Philip Green, known alternatively as the King of the High Street and the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’ has seen his flagship company Arcadia go bust with the loss of 13,000 jobs. He and his wife Tina live tax-free in Monaco and were heavily criticised for the sale in 2015 of department store BHS for a token sum. He denied having done so to avoid a massive pension plan liability. After a highly critical media campaign he later paid £363m to make good the scheme.
There appears to be no requirement for companies to repair any deficit in the pension schemes but he’ll still be attacked if he doesn’t in this instance since he and his wife built their fortune on a 2005 £1.2bn dividend they took out of the business. The Arcadia group of shops, bought by him was transferred immediately to his wife and is majority-owned by her Taveta Investments, set up on 19th June 2002.
He was born 15 March 1952, with a property developer father who died when he was 12 and he left school at 15 with no O-levels. He travelled in the USA and Far East and set up his first business when he was 21 and went on from there.
He is a Sun Pisces, like Rupert Murdoch, with a super-determined and unsentimental Mars in Scorpio trine his Sun, in a ruthless square to Pluto and trine Uranus – hard-driving, a risk-taker, bad-tempered. His Jupiter in go-ahead Aries is in a confident trine to Pluto and opposition both Saturn and Neptune in Libra. The Jupiter Saturn will give him mood swings and Jupiter Neptune can be delusional or at least given to unrealistic dreams.
His get-it-together 5th Harmonic chart is well-aspected; and his rise-and-fall 10H (from hero to zero) is also notable. His strongest harmonic is his what-gives-him-pleasure 9H, often the case with avaricious money men.
His worst year is yet to come with tr Neptune conjunct his Sun and his Jupiter/Node midpoint in 2022 along with a shockingly insecure tr Uranus opposition his Mars and square his Pluto. There’ll be a few swampy patches in 2021 but the year after will be his nadir.
Not that he’ll be left without a bean but his fortune is already thought to be a fifth of what it was a few years back. Down from nearly £5 billion to under £1 billion.
Taveta is also taking in water with tr Neptune eroding the Saturn in Gemini opposition Pluto from a couple of years back through till February 2021; and then heading for the Gemini Sun come 2022/23.
Thanks Marjorie If it wasn’t for the fact that I was born a month later I would be somewhat pleased that he will be receiving his just desserts! I notice that he has a moon in Scorpio though that would also be also be affected by the adverse transit of Uranus??
Thanks Marjorie. Philip Green is, according to an interview I heard yesterday, an old-fashioned ‘asset stripper’. He could easily have developed online retail sites for his brands, but chose not to. I can’t help thinking he’s used this current Covid crisis to let Top Shop and the rest go down. He is ruthless and resourceful, and apparently has little in the way of empathy or conscience.
I noticed his Aquarian Venus beside the Nodes – quite symbolic of fashion for everyone. I hope his employees will receive the money they are owed, their immediate prospects are very bleak.
What I don’t understand is what the regulators and legislators are doing? Or rather haven’t been doing. All of us simple souls assumed that pension schemes would be ring fenced and heavily protected from predators.
Pensions schemes have been ringfenced since Robert Maxwell stripped out the Mirror Pension scheme. (Noting that legislation would have occurred when Saturn was last in Aquarius/Pisces).
The issue here is probably that the pension scheme has been underfunded. The pension fund is a mass of investments that is hopefully growing and needs to be able to continue to grow and pay out for all the current and future pensioners and spouses – some of whom will be claiming for the better part of the next 50-75 years. When there’s a shortfall, the company usually invests more money.
But these are just calculations based on expectations of how investments will perform, rates of inflation, life expectancy etc, etc. So an unscrupulous company can probably get away with saying “The stock market will pick up in a year or two, the fund will be ok” and not do anything. I’m not sure how much regulation exists around this part as the markets do fluctuate especially with things like Brexit!
FWIW this is why so many companies have moved away from Final Salary schemes. By going to Defined Contribution – “we’ll give you the equivalent of 10% of your salary to invest how you want”; costs for the company are controlled and the risk is moved to the employee/pensioner.
“He could easily have developed online retail sites for his brands, but chose not to.”
To be fair, brands relying on the same business model as Green’s big money maker Topshop – copying latest trends and getting it to stores on large volumes – have struggled considerably with getting their online business going. I think it’s because online shopping has a different logic than “in store” shopping. While Topshop, Zara, Mango and, to an extend, H&M rely on getting shoppers in, trying on things, and, if the first thing that drew them in doesn’t fit, leave with other things, online shopping tends to be much more targeted. Successful large online shopping sites, such as US shoeshop Zappos (whose founder lived at a trailer, and died tragically just a couple of days ago) or German Zalando have crazy amount of search filters ensuring you can narrow the choice quickly without visiting 10 stores.
A development I’ve seen with covid-19, however, is midpriced smaller brands which have never had large retail presence with their own brand stores, but have been sold at department stores, doing well online. This probably has been really bad for department store side of Green’s business.
hi nice work
we used to be able to share these on f b ? but i haven’t seen the FB logo for a while ??
Hi Is back now on mine.