A top City banker, who is a close confidante of Sir Philip Green, advised the convicted fraudster who tried to buy BHS during 2013 and 2014, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.
Robin Saunders, is a banker once known as “the queen of the City” and who helped Green raise funds to buy the chain in 2000. She was part of the team conducting due diligence on the retailer being led by Paul Sutton, a 59-year-old bankrupt businessman who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment after being found guilty in absentia of embezzlement in France in 2002.
Saunders, who made her name at the German bank West LB in the early 2000s and had stints as an adviser for Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One business and the refinancing of Wembley stadium, is credited with pushing through the deal that enabled Green’s breakthrough acquisition of BHS 16 years ago.
She went on to sit on the BHS board and received handsome dividends from the company, before it merged with Green’s Arcadia group in 2009. It is not clear how she came to work for Sutton.
During the parliamentary hearings on the BHS collapse last week, Paul Budge, the finance director of Green’s Arcadia group, said he met Sutton in April 2013 after being “put in touch with us via a banker friend of Sir Philip’s”.
Budge added: “[Sutton] wanted to invest in BHS at that time. We talked on and off for many months without really going anywhere. He worked up a business plan – it was called Project Albion – and the idea was to turn BHS around to profitability.”
Documents, seen by the Guardian and sent to both Sutton and Saunders, refer to a “possible sale and purchase of, or investment in, our BHS business”, which was being run under the a codename of Albion during 2013.
Saunders did not respond to phone calls and emails. Green declined to comment.
The news that such a well-known ally of Green’s was involved with a BHS bidder comes after it emerged that funding from Guy Dellal and Alexander Dellal – the son and grandson of property investor “Black Jack” Dellal who helped to finance Green’s takeover of retail group Sears in 1998 – helped push through Green’s sale of BHS to Dominic Chappell last year.
The Dellals provided £35m to Chappell – whose consortium bought BHS in 2015 – which he needed to show he was a credible acquirer of the store chain. The Dellals’ company, Allied Commercial Exporters, then went on to make millions from a series of real-estate deals with the department store chain.
BHS collapsed into administration barely a year after Chappell acquired it, leaving 11,000 jobs at risk and the company pension fund in deficit to the tune of £571m. After acquiring the business, more than £25m was paid out from BHS to Chappell’s consortium, Retail Acquisitions, in the period between its sale and it falling into administration. This included £2.8m in management fees, £2.1m in salaries and wages, £11m in legal and professional fees and £10m in interest payments.
Chappell, who is due to answer questions on the store’s collapse in front of a parliamentary select committee next week, was briefly a director of a company understood to be controlled by Sutton, while both men attended meetings together about acquiring BHS during 2014.
Sutton was eventually ousted from the transaction when a dossier outlining his controversial history was sent to Green. Chappell then pressed ahead with his own deal, while Green demanded guarantees that Sutton was not involved in the transaction.
