In these straitened times, Wimbledon invites are hard to come by. There were eyebrows raised in the City last week when the governor of the Bank of England was spotted in the royal box on centre court every single day.
Sir Mervyn King rarely accepts freebies — not even lunch. But when King next discloses who has been entertaining him, apparently there will be no mention of tennis.
The governor was not on a jolly, the Bank insisted. “He’s a member of the committee that runs the championship,” it said.
“He uses part of his annual leave from the Bank to act as an occasional host.”
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George Osborne, on hand to see Roger Federer crash out, might need a similar excuse.
In the silence before a Federer serve, someone in the crowd shouted “Busy day at the office, George?” — prompting a fiery blush from the chancellor.
See you in court Incorporated
What’s big in America eventually becomes big here. Burger King, iced coffee, and now litigation funds, which are springing up to make money financing the wave of court cases generated by the credit crunch.
The latest one is Astraea Capital, chaired by Harry Hill, the Rightmove founder. Astraea is trying to raise £100m on AIM, the junior London market. The float prospectus reveals that the man behind it, Jack Simony, certainly knows the litigation game first-hand.
Platinum Partners, an outfit where Simony was previously a freelance consultant, is embroiled in the fallout from a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by the convicted Florida fraudster Scott Rothstein. The Rothstein estate liquidators are trying to claw back cash from Platinum, claiming they realised they were invested in a dodgy scheme but kept schtum in the hope of getting their money back before others.
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Platinum Partners protests its innocence. Simony, a witness in the case, has suffered the embarrassment of seeing nervy emails between him and Rothstein’s team leaked. Either an ideal qualification to run a litigation firm, or one to avoid.
Blakes progress for Staveley’s man
Mehrdad Ghodoussi is a busy man. Between preparing to marry über dealmaker Amanda Staveley, and pursuing his career as a financier, Ghodoussi is planning to launch a boutique hotel in Dubai.
He wants to open a franchise of Blakes, the South Kensington cubbyhole favoured by celebs like Gwyneth Paltrow, at the International Financial Centre. “Dubai is full of hotels but to bring an exclusive brand like Blakes gives it a different dimension,” he tells me.
But isn’t Blakes’ location what makes it so special?
• The commodities boom has claimed another victim — the pina colada. The Indonesian coconut crop has failed due to a drought and insect infestation. Funkin, the company that supplies pina colada mix to bars, has had to stop making it.
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That’s bad enough, but lovers of fruity cocktails should get ready for another drink to be off the menu — the daquiri. One-third of the European strawberry crop, which is used in the daquiri syrup, has been wiped out by bad weather. Thank goodness the ingredients of a gin and tonic have so far proved more resilient.
Iceland’s sale on ice
Supermodels won’t get out of bed for less than £10,000 — how much to extricate the finance director of Iceland, the frozen food chain? The company’s up for sale for £1.6 billion, but Tarsem Dhaliwal, finance chief, is off to Majorca this weekend to get married. Before he left on Friday, he sent an email to bankers involved in the auction. One told me: “It basically said ‘don’t call me or email me over the next two weeks because I won’t respond’.”