The Sports Direct founder, Mike Ashley, has admitted to arranging surveillance footage that brought down his rival Peter Cowgill, the former JD Sports chair.

Cowgill was secretly filmed in 2021 in a car talking with the Footasylum boss Barry Bown. JD Sports was in the process of acquiring the trainer retailer at the time and the two companies were not allowed to share commercially sensitive information.

The footage, which was seen by the Sunday Times, triggered a regulatory investigation and ultimately led to fines of almost £5m from the competition watchdog and Cowgill being ousted from JD Sports.

Ashley said he was not “hiding from the fact” that he wanted to topple Cowgill. The billionaire said in an interview with the Financial Times that Cowgill “shouldn’t have been in the car park and maybe I shouldn’t have been in the bushes”, adding later that associates in his employ had recorded the video.

“No one is perfect,” he said. Ashley told the FT that he still believed Cowgill “knew what I was going to do – so then why did he do it?”

Ashley is one of the most prominent and unorthodox figures on the UK high street. He is worth more than £3bn, according to the Sunday Times rich list.

He stepped down as chief executive of Frasers Group, formerly Sports Direct, in 2022 but still retains a 73% stake in the company that he built up from a single sports store in Maidenhead, England, in 1982 with £10,000 from his parents. The group also includes House of Fraser, Flannels and Evans Cycles, among others.

After the existence of the covert footage with Bown was made public, Cowgill suggested to the Sunday Times that it had been recorded on behalf of a “key competitor” and that he was concerned that they had been able “to go to those lengths”.

Ashley told the FT that most of the conflicts in his career had been driven by his beliefs around fairness. “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.