Mike Ashley, has admitted to arranging covert footage of his rival Peter Cowgill that ultimately forced the JD Sports chair out of the company, and Cowgill has now hit back.
Ashley said in an interview with the Financial Times that he had arranged for associates to secretly film Cowgill during a meeting with Barry Bown, the chief executive of Footasylum, in a Burger King car park in 2021.
The two men had been talking in a car during a time of Covid restrictions, when JD Sports was in the process of acquiring Footasylum, with competition regulators having explicitly barred the companies from exchanging commercially sensitive information while scrutinising the £90m deal.
The footage was leaked to The Sunday Times, triggering a Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigation that resulted in fines of almost £5m for JD Sports and Footasylum, and Cowgill’s departure from the company. At the time, Cowgill suggested the recording had been made on behalf of a “key competitor” and expressed concern that they had been able “to go to those lengths”.
Ashley, who is worth more than £3bn according to the Sunday Times Rich List, was unapologetic about his role. He said he was not “hiding from the fact” that he had wanted to topple Cowgill, quipping that Cowgill “shouldn’t have been in the car park and maybe I shouldn’t have been in the bushes”.
He added that he still believed Cowgill had known what he was planning. “No one is perfect,” he said, while insisting that most of the conflicts in his career had stemmed from his beliefs about fairness. “I’m not Mary Poppins. When you get in a fight with me, I’ll come back at you. But I’m not the devil incarnate.”
Cowgill, reacting to the FT interview, said he had been winning his battle against Ashley before the footage emerged.
Cowgill told The Times he had long believed Ashley was behind the covert filming and said: “I respect him as an operator. I don’t respect his tactics. We have a mutual respect, but the facts are I was winning [and] would I have used those tactics on him?
“The truth has emerged and I feel vindicated and justified. I had a very high level of confidence that I knew who the perpetrator was, and I was surprised not to receive more support [from the board and the CMA] at the time, really.”
Cowgill insisted that the speculation around the meeting was unfounded, and rejected suggestions that there was a failing of governance in JD Sports during his leadership, describing the culture as “like a monastery”.
“The truth of the car park incident is that it was completely innocuous. Completely. Not even slightly,” he said.
“The culture within JD, I never want it to be misinterpreted. The culture was completely, completely on the ball.”
No comments yet