1/ I worked for the Arcadia Group’s golden goose Topshop between 2008-2011

Philip Green’s monumental fucking mess A THREAD

2/ First, the positive: In the mid-to-late ‘00’s Topshop and Topman acquired an almost mythical cultural cache in the U.K. by sponsoring London Fashion Week, supporting aspiring designers, associating itself heavily with arts & music through sponsorship

3/ They backed festivals, gigs, and the NME — not forgetting what most people remember, signing Kate Moss to sell a fashion line.

4/ On a personal level, initially — working there gave me a huge confidence boost, provided an insight into other people’s lives and the world of work.

5/ It afforded me a degree of financial independence/security as a 16-year old in a single-parent household in the aftermath of the ’08 crisis which I know I was lucky to have

6/ But let’s look at the issues:
By 2005 Arcadia’s annual profit was exceeding £100 million, it was opening new stores, renovating existing ones and looked set to entrench its position in the U.K. while expanding internationally.

7/ It is not an exaggeration to say that when I was offered a Saturday job there in 08’ — I considered it a cultural icon. Green, whose personal wealth peaked in ’07 at £5 billion, and is a notoriously capricious vein bully — he treated it as a personal fiefdom.

8/ The groundwork was laid for the issues at the company to come in the early golden years.

In 2005/6 with group sales at £1.8 billion, the Green family received a £1.2 billion dividend.

9/ Despite pre-tax profits being significantly — more than four times — smaller than this, at £253m.

10/ Green paid no tax on the payout as the company was in his wife’s name — who as a resident of Monaco, wasn’t liable, the legal construction was complete fiction and an obvious one at that — but more than legal.

11/ Around this time, ole’ Philly G was attempting to move in on British high-street icon M&S.

12/ Describing his attempts to saddle the target company with £10 billion worth of debt for loans he would take out to buy it as: “plain vanilla, not chocolate or raspberry” insisting it wasn’t “rinky-dinky funny money,

13/ Sounding like leveraged buy-outs shittiest beat poet, he at the same time he made the claim that — "In every business [I’ve] ever bought, we haven't sold and leased back all the assets, we've kept them all.

14/ We haven't ratcheted the business off the roof," — attempting to claim that his companies didn’t employ tricks like moving potential liabilities off balance sheets, or artificially disposing of infrastructure in order to appear more profitable. He was lying.

15/ All the companies mentioned in quotes in the two Tweets below that receive a benefit were owned by a member of the Green family, it comes from a select committee report. I include it merely to demonstrate Philip Green is a bullshitter.

16/ His claim of not to have engaged in financial engineering is a demonstrable lie.

17/ “Carmen Properties—incorporated in Jersey and with Mrs. Green as the ultimate beneficiary—bought and leased back to BHS ten properties in 2001 and was transferred to BHS as part of the deal.

18/ "BHS made another sale-and-leaseback deal, with Mildenhall Holdings Ltd (“Mildenhall”)—another Jersey, you'-registered company whose ultimate beneficiary was Lady Green—for a property in Leeds. Between 2005 and 2012, BHS paid £2.7 million in rent to Mildenhall."

19/ But that was BHS; famously Green had more love for Topshop and Arcadia. So how did he treat the money that legally and morally belonged to his staff as deferred benefits to be paid as a pension?

20/ With utter contempt, obviously: In 2007 it was reported that Green was seeking to offload the Arcadia group’s pension fund, with Goldman Sachs expressing interest, at the time the fund was said to have assets of about £700 million.

21/ The UK Companies Act 2006 changed the law so that pension deficits were counted as debt on a company's balance sheet, at that point all the funds had assets, but little more than five years into his mismanagement were feeling the pinch. It was about to get much worse.

22/ Green’s business strategy has always relied heavily on being able to secure credit against companies he owned, and companies he was seeking to take over — in order to expand

23/ Remember that pension funds, like any other investment funds — are not inherently an economic drag, and some of the best managed funds in the world are pension funds. The average return pension funds in the U.K. between 2008 and 2018 averaged 6.5%.

24/ Arcadia's two pension schemes went from being the best regarded in the industry when he purchased the company, to the situation we find ourselves in now.

25/ Presently, it has gone from a going concern, funding its member's retirement, worthy of the attention of the major investment bank—admittedly with its trustees raising concerns over Green’s approach to it, to less than junk with an estimated deficit of £350 million.

26/ Greens company structures are so complex that it is likely only he knows what went on. But to me, it seems abit rinky-dinky.

He needs to explain what happened, and not lie. Nothing funny, plain vanilla — it's all we ask for Greeny.

ENDS.

*I spotted a few typo's, I swear I can write -- I'm just tired.