Tina Green, the wife of Sir Philip Green and ultimate owner of the Arcadia Group, was paid £25m by the retail empire last year despite a near wipeout of profits at its flagship Topshop brand.
Lady Green, 68, who is based with her 66-year-old husband in the tax haven of Monaco, was made the controlling party of Taveta, the parent of Arcadia, at the turn of the century.
According to accounts filed at Companies House this week, Lady Green received a £25m payment from Taveta linked to transactions involving the collapsed department store chain BHS. Taveta redeemed £20m of loan notes and paid interest of £5m relating to the purchase of BHS from the family in 2009. Accounts show Taveta still owes the Green family nearly £65m for the failed department store, down from £87m last year.
After a tough few years in which Sir Philip agreed to pay £363m to support the BHS’s pension fund after calls for his knighthood to be stripped away, the Green family’s wealth was marked down £787m to £2bn in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.
The Taveta accounts also reveal that a company led by Lady Green’s son from her first marriage, the property developer Brett Palos, was paid almost £900,000 to manage a redevelopment of an unnamed store.
In 2016 Lady Green defended the couple’s use of what has been described as a “complex web” of companies based in tax havens that sit behind the family’s retail empire. She made the statement in response to MPs investigating the collapse of the high street retailer BHS, which Green sold in 2015 to Dominic Chappell, a former racing driver, only for it to fold a year later.
Topshop’s pre-tax profits dived 99% to £909,000 in the year to 26 August 2017 amid rising costs and as sales slid 5.8% to £933.6m, according to the Companies House accounts. Sales in the UK dived nearly 8% to £846m.
The flagship chain’s poor performance contributed to a 5.6% fall in sales at Green’s retail empire – including a 7.3% slide in the UK. Underlying profits for the continuing businesses of Taveta dived 42% to £124m. Pre-tax profits rose from £36.8m to £53.5m after a disastrous 2016. In 2015 the retail group made a profit of £172.2m.
Taveta’s pension liability fell to £300m from £426.8m a year before as the group topped up its contributions by £25.6m to £50m a year and changed some of the assumptions used to calculate the deficit.
The hefty deficit is likely to remain a potential stumbling block to any sale of Arcadia, which Green is rumoured to be looking to exit. In February, Green denied he was in talks to sell Arcadia to the Chinese textiles firm Shandong Ruyi.
A spokesman for Taveta declined to comment.
