the company and give it as a “dividend” to his wife who pays zero tax in Monaco,’ said one BHS staffer.
‘It is we who will have to suffer the consequences of the pension deficit. Plus the fact that we might not be in this position if he had reinvested the money in the business.’
Until a year ago, when Sir Philip sold BHS for £1 to twice-bankrupted former racing driver Dominic Chappell, the chain was was officially part of a High-Street retail empire owned by his wife.
And while the foul-mouthed and flamboyant Sir Philip is a prominent presence on the London retail scene, the role played by Tina has been somewhat overlooked.
In fact, Tina is one of several women who have had a huge influence over the pugilistic Sir Philip and his business career.
These include his mother Alma and the blonde, American-born banker Robin Saunders, who helped to finance his early involvement in BHS.
It is highly unlikely that any guests at the dinner in Monaco organised by the Princess Grace Foundation were dressed by BHS. Doubtful, too, whether the dowdy depart- ment store was on Tina’s mind as she mingled under the stars in the Honour Courtyard of the Prince’s Palace, which perches on a rock jutting into the sea.
No fewer than 20 chefs and 100 waiters served a range of delicacies including caviar, blue lobster and Kobe beef, washed down with exquisite wines and champagnes including Veuve Clicquot Brut.
The lavish event was held on a balmy Saturday evening — which meant Sir Philip, who stays in a hotel in London during the week, was on hand to squire his wife.
Thanks to the family private jet and helicopter, hopping from London to Monaco is almost as easy for him as catching a bus.
Lady Green, well-preserved in her seventh decade with a blonde mane and perma-bronzed complexion, is one of the 5,000 Britons who live in Monaco, eating and drinking at the Hotel de Paris and frequenting nightclubs such as Jimmy’z.
However, life is not all one long holiday for Lady Green — not quite.
She has her own independent business interests, though it must be said these deal in goods of a rather more exalted sort than the plastic coathangers and polyester lace to be found in BHS.
She is a director of a Monacobased company called Green & Mingarelli, which she set up with Italian architect Pietro Mingarelli four years ago to fit out the interiors of luxury yachts for the tycoons who infest the little principality.
The Green & Mingarelli offices are just across from the port in Monaco, which is crowded with some of the biggest yachts in the world — including, of course, her own.
‘ Frankly, Monaco gets boring pretty quickly, and this kind of project allows Tina to get away, while immersing herself in a thriving business,’ said a fellow resident.
‘She’s not just a figurehead for the company, either. She is a proper designer who particularly loves working on yachts.’
Tina met Pietro 13 years ago and the pair have also designed furniture for Lalique, the ultra- expensive French glassmaker.
They did the décor for the exclusive Villa Rene Lalique, the home the great designer built for himself in 1920 in the forests of the Vosges in France, which is now a small hotel. A night in one of the six suites can cost up to £2,730. Perhaps surprisingly, given Lady Green’s penchant for plunging necklines and leather trousers, the palette of her interior decor features restrained black and cream. If guests see something they fancy, they can put in an order.
Her other projects include luxury flats and the interior design of three Gulfstream jets and helicopters.
Her main qualification for decorating floating palaces is, she has said, her ‘ vast experience’ because ‘I am fortunate to live on a yacht six months of the year. In that respect I have an edge!’
Quite. Her first project was designing the interior of the Greens’ own first yacht when they moved to Monaco in 1998, because Sir Philip did not want anyone else to do it.
They now have three yachts, including their latest acquisition, the 90m Lionheart, reputed to have cost about £100 million and commissioned four years ago.
Its delivery this spring, just as BHS hit the rocks, is bad timing from the tycoon’s viewpoint.
Nonetheless, living aboard a floating palace has clearly given Tina an insight into the tastes of monied boat-dwellers.
One yacht she decorated for a super-rich client had a sundeck, a plunge pool, a breathtaking staircase and ‘cosy’ cinema room.
She and Pietro had the dining area decked out in walnut, shagreen (a luxury leather often fashioned from shark or stingray skin) and goat-skin parchment. The cushions for the exterior of the 58m vessel alone took months to create, as each one was ‘beautifully embroidered with a rose’.
According to the owner, ‘Tina and Pietro have been all over the world finding this stuff. Their skill is they don’t go and buy out of a catalogue.’
Good heavens, no. It’s safe to say they wouldn’t find similar kit in the homewear department of BHS, either — though Lady Green did design a range of furniture and accessories for the store a few years ago, to the manifest pride of her husband.
As well as working with Pietro — each describes the other as their Muse — she has collabo- rated with her best friend, the 47- year- old British interior designer Nicola Fontanella.
The two women toiled on yet another luxury yacht, the Silver Angel — which, among other accoutrements, has a gym and a
The couple’s third yacht cost about £100m She had a tax free dividend of £1.2 billion
swimming pool in black mosaic with tiny lights encrusted in the tiles that look like coloured bubbles.
Fontanella claims her clients have included Madonna and Naomi Campbell, though her Argent Design business has shareholders’ funds of just £44,737, according to documents from corporate intelligence company Duedil.
As well as these arduous business ventures, Lady Green has an important role in the background of her husband’s business from her tax-haven home.
Her involvement goes back at least as far as 1999, when Sir Philip launched the first of his two failed takeover attempts of Marks & Spencer.
That bid was ditched after it emerged that Tina had bought a multimillion-pound stake in Marks, perfectly legally, before he had publicly declared his interest. So he bought BHS for £200 million — and two years later purchased the Arcadia Group, which includes Topshop and Topman.
Lady Green has been the legal owner of his major retail investments since 2004 and received an eye-watering dividend of £1.2 billion in 2005 — tax-free, of course.
Although she is a shareholder, with no involvement in running the business, some observers believe she bears at least partial responsibility for the fate of BHS employees and pensioners.
‘Would 11,000 BHS workers still have jobs if Tina Green hadn’t siphoned £1 billion out of the business?’ was the headline on the Financial Times Alphaville blog this week.
Putting his business in Tina’s name may be tax- efficient but it would also strike many men as placing huge trust in a wife. ‘I don’t know about that,’ says one longstanding friend of the couple. ‘He knows if he gets divorced he will have an enormous bill anyway, whether things are in her name or not.
‘ Tina is an incredibly hardworking person, and she is the heart of the family. She does anything and everything that needs doing for Philip. They seem to have a very strong marriage and very nice children.’
The Greens, plain Tina and Philip until he was knighted by Tony Blair’s government in 2006, met in 1985 in San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, then one of the capital’s trendiest eateries and a favourite haunt of Princess Diana. Tina, who was married at the time to her first husband, with two young children, was not impressed. In fact, she thought Philip was ‘ dreadful’ and an ‘ arrogant man’ because he declared he had never heard of a boutique she then ran.
Born in England, she had an exotic upbringing in Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. She was a selfdescribed ‘wild child’ who married jazz drummer Bobby Palos, 14 years her senior and ‘six-foot-two and divine’, aged just 18.
With Palos she had her first two children. Brett is now a 41-year-old property entrepreneur and a director of Taveta Investments, which held the BHS brand under Green’s ownership. Her elder daughter, Stasha Lewis, 44, is an artist.
Tina and Bobby stayed friends until his death in 2014, but in the rotund, balding form of Sir Philip, she told one interviewer, she had found ‘the love of my life’.
As for the other women who have loomed large in Green’s life, his mother Alma, a businesswoman who owned garages and car showrooms, is the person he credits as his role model.
Then there is Robin Saunders, a financier at German bank WestLB, which provided £ 120 million towards his £200 million purchase of BHS in 1999.
The multimillionairess, who has now vanished from the City scene, was one of Green’s early supporters and for a time a director of BHS.
But there is no doubt it is Lady Green who exerts an iron grip on the purse strings, as well as the heartstrings. After their marriage in 1990 Tina went on to have two more children with her new hus- band. The main claim to fame of their son Brandon, 23, is the £4 million bar mitzvah laid on for him by his doting dad at the Grand- Hotel du Cap- Ferrat in 2005, with Andrea Bocelli and Beyoncé providing the entertainment.
The young buck was also, according to society magazine Tatler, spotted playfully groping the bikini-clad bottom of Kate Moss on holiday in St Barth’s a couple of years ago.
Daughter Chloe, 25, who appeared in the reality TV show Made In Chelsea, is said by friends to be the apple of Sir Philip’s eye.
She enjoyed a year-long romance with Marc Anthony, the former husband of American singer and actress Jennifer Lopez. Their breakup in 2014 was blamed on ‘ busy work schedules’.
The young socialite was recently pictured in a pouting selfie with Real Madrid football star Cristiano Ronaldo and was spotted with both parents in December on the annual family vacation on an idyllic Barbados beach. Sir Philip had a nightclub erected in her honour at his 60th birthday party in Mexico in 2012.
At the four-day-marathon, costing an estimated £ 6 million, guests including Leonardo Di Caprio, rock star Ronnie Wood and actress Kate Hudson had to wear PG60 logos to denote his initials and age.
Gigantic pictures of his face were beamed onto the rocks at the Rosewood Mayakoba resort, interspersed with ones of Chloe.
For his 50th birthday, he flew more than 200 of his friends to the Anassa resort in Cyprus for an estimated £5 million extravaganza.
Guests that time included Prince Albert of Monaco, former Page Three girl Jilly Johnson, Sir Stirling Moss and Jeremy Beadle.
There were performances from George Benson, Tom Jones and Rod Stewart, plus Demis Roussos and a Frank Sinatra lookalike.
‘It was quite a bunfight,’ said one guest. ‘But most people there were businessmen, not celebs.’
It is not clear whether Tina has the same Midas touch as her husband with her Green & Mingarelli company. As a Monacobased business, it is not required to file accounts in the UK.
Not all her ventures have been successful. A Knightsbridge fashion business, Herobell, which traded under the name of Alma in an apparent reference to Sir Philip’s mother, went into liquidation in the Nineties.
With a fortune of £3.22 billion, however, Sir Philip and Tina can afford to see a small company go under every now and again.
Now, of course, there is another much bigger business failure blotting the family escutcheon. And it is one likely to exact a heavy cost on the Greens’ reputation. Additional reporting:
PETER ALLEN
Tom Jones and Rod Stewart sang at his 50th