‘Look! Concrete!’ Bruno Lafont crashes his fist on the table. ‘You could put 30 tonnes on top of this table and it wouldn’t break. Tougher than steel!’ The table doesn’t look like concrete at all. The top is only a centimetre thick. The surface is painted a Tuscan tone, giving it the feel and look
The current row about private equity seems to me to have much more to do with the flexing of union muscles in anticipation of a return to influence under Gordon Brown than it has to do with efficiency and fairness in the use of capital. The GMB union has taken the lead, publicising its claim
Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the
Dominic Prince says you’d have to be potty to buy a racehorse as an investment — unless your name happened to be John Magnier or Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum Owning and breeding a thoroughbred racehorse can be a mouth-wateringly profitable enterprise. Sir Percy, winner of last year’s Epsom Derby, cost a piffling 16,000 guineas when
With the endless talk about private equity these days you could be forgiven for thinking it must be the only sensible investment out there. Not so. In fact some of private equity’s biggest players (think Guy Hands) have recently been putting their money into something much more prosaic — trees. Until a few years ago,
Twelve years ago, on a rainy afternoon when nothing much else seemed to be happening, I abandoned my desk in Canary Wharf for a few hours in order to track down a new and obscure betting operation somewhere off the Mile End Road. The managing director was a large, florid man in his late forties.
Elliot Wilson explains how to navigate India’s rigid investment rules and buy into a dazzling growth story Sweat was pouring off the commodities broker sitting next to me in the sauna of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. ‘India is shining,’ he thundered. ‘You must invest in it — everyone in England must. The economy
In his annual meeting with foreign journalists in January, President Putin enthused over his country’s record on initial public offerings: ‘Without any doubt, 2006 can be called the year of IPOs, because it was the first time that Russian companies carried out … IPOs worth dozens of billions of dollars on international and Russian exchanges….
When Charles Prince, the chief executive of Citigroup, announced two weeks ago that he was getting rid of his bank’s rather likeable corporate logo, a red umbrella, I feared that he might be tempting the household gods. And the gods have duly stirred. The Financial Times has reported grumblings from some big shareholders that the
I admire the late Steve Irwin, the Australian crocodilaphile who, coming from nowhere, contrived to make £2 million a year sporting with these ugly, dangerous and tremendous beasts, and was then killed by a miserable stingray. I say ‘ugly’ but that is a matter of opinion. I love drawing them more than any other creature
Of the Australian tycoon Alan Bond it used sometimes to be remarked that, after a nuclear war, there would be only three things left alive: seaweed, cockroaches and Bond. In British business these days, there is probably only one man with the same kind of durability: Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP. The recent warfare at
Edie Lush endures a ‘Win Investing’ seminar which fails in its promise to reveal the secrets of stock-market success ‘What percentage of ten trillion pounds do you need to be happy?’ asks the young Australian called Jonathan who is instructing the ‘free’ Win Investing seminar I’m attending. You may have heard Win Investing’s irritating ads
Peter Hain says two thirds of City bonuses should be redirected to charity, or employers who dish them out should face tax penalties. David Cameron is trying to find a formula to suggest he disapproves of City greed while signalling that the City need fear no tax-grab from him. Those who find the disparity between
If I wanted to pick an artist whose work and mind seem peculiarly apt for the present day, my choice would fall on Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), the Netherlandish master who specialised in moralising fantasies and diablerie. The world we live in is characterised by unchecked and unpunished, widening and deepening evil, manifesting itself in
Ghosts are fashionable just now. There are two productions of Ibsen’s play and a movie. At dinner parties, if conversation falters or begins to move down forbidden (by me) tramlines, I ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Instantly there is a babble. Nobody believes in ghosts personally. But everyone knows somebody who does, and provides
When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just
Not many people seem to realise this, but it’s cheaper in the long run to buy a solid carved mahogany antique chest of drawers than a modern pine one from Ikea. Without having to search far, you can get a beautiful Victorian chest of drawers in excellent condition for £200 which will last you and
‘Blunkett Is Blind’ screamed a pertinent piece of graffiti in Sheffield city centre in the 1980s. This wasn’t just a statement of the bleeding obvious, as a London cabbie might say, but a condemnation of David Blunkett’s stewardship as leader of Sheffield City Council for the seven years before he became MP for Sheffield Brightside
Mark Benton is quite clear why he followed his father into working for Rolls-Royce; after three years toiling away as a roofer, he discovered that ‘it’s nice and warm in here…. Oops, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.’ Benton, 28, born and bred in Derby, rushes to add that he’s better paid, has had five
Councils the length and breadth of Britain are smelling the money Red Ken is making and talking of introducing congestion-charging schemes. Interest groups are starting to complain at the introduction of yet another tax on motoring. But there are better models than Ken’s, which could bring real benefits. Charging for road use is hardly a