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…
