Showbiz mates are nowhere to be seen
He’s living it up in a £17,000-a-week Miami mansion, driving a Bentley and flaunting his £320 Louis Vuitton tennis racket covers
AS bronzed as a crisp-skinned turkey, apparently carefree, and wearing his usual billionaire’s uniform of a billowing T-shirt and capacious shorts, this is how Sir Philip Green has been spending his Christmas break.
He is in deep disgrace — none of those showbiz mates who used to hang around him are anywhere to be seen — and is said to have determined against his customary holiday at the Sandy Lane hotel in barbados, as that display of conspicuous consumption might seem provocative.
This must surely disappoint his flashy wife Tina, who has been a fixture for years at their annual new Year party wearing her stunning favourite £5 million, 52-carat, diamond necklace and chinking champagne glasses with Simon Cowell.
but, while their usual £250,000 barbados blow-out is no longer in the schedule, let’s not imagine for a moment that they are slumming it.
As thousands of bHS pensioners have been left to bleakly contemplate a retirement on straitened terms — and as we shall see many of them have had to resort to asking for charity to get by — he has been living in his customary gilded bubble. The former owner of bHS has spent the festive season in Miami, in an extraordinary £21 million modern house which is understood to cost £17,000 a week to rent.
He and Tina — the nominal owner of the Arcadia Group — are set to spend three weeks there in total before they return to their penthouse in the tax-free haven of Monaco.
They have whiled away their days whizzing around in a bentley convertible supercar, and on Thursday afternoon popped into another local mansion which is for sale — a snip at £20million. Perhaps they are contemplating joining the local set. Sir Philip, an avid tennis player, has also been seen brandishing his racket, encased in a screamingly vulgar £321 Louis Vuitton leather cover, and enjoying a doubles game at the nearby sports club.
(In previous years at the Sandy Lane he was reported to play ‘high stakes’ tennis with other plutocrats, with up to £20,000 wagered on each set just to make the competition more piquant.)
every night the couple will be able to observe the sun setting spectacularly over biscayne bay — assuming, of course, that Sir Philip, 64, isn’t too busy ‘sorting’ the giant pension deficit to notice the scenery.
Perhaps comfortingly, they are among other multi-millionaires: it’s a view which also enchants neighbours such as Phil Collins, and designers Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.
The house features vast swathes of white marble, set off by dark slate floors. There are seven bedrooms and ten bathrooms, a movie theatre, covered outdoor dining and a summer kitchen.
built in 2015, this mansion is the last word in modernity and has its own elevator. naturally there is a pool.
There is also an entertainment terrace, landscaping, water features and ‘cutting-edge smart technology’ throughout.
It is described in the sales material as a ‘dreamhouse’ with ‘elaborate finishes’.
Why choose Miami? Well, Tina’s son, brett, has his own £17million mansion just a stone’s throw away.
He is a property developer who is probably best known for the rum episode in which his company, Thackeray estates, bought the ealing branch store from bHS a few days before the company was sold by his stepfather. He sold it for a £3million profit a few months later.
And it seems the whole of the Shifty clan has gathered for a spot of Florida sunshine. Sir Shifty arrived on december 16, having flown in on his Gulfstream G650 er private jet. The plane, which he bought this spring, is worth £50.5million and a flight from London to Miami on one is said to cost £27,000 in fuel alone — that’s before you add in pilot and crew costs and hangar fees.
daughter Chloe, 25, is also in Miami and has been pictured hanging out on the beach at the Hotel Faena with her glossy group of friends.
The hotel, which has dozens of gilded columns and decorative accents in hot orange, is about as blinging as it gets in Miami, which is saying something.
The festivities will not stop there. on Thursday afternoon a huge truck containing ‘party supplies’ drew up and unloaded. It seems that Lady Green, 66, an inveterate party-thrower, is planning a new Year bash. but who — one wonders — will come? For although Sir Philip’s previous birthday parties attracted a Who’s Who of the rich and famous, with everyone from actress Gwyneth Paltrow to model Kate Moss turning up, there has been absolutely no public support from any of his famous friends since the collapse of bHS.
