Sir Philip Green family

Early life

Green was born on 15 March 1952 in Croydon, England, into a middle-class Jewish family. He was the son of Simon Green, a successful property developer and electrical goods retailer, and Alma. He has a sister, Elizabeth, five years his senior. His family moved to Hampstead Garden Suburb, a middle-class area of North London, and at the age of nine he was sent to the now-closed Jewish boarding school Carmel College in Oxfordshire. When Green was twelve, his father died of a heart attack, and he inherited the family business. After leaving boarding school at 15 with no O-levels, Green worked for a shoe importer in East London before travelling to the US, Europe and the Far East. On his return, aged 21, he set up his first business, importing jeans from the Far East to sell on to London retailers. The business was assisted with a £20,000 loan (equivalent to £216,000 in 2014) backed by his family. In 1979, Green bought up, at low prices, the entire stock of ten designer-label clothes retailers that had gone into receivership. He then had the newly bought clothes dry cleaned, put on hangers, and wrapped in polythene to make them look new, and bought a shop from which to sell them to the public.

Sanctions & controversy

In October 2018, The Daily Telegraph reported that "a leading businessman has been granted an injunction against" the newspaper to stop the "newspaper revealing alleged sexual harassment and racial abuse of staff". The following day, in the House of Lords, Labour peer Peter Hain exercised parliamentary privilege to name Green as the subject of the allegations. The Telegraph said that the allegations would "reignite the #MeToo movement against the mistreatment of women, minorities and others by powerful employers. Opposition MPs, including Labour MPs Frank Field and Jess Phillips, and Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, called for a revocation of Green's knighthood. In May 2019, Green was charged with four counts of misdemeanor assault in the US after an Arizona Pilates teacher accused him of frequently touching her inappropriately.

Career

In April 1980, Green registered a philanthropic initiative, the Kahn Charitable Trust, with a vision of "putting lost smiles back on the faces of less privileged persons across the globe." Green is a supporter of the Fashion Retail Academy and the industry charity Retail Trust. Green was made a Knight Bachelor in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours "For services to the Retail Industry". In May 2007, after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal, Green donated £250,000 as a monetary reward for any useful public information. He also gave the McCanns the use of his private jet to allow them to fly to Rome for a Papal visit. In 2010, Green donated $465,000 for new beds at the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, after his wife Tina's mother died there. He also spent more than $150,000 for an Alexander McQueen dress at Naomi Campbell's Fashion for Relief charity event. In the same year, Green donated £100,000 to the Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund which aims to support London's poorest people. He was reportedly the BBC's first choice to front the UK franchise of The Apprentice; however, at that time in 2004, he was too busy with Arcadia's attempted takeover of Marks & Spencer.

Arcadia has been criticised for the pay and conditions of both overseas and UK workers by anti-sweatshop groups such as Labour Behind the Label, No Sweat and the student activist network People & Planet. Green denied allegations in The Sunday Times made during 2007 that his firm used overseas sweatshops where workers in Mauritius were paid pitiful wages. In 2010, Green was again accused of using sweatshops, this time by Channel 4's Dispatches programme. It was asserted that he was using factories in Britain in which workers were paid less than half the legal minimum wage.

Personal life

Green and his wife Cristina Palos have two children, one of whom, Brandon, was previously in a relationship with actress Emma Watson. Green is based at a London hotel during the week, spending the weekends with his wife and their children in an apartment in Monaco. For his 50th birthday, Green flew 200 guests in a chartered Airbus A300 to a hotel in Cyprus for a three-day toga party, where Tom Jones and Rod Stewart performed. For his 55th birthday, Green flew 100 guests 8,500 miles in two private jets to the Four Seasons at Landaagiraavaru, an eco-spa on a private island in the Maldives. Green owns a £100 million, 90 m (300 ft) yacht named Lionheart constructed by Benetti and a £20 million Gulfstream G550 private jet. For a birthday, his wife bought him a solid gold Monopoly set, featuring his own acquisitions. Green is inspired by Sir Charles Clore, who built the Sears plc UK retail empire from scratch in the 1950s and 1960s.