YOU may remember that monster, the Bad Banker. Until recently we were boring ourselves demented ranting about him, as if complaining about some ex-lover we never liked in the first place. So, it comes as a relief to find we have moved on, and have a new baddie to gripe about. Philip Green, former “king of shops”, now, with the demise of BHS, the company he stewarded until he sold it for £1 last year, hailed by Conservative MP Richard Fuller as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”.

In a way, those two exes are not that different. Both come from the same world, both are connected, both speak volumes about the flaws of the economic system we live in and the way it is regulated. Both are characters we have long held with suspicion.

It’s hard not to see Green’s story as a fable of our times. To talk about the billionaire, worth around £3.2 billion, is to touch on the big issue of our time: widening inequality. How did the super-rich get so loaded, while everyone else seems to be struggling? How can Philip Green sit on his yacht on the Monte Carlo marina, while 11,000 people stand to lose their jobs at BHS?

Should he shoulder some blame, though he sold the company months ago? Is there something morally wrong, even if legally OK, about what he did when he bought up BHS in 2000 for £200 million and 15 years later sold it for £1 to a team that included the twice-bankrupted businessman, Dominic Chapell?

Green is he lends himself almost too well to caricature: the embodiment of all that is wrong with capitalism. There was the £6.2 million birthday party in Mexico, at which Stevie Wonder and Robbie Williams performed; the photographs with supermodels and pop stars; the solid gold monopoly set with the locations changed to those of Green family businesses; the three luxury yachts; the wife, Tina, who lives, like some offshore treasure, in the tax haven of Monaco, receiving occasional dividends from Arcadia, the fashion business of which she was conveniently made owner when Green acquired it in 2002.

This is a man who, in 2005, awarded his family (actually his wife, thereby avoiding tax) the biggest then pay cheque in British corporate history, a huge dividend from Arcadia that was more than four times the group’s pre-tax profits. His life, even without this latest episode, delivers us wealth porn at its most indigestible, a grotesque overdose of super-rich detail, in a world where so many have so little.

Then we find that some of the Green millions came from dividends taken out of BHS, a company which has collapsed, leaving thousands jobless.

The whole affair could almost have been penned by a satirist as a tragi-comic sketch about capitalist injustice. We learn, for instance that Green and his family received £586m in dividends, rental payments and interest on loans before he sold BHS, and it turns out that this figure is not far off the company’s pensions deficit of £571 million. The £80 million he has offered to pay into the Pension Protection Fund, is less than the around £100 million it’s estimated he has just spent on his third super-yacht.

Of course, Green’s defenders will point out that much of the pension shortfall was caused, not by Green but by the 2008 crash. They’ll note that BHS was doing quite well when he took those dividends out of the company. But, across the media, even believers in capitalism are seeking to distance themselves from what he represents. Conservative MP David Davis, in The Financial Times, said: “This is the dark side of capitalism: increased borrowing and payment of ever bigger dividends; risk transferred from the private to the public when the business fails; the low paid and the taxpayer left to pick up the bill. It is all worryingly reminiscent of the 2008 banking crash.”

The urge is there, undoubtedly, to see Green in stocks. Some are calling for him to be stripped of his knighthood, some to pay back his dividends. There is a desire for questions to be answered, and some will be when he appears before MPs investigating BHS’s collapse. Of course, when the questioning is done, it may transpire that it’s all perfectly legal. But that wouldn’t stop us thinking the situation was rotten. In fact, it would make us feel it stank even more: not just Green, but the whole system.

Fred Goodwin became our poster boy for how the banking world went bad. Now, Green looks to be reminding us that there are many unacceptable faces of capitalism. Of course we always knew that. But it’s been a while since we’ve had it so glitzily wrapped, in pictures of Kate Moss and luxury super-yachts.