Most notably, media mogul and X Factor supremo Simon Cowell has not been seen with him at all.
Cowell is in barbados, as usual, with toddler eric and girlfriend Lauren Silverman. They are staying in the one Sandy Lane villa right next to the Sandy Lane hotel.
Last Christmas Sir Philip was spotted cradling baby eric on the beach. In previous years Cowell and Sir Philip have occupied neighbouring sun loungers.
Sir Philip has been a fixture at Sandy Lane for 20 years, always taking a villa which costs around £18,000 a night.
The minimum stay over Christmas is two weeks — meaning a spend of £252,000 before the consumption of a single club sandwich or Coca-Cola.
(With a fortune said to hover
The whole of the Green clan is in Florida
They’ve viewed a mansion for sale at £20m
around the £3.2billion mark, the Green’s can definitely afford it.) Now, though, the men are keeping their distance.
Associates of Cowell deny any falling out, but say that they have seen less of each other because Sir Philip has been ‘naturally preoccupied with business.’
It’s all rather curious, as only seven years ago the two of them announced that they were going into business together and wanted to build an empire ‘bigger than Disney’. In the event, that never happened. It is said that Sir Philip had such a row with the then chief executive of Sony Music while negotiating a deal that he was sidelined.
Sir Philip holds an unofficial role as ‘an adviser to Simon Cowell’, and is a minority shareholder in a company used by Cowell to control his share of the company, Syco. They were very close, though.
In truth you would need the hide of a rhino to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sir Philip at present. Always pugnacious and combative, his performance over the summer when summoned to explain his role in the demise of BHS led to him being branded the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.
The High Street chain, part of the Arcadia Group, was sold by Sir Philip in 2015 to former racing driver Dominic Chappell for £1.
BHS went out of business this year, with debts of £1.3 billion and a huge £571 million deficit in its pension funds. Some 20,000 pensioners have been left facing payment cuts as a result.
It has emerged that despite the pension deficit, Green and his family collected £586 million in dividends, rental payments and interest on loans over their 15-year ownership of BHS.
The then Shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle noted: ‘It appears this owner extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from the business and walked away to his favourite tax haven, leaving the Pension Protection Scheme to pick up the bill.’
Sir Philip is still in negotiations with the Pensions Regulator over the deficit.
The regulator has launched enforcement action to pursue the former owners of BHS and called on them to plug the shortfall.
It is thought that Sir Philip may be asked to contribute around £300 million.
However this has not yet happened. Experts suggest that it could take years of legal wrangling before Sir Philip and the regulator reach an agreed settlement.
BHS’s pension deficit has already been transferred to the Pension Protection Fund, but this means that the retailer’s pensioners could face a 10 per cent cut to their entitlements.
Since the chain’s collapse, nearly 1,600 former BHS staff have retired with reduced pension pots.
In October this year, possibly angered by Sir Phil’s three-month jaunt around the Mediterranean on a brand-new £100 million yacht, the House of Commons unanimously voted to strip the retail billionaire of his knighthood.
The fate of his title will finally be decided by the Honours Forfeiture Committee.
This week a charity which supports struggling families of retail sector workers reported that it has received a record number of claims in the wake of BHS’s collapse.
The Fashion and Textile Children’s Trust, which was founded in 1853, has had claims from a record 460 families.
Of those, 275 were related to people who used to work at BHS.
The charity said that it had provided an average £150 to families to help support school uniform purchases ahead of the new term. Sir Philip declined to comment on the Trust’s rise in claims as a result of BHS’s closure.
Daughter Chloe is clearly rather exercised by the experience of the family’s steep fall from grace.
Last week, while holidaying in Miami, she quoted a lengthy motivational paragraph to the effect that what seems a curse can be a blessing, that there is always hope, and that sometimes the darkest times can bring us to the brightest places.
She added that ‘our most painful struggles can grant us the most necessary growth’.
To that, at least, the BHS pensioners will surely say: ‘Amen.’ Although, from the outside, the Greens’ family struggle doesn’t look all that painful. Does it?