Mike Ashley has admitted arranging covert surveillance footage that helped bring down his long-time rival Peter Cowgill, saying he had no intention of pretending otherwise. The footage, filmed in 2021 and later seen by the Sunday Times, captured Cowgill in a car speaking with Footasylum boss Barry Bown while JD Sports was in the middle of acquiring Footasylum.

The video triggered a regulatory investigation that ended with fines of almost £5m from the competition watchdog and, eventually, Cowgill’s ouster from JD Sports. Ashley said associates in his employ recorded the video and insisted he was not hiding from the fact that he wanted to topple Cowgill.

Speaking in a Financial Times interview, Ashley said Cowgill “shouldn’t have been in the car park and maybe I shouldn’t have been in the bushes,” adding: “No one is perfect.” He also said he still believed Cowgill “knew what I was going to do – so then why did he do it?”

The remarks reopen one of British retail’s most bitter feuds. Ashley founded what became Frasers Group from a single sports store in Maidenhead in 1982 with £10,000 from his parents, built it into a business that now includes House of Fraser, Flannels and Evans Cycles, and stepped down as chief executive in 2022. He still retains a 73% stake in the company and, according to the Sunday Times rich list, is worth more than £3bn.

Cowgill has suggested the covert footage had been recorded on behalf of a “key competitor” and said he was concerned that they had been able to go “to those lengths”. That complaint goes to the heart of why the episode mattered: JD Sports and Footasylum were not allowed to share commercially sensitive information during the acquisition process, and the secret recording helped raise questions about how far the rivalry had gone.

Ashley did not try to soften the picture of himself. “I’m not Mary Poppins – when you get in a fight with me, I’ll come back at you. But I’m not devil incarnate,” he said. JD Sports and Footasylum declined to comment.

What the interview makes clear is that the dispute was never just about business logic or market share. It was a personal campaign carried out in the shadow of a takeover, and the fallout did not stop with one hidden camera. It reached the regulator, the boardroom and, now, the man who says he ordered the whole thing.