Green: Man with a fine attention to retail

London: The forthright billionaire boss of Top Shop and BHS plans to go into the entertainment business with his friend Simon Cowell. It could be a plan dreamt up over cocktails on Sir Philip Green's yacht, Lionheart, or during a long lunch at Sandy Lane, the exclusive Barbados resort where Green and his friend Simon Cowell escape for a few weeks every year.

The retail mogul and the American Idol judge are poised to unveil a multi-billion pound entertainment venture - reportedly called Greenwell, that will create new hit shows and sell them around the world.

Details are sketchy, but speculation suggests Cowell will devise the formats and Green will help finance them, even producing merchandise that could go on sale in his network of high street stores.

The BHS and Top Shop boss controls 12 per cent of the UK market and that could prove lucrative. "He's been working on this throughout the night in recent weeks," a source close to the businessman claims. Even so, the proposal sounds like a business plan Green might reject were it to be presented to him by one of the sharp-suited investment bankers he professes to detest, on the grounds that it is long on ambition but short on detail.

That could be because it was uncovered before the two men were ready to go public, but it might just be an elaborate negotiating ploy. Cowell is said to be unhappy about the amount of money he receives for the franchises he stars in and believes Simon Fuller, the pop impresario who owns the rights to American Idol, America's Got Talent and their numerous spin-offs around the world, should hand over a share of the profits. The prospect of Cowell teaming up with Green might force Fuller to the table. If Cowell no longer wants to be one of Fuller's paid employees, albeit one who is said to earn many millions, it is little wonder he has turned to Green for advice.

Few people have more cash than the 57-year-old Londoner, whose wealth is estimated as at least £4 billion (Dh24.27 billion). Cowell is worth a fraction of that. If they were to go into business together, there is little doubt who would be the senior partner. Both men have become poster boys for The Apprentice generation, admired for their brash, self-confident manner and unapologetic attitude to making money, but it is Green who has come to personify the excesses of an era in which cheap money and a consumer borrowing binge combined to create huge wealth.

He was rumoured to be the first choice to host Sir Alan Sugar's BBC show, but was too busy trying to buy Marks & Spencer at the time. It foundered after M&S management portrayed him as a greedy corporate villain intent on destroying a British institution for personal gain.

Green is accustomed to such attacks, and his lavish lifestyle supplies his critics with endless ammunition. His detractors in the City, who wrote him off as a wide boy in the 1980s, accuse him of being "flash." He can afford to laugh that off, but criticism about his off-shore tax status has proved more difficult to deflect. A British citizen, he spends most of his time in Monaco with Tina and their children, Chloe and Brandon, and pays minimal tax on the proceeds of parts of his retailing empire, Taveta Investments.

Taveta, the holding company used to buy BHS, is registered in the name of his wife, a Monaco resident, which means it pays less tax on its profits than it otherwise would.

The fact Green was recommended for a knighthood by a Labour government rankles with many backbenchers, who believe New Labour tied itself in ideological knots as it sought to create the conditions that helped to fuel the Brown boom before it turned to bust.

Despite the disapproval of the City establishment, Green is feted by the media and the public, regularly appearing in the newspapers alongside beautiful woman, including Kate Moss, another business partner. He teamed up with Moss to create a successful clothing line.