Wallowing in luxury as BHS shuts up shop

MILKED and then abandoned by Sir Philip ‘Shifty’ Green, the 22 remaining BHS stores close their doors for the final time this weekend, throwing the last of the chain’s 11,000 staff out of work and leaving 22,000 members of its pension scheme high and dry.

Meanwhile off the Greek island of Corfu, the tycoon’s billionairess wife continues her long summer cruise aboard the £ 100million Lionheart, one of three superyachts bought with the proceeds of her husband’s wheeler-dealing.

Some think of Tina Green, the Monacobased tax exile who nominally owns most of Sir Shifty’s assets, as an ignorant pawn in her manipulative husband’s game.

In fact, she is a shrewd businesswoman, who must be aware of the labyrinthine transactions he conducts in her name.

Yet even if she were just an airhead with a vulgar taste for the high life, her responsibilities to the betrayed workers and pensioners of BHS would be quite as great as his.

For not only on paper but in practice, she is a vast beneficiary of his dealings, which allow her to crew Lionheart with 40 staff including two chefs, a hairdresser, a masseur and a dog walker.

As the titular holder of the family’s assets through a Jersey company, she is also his co- conspirator in avoiding tax and maximising dividends from the companies he runs. These include more than £400million siphoned off from BHS between 2002 and 2004.

This is why the Mail welcomes last night’s revelation that the Pensions regulator is investigating Lady Green in its bid to plug the £571million shortfall in the BHS pension fund, left after her husband sold the company for £1 last year to a thrice bankrupt former racing driver, Dominic Chappell. Despite promising more than two months ago that he would ‘sort’ the crisis, Sir Shifty himself has yet to produce a penny of the £80million he is said to have offered – let alone the full £700million which may now be needed.

While he fails to deliver, and the Serious Fraud Office seeks evidence of criminal deception, the pensions watchdog is right to focus on his wife too.

If it is found that the couple deliberately avoided their liabilities – and why else would they offload the company to the patently untrustworthy Mr Chappell? – the regulator has the power to force them to pay up. It mustn’t hesitate to use it.

The alternative is that BHS pensioners will lose out heavily, while the bulk of the shortfall will have to be met by the Pension Protection Fund, which is financed by everyone who contributes to eligible schemes.

It will be a grotesque injustice indeed if hard-working savers are forced to pick up the bills, while the Greens wallow in luxury aboard Lionheart.