Sir Philip Green did it: he successfully pleaded poverty from the deck of his large motor yacht, currently moored in Sanremo. The billionaire (or thereabouts) didn’t even need to turn up in person in London to chivvy Arcadia’s landlords to accept hefty rent cuts on 194 shops. It required two attempts, but it was quite a piece of negotiation.

Success is clearly good news for most of the 18,000 staff, which is why the CVA should be welcomed. But let’s not pretend that skies suddenly look sunny for Arcadia. The group has suffered years of underinvestment while Asos, Boohoo and Next have led the online charge. It’s not obvious that a £50m injection of equity into Arcadia, courtesy of Tina Green, will now be enough to provide “the very best multichannel experience”.

The weather outlook for the landlords, however, looks worse. Intu, the owner of the Lakeside, Merry Hill and Metrocentre shopping centres, opposed the CVA, seemingly on the theory that Topshop, the healthiest part of Arcadia, would emerge intact whatever happened. The bulk of the rest of the landlord crew folded. Fear of administration, and thus empty shops, prevailed.

It’s a point to keep in mind when the next big property company tries to argue demand for retail space is still OK and that the stock market, which has whacked the share prices of retail landlords, has overreacted.

The reality at Arcadia is that a near-billionaire asked to pay less rent – up to 50% less – on leases he had freely signed. And the landlords said yes. It can only mean rents in retail land still have a long way to fall.

Neil Woodford’s departure could be a win-win

Everyone is wondering if the board of Woodford Patient Capital Trust will sack Neil Woodford as manager, as it’s entitled to do. But the question also needs to be asked the other way round: will Woodford want to continue?

Remember an unusual feature about Patient Capital, an investment trust exclusively focused on small and unquoted companies: Woodford doesn’t get a regular management fee and instead signed up at launch in April 2015 to performance-only rewards.

He’s never been paid a penny under a performance hurdle that requires the value of the trust’s assets to compound in value at a rate of 10% a year. And the medium-term prospects for a payout don’t look good either: the hurdle is now close to 150p a share, whereas the per-share value of the assets is just 87p. Woodford is a very long way behind par.

He might take the view that Patient Capital will recover the lost ground eventually. Pride might also motivate him to keep going in the world of young and unquoted companies; he will clearly resent the idea that he made a colossal mistake by not sticking to his old territory of big dividend-paying income stocks.

But would he really continue with Patient Capital if the rest of his empire, where regular management fees are charged, emerges from the mess in vastly smaller form?

If punters in the flagship Equity Income Fund pull half their money when the gates are opened, fees for Woodford are heading south. And since Woodford is now obliged to cleanse the Equity Income portfolio of its unquoted stocks, supposed synergies with Patient Capital will disappear.

All in all, a parting of the ways at Patient Capital might suit both sides.

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Chief executive of Saga is to boldly go

Two months ago, Lance Batchelor, the chief executive of Saga, declared he had a “bold and fundamental” strategy to fix the over-50s insurance and cruise specialist. Part one of this new approach, it turns out, is his own exit. At the age of 55, he’s decided to retire.

Odd as it may sound, it may be a genuine retirement, rather than a prod from the board to head to the exit, since Saga says there won’t be a payoff and Batchelor won’t actually depart until January.

Even without a payoff, he should count himself lucky he’s able to make a long goodbye. Batchelor has been in charge since flotation in 2014, since when Saga’s shares have travelled from 185p to just 38p. Along the way, there have been two profit warnings, and the second, in April, came with a steep dividend cut.

The oddest part was Batchelor’s grumble about how Saga had been “focused overly on the short term” and needed to remember its “heritage”. He’d been in charge for half a decade at that point. Saga’s cruise ships move slowly; investors might reasonably have expected more pace in the boardroom.