Chequered history of bust airline's boss

The boss behind the biggest collapse in the holiday industry declared himself bankrupt just three months ago, the Evening Standard can reveal.

Peter Owen was forced to step down as chief executive of XL Leisure in June days after being made bankrupt. At the time the company said the decision was for "personal reasons".

But the Standard can reveal that Mr Owen, 61, from Hampton, west London, had declared himself bankrupt at Kingston county court on 28 May.

Two days later, the administrators of Silverjet, a low cost business-only airline which went bust at the same time, claimed Mr Owen, Silverjet's chairman, owed the company £240,000.

Mr Owen was formerly head of operations at BA in the early Nineties and briefly chief executive of Aer Lingus. Silverjet had promised to shake up the transatlantic business market by launching a business-only airline flying out of Luton to challenge BA and Virgin. But with business executives reluctant to use Luton and the cost of aviation fuel spiralling, Silverjet collapsed.

Following its demise, Mr Owen stepped down as chief executive of XL only to be replaced by his predecessor Phil Wyatt, the deputy chairman.

Mr Wyatt, who engineered the management buyout of XL in 2006, is a key figure in the company's rapid expansion, which transformed the group into Britain's third largest tour operator.

With his blond hair and deep tan, a tearful Mr Wyatt appeared before the cameras today to speak of his devastation at his company's demise.

But Mr Wyatt, 45, who lives with wife Jacqueline in a sprawling £2 million country house in West Sussex, also has something of a chequered past in the travel industry.

His former charter airline business Goldcrest Aviation was heavily criticised in the Nineties for delays and poor customer service. In one infamous incident passengers on a Goldcrest plane staged a sit-in at Malaga after an 11-hour delay. Goldcrest pledged that next time this happened they would call in the police to clear an aircraft.

In an interview with Mr Wyatt in 1997, Travel Trade Gazette, the travel industry's trade newspaper, described him as "Public Enemy Number One" - at least according to rival UK charter airlines. One holiday company chief executive told Travel Trade Gazette: "Phil Wyatt and people like him have set back the image of the charter industry 10 years."

His family history is steeped in the airline industry. His father Harry Wyatt helped to set up Monarch Airlines where his son, then aged 16, began his career as an operations clerk in 1979. Phil Wyatt became a director of Inspirations, the tour operator, in 1991, the same year he set up Goldcrest. Inspirations later took control of Goldcrest.

In 1999, Mr Wyatt joined the fledgling Excel Aviation as a consultant and was appointed chief executive from 2001, overseeing its rapid expansion. By 2003, Excel's profits had quadrupled from £3.4 million to £13.4 million in just 12 months, making Mr Wyatt's 10 per cent stake in the company worth £18.5 million. He may now have lost the lot.

In November 2006, Mr Wyatt orchestrated the management buyout of Excel. In doing so he sowed the seeds of its downfall, borrowing £143million - ostensibly from an Icelandic bank - to fund the deal.

The company then embarked on a rebranding exercise at a cost of £1.6 million, transforming it into XL. Key to raising awareness of the company was the £7.5 million sponsorship deal with West Ham United.

The latest accounts - filed in May for the year ending October 2007 - reveal a £23.6 million loss. Despite that, XL's six directors were paid close to £1 million in total with a top salary - almost certainly for Mr Wyatt or Mr Owen - of £272,000.

In the annual accounts, Mr Owen declared: "We are in a strong competitive position within our markets."

But with debts now reaching £200 million, XL could not pay its creditors. Negotiations carrying on until the early hours of this morning failed to secure a deal to rescue the business.