Welcome to Capital Confidential — a weekly diary column featuring the best tidbits from around the U.K.’s business and political landscape from MarketWatch sister publication Financial News.
This week: Guy Hands’ fears for his life while he was putting EMI on the straight and narrow; altruism from the City’s brokerage houses; and rumours of a Howard-Rokos reconciliation...
Getting into the wrong Hands
Guy Hands’ ill-fated £4.2bn takeover of EMI in 2007 ultimately led to the death of the storied music label, with it being broken up five years later. But the private equity tycoon has now revealed “drug gangs” at EMI were out to physically assault him after his firm Terra Firma Capital Partners began running the label.
According to a new book, The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig by music journalist Eamonn Forde, Hands’ crackdown on the company’s alleged practice of paying for its friends’ chemical misbehaviour (euphemistically called the “fruit and flowers” budget) had severe consequences. “I was warned about threats from drug gangs in EMI because I made it essential that people give receipts and explain where the money was going,” Hands tells Forde. “The rumours were that this had annoyed the drug gangs who were supplying drugs.
“That was quite a thing. We had one guy — and the police had to be called — who wanted to attack me on the premises. A dealer — just a small-time dealer. My driver had to go and have police training because they were very worried I was going to get attacked.”
Hands adds in the book that he finds it “difficult” to disagree that his EMI takeover wasn’t one of the worst private equity deals in history. Sounds like it could have been far worse…
Hope springs
Heartwarming news from inside the City’s brokerage houses. Hope Stringer, a gas broker on the energy desk of Marex Spectron, the commodities brokerage, was re-diagnosed with cancer, in the form of a soft tissue sarcoma, at the end of 2018. Marex Spectron’s energy brokers, customers and their clients all donated their commissions on 12 February to pay for her experimental cancer treatment in the US, raising $1.5m. Rumours swirl that a few of Marex Spectron’s competitors did not compete with the company for trades that day to ensure as much money as possible was raised for 27-year-old Hope’s treatment.
Monkey business
Hugh Jackman opened the Brit Awards last week with a routine from his film The Greatest Showman. But spare a thought for the Australian performer, who is being completely neglected at this year’s Oscars. Six months ago, Jackman was considered among the favourites for Academy Award recognition for his portrayal of former Colorado senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart in political drama The Front Runner. The film chronicles Hart’s reputed dalliance with model Donna Rice, which derailed his 1988 presidential campaign.
But despite a wide release from Sony Pictures, The Front Runner flopped at the box office. It made just $145,000 in the UK and $2m in the US, and failed to live up to its title during awards season. What went wrong? Quite apart from the shortcomings of Jason Reitman’s film, Hollywood analysts think the fact the movie didn’t recreate the famous photo of the married Hart, seated with Rice on his lap on board a yacht named Monkey Business, hardly helped its audience appeal.
Howard’s way
Things got notoriously acrimonious between hedge fund managers Alan Howard and Chris Rokos when the latter left Brevan Howard, the former’s firm, in 2012 to set up his own shop. Rokos sued Howard to exit the partnership agreement that prevented him from starting his own fund, but the case was settled in 2015 and he started his own business shortly afterwards. Relations between the pair have remained strained, but is a shock reconciliation on the cards? Capital asks because when Howard was quizzed by industry magazine EuroHedge which European hedge fund manager he would invest with, he named Rokos. Before we book a Mayfair lunch reservation for the pair, it’s worth recalling that Brevan Howard took a stake in Rokos’s hedge fund as part of the settlement.
USA Today
John Humphrys, the contentious veteran broadcaster, is standing down as presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme some time before the end of the year. Will he miss presenting the influential news show? Not if the experiences of his erstwhile Today partner-in-crime James Naughtie, who hung up his headphones in 2015, are anything to go by. “No,” Naughtie tells Capital when we ask if he still wishes he was setting the news agenda at the break of day. “Twenty-one years was enough. I’ve got the life of Riley — I can do what I like.” This freedom, Naughtie discloses, extends to going to the land of the free and writing a book about his stateside adventures, which he is provisionally calling On the Road from Nixon to Trump.
Poor performance
Which fading hedge fund manager attended a recent Mayfair dinner in a hoodie and ripped jeans, smelling of alcohol and resembling a vagrant? Even though his fund had received negative media coverage for poor performance shortly before the dinner, he drew further attention to himself by boorishly shouting trades into his mobile phone throughout proceedings.
Good Deedes
Farewell to The Dastardly Mr Deedes column in the Daily Mail, which has gleefully skewered City skulduggery for the past three years. The column has finished as writer Henry Deedes has switched to being a sketch writer in the House of Commons for the Mail, where his satirical skills will unlikely be found wanting. In the meantime any City confidantes of Mr Deedes presently feeling bereft — do feel free to get in touch.
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