Remember, people, try to keep it in the family
A warning to bankers (and their daughters): be careful on social media. Rory Cullinan, the head of investment banking at Royal Bank of Scotland, must be cursing after being caught by The Sun using Snapchat to send selfies from work to his daughter Bridget. Alas, she posted the images, with his messages such as “boring meeting” and “another friggin’ meeting”, for all to see on Instagram. Bob Diamond’s daughter, Nell, made a similar slip when he exited Barclays and she tweeted: “George Osborne and Ed Miliband you can go ahead and #HMD [hold my d***].”
. . . unless you’re too busy
Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat business minister, who gave birth to her first child, Andrew, last year, is putting her day job ahead of being a mother for the next eight weeks. Ms Swinson, 35, who became an MP a decade ago and is married to fellow parliamentarian Duncan Hames, says of her son: “It’s election time. He’s 14 months old. He will not remember.”
The natives are restless
Bankers from HSBC stayed away from the annual Private Asset Managers Awards at the Dorchester Hotel. Probably a good job; there was mischief in the air. Goldman Sachs, which was up for five awards, came in for most stick, being booed each time it was mentioned.
. . . So what’s the story?
Still, the black-tie dinner was hardly of a “socialist, revolutionary character”, as Miles Jupp, the television comedian and master of ceremonies, noted. “Some prefer to call them the 1 per cent, some call them a persecuted minority — you guys call them clients,” quipped the comic best known among viewers of a certain age as Archie the Inventor in kids’ show Balamory.
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Business big shot
Name Trevor Mather
Age 47
Position Chief executive, Auto Trader
There’s many a corporate man and business school grad who talks about companies achieving lift-off, shares rocketing and stock lighting up the boards like stars in the sky — and rather fewer who can do so claiming to really know what they’re talking about because they’ve got a Masters in aeronautic and astronautic engineering on their CV.
Trevor Mather can, though, and he probably will when Auto Trader, Britain’s biggest second-hand car sales website, lists, with Bloomberg reporting yesterday that bankers could push its valuation up to £2.5 billion, a heady 18 times last year’s earnings. If Mr Mather pulls that off, he’ll be a star turn for Apax Partners, the private equity group that bought out joint owner Guardian Media Group last year in a deal that valued the business at less than £2 billion.
Mr Mather avoided the City limelight until he joined Auto Trader in 2013, after more than a decade at the UK outpost of Thoughtworks, a Chicago-based software designer and consultancy, and earlier spells at Andersen Consulting and BAE Systems. He grew up in Lancashire, where he studied “maths ’n stuff” at Runshaw College.