A few weeks ago Bonnier, the former UBS banker and boom-to-bust dotcom entrepreneur, swaggered into Tchenguiz’s office, apparently with a great investment tip.
The stock, gaming group SCI, was set to rocket, said Bonnier. It was an absolute dead cert, a total winner, heading for the sky. Even better it was Tchenguiz’s lucky day because Bonnier knew of a 2m share stake for sale.
I’m told Bonnier, who had an SCI stake already, was persuasive so Tchenguiz bought the whole lot.
Somehow this has exploded into a big row. So what’s happened? On the one hand, I’m told Tchenguiz discovered the stake he’d bought actually belonged to Bonnier who, under pressure from margin calls, was desperate to dump some stock and decided to choose Tchenguiz. Others say Tchenguiz wanted to buy more stock and got irate when Bonnier wouldn’t sell.
When later Bonnier did sell some to raise money for another project, Tchenguiz took it personally and tried to “poison” other investors against the placing so he could scoop it up for less.
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Either way, he now owns 15% of SCI and I’m told he wants to reach 29%. Who’s next?
Let’s have it from Avi
THE plot thickens at Langbar, the cash shell being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for seeming never to have had any cash.
Ten days ago officers at the SFO received information of a sighting in Barcelona of Abraham “Avi” Arad, the Argentine-born Israeli who arranged the initial £150m backing for Langbar in 2003 and set up its biggest deals.
The evidence of the hefty 6ft 3in mathematical genius, terrorism expert and former adviser to the Israeli government is particularly important since he also went to Brazil last year with chief executive Stuart Pearson to confirm the existence of the cash in a bank account.
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The SFO couldn’t say whether it had interviewed Arad already, but sources said he had been in Israel in recent weeks and was tricky to reach, so officers had been deployed to have a word.
C’mon Avi, let’s hear your tale.
De Savary may check out of hotel
I GOT a hot tip 10 days ago that Bovey Castle, the luxury hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, was changing hands. Built by Viscount Hambledon, son of the founder of WH Smith, the £50m pile has since been snapped up by Peter de Savary. I was told the cigar-chomping buccaneer started talks some weeks ago to sell a