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Stepping very close to the libel law here Aditya

But then, Green is used to cherry-picking which rules he plays by. Take this example: he buys Arcadia, the company that owns Topshop, then arranges for it to give his wife a dividend of £1.2bn. Since Tina Green is, conveniently, a resident of Monaco, the tax savings on that one payment alone are worth an estimated £300m.

Well, no, not really.

As The Guardian pointed out in a correction:

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday November 9 2004

Philip Green, the retailer, has asked us to point out that contrary to the impression given in the headline of this article, Arcadia has at all times been owned by his wife since the business was acquired in 2002.

Tsk.

5 thoughts on “Stepping very close to the libel law here Aditya”

  1. So.

    Make up false alleged fact, correct, refer back to it a decade later ignoring the correction.

    Where did Chakro get the fake allegation and the tax estimate from? Has Murph been burbling again?

  2. Also, Tina Green is South African – or at least, that’s where she is from. Why she should be expected to live in the UK instead of Monaco I don’t know. If modern women are expected to reside in the same country as their husbands as a matter of course, somebody at the Guardian needs to have a word with my wife.

  3. Actually, it is not incorrect.

    It is directors, not shareholders, who propose what dividends should be paid?

  4. When I was waiting in a shop the other day, their telly was showing the grilling of the spiv. He looked stupid and ill tempered.

    Maybe the wide boy really was lucky, and the twerp just presented himself as a purchaser without any need for a douceur. Maybe.

  5. The Pedant-General

    BraveFart,

    Who authorises the dividend isn’t the bit that’s incorrect.

    The implication is that the Green owned the company so that the dividend payment was going somewhere else. That’s the issue.

    More importantly, if it had to be corrected a decade ago, you would have thought that that would be fair warning. To make the same insinuation now really could be actionable couldn’t it? The Graun KNOWS it to be untrue.

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