Ashley abandons Green after vicious retail row

MIke ashley has sold his entire stake in a struggling online firm which he owned with fellow retail tycoon sir Philip Green, after a rift opened up between the pair.

ashley offloaded his 4.8pc stake in Mysale, worth around £518,000 at current prices.

the tycoons fell out earlier this year over ashley’s claims that Green was manipulating the sale of HMV.

ashley ditched his Mysale stake just days after announcing a planned sale of sports direct’s derbyshire headquarters for £120m.

One city analyst said it could mean that ashley is building a war chest to scoop up more troubled High street chains, adding to his expanding retail empire.

catalogue firm shop direct – the parent company of littlewoods and Very – may be in ashley’s crosshairs, the source suggested.

Over the past year the billionaire has snapped up companies including sofa.com, evans cycles and House Of Fraser in cut-price deals.

sports direct, the budget sports company which 54-year-old ashley founded in 1982, revealed it had sold the Mysale stake in a filing once the stock market had closed for the day, after being contacted by the Mail for comment.

together with the deal to sell sports direct’s sprawling industrial head office in shirebrook, ashley has potentially raised almost £121m of cash in a matter of days. sports direct refused to comment on its interest in shop direct, but a source close to the company said: ‘the investment in Mysale no longer had the same strategic value it once did, particularly after it withdrew from the uk.’

Mysale formerly owned cocosa, a uk flash sale website which offers discounts on luxury goods.

It announced it was selling the British site earlier this year, following a profit warning, which prompted Mysale to focus on its core markets of australia and New Zealand. Green also owns a large stake in Mysale, though the company’s tumbling share price has wiped millions from his personal wealth over the past five years.

the retail tycoon, who owns topshop, Burton, Miss selfridge and dorothy Perkins through his arcadia empire, bought a 25pc stake in Mysale in 2014 just months before it floated in london.

the shares were priced at 226p, valuing Green’s stake – owned through his wife tina’s offshore investment firm – at around £85m.

But since the float, Mysale’s shares have tumbled by 97pc.

Green, 67, now owns a 22pc stake worth just £2.4m.

the investment in Mysale has also proved disastrous for ashley, who bought his 4.8pc stake in June 2014 for around £15m – over £14m more than he sold it for yesterday.

the two tycoons are embroiled in a tiff over collapsed music retailer HMV. Green was alleged to have been controlling the sale of HMV from behind the scenes as ashley was thwarted in his efforts to snap it up for a knockdown price.

later ashley said that he would not even buy Green’s arcadia fashion empire for even £1 – in a thinly veiled attack on his rival over his sale of BHs before it collapsed.

shop direct owners david and Frederick Barclay, who are also behind the telegraph newspapers and the ritz hotel, put shop direct up for sale in 2017. Major investment firms were sniffing around but a deal was never reached.

at the time, shop direct said: ‘the appetite of potential bidders has begun to change due to uncertainty created in the post-election uk environment so the shareholders have decided not to pursue discussions further at this stage.’

In the year to June 30, 2018, when shop direct last filed its accounts, the company generated sales of £2bn but made a loss of £24.7m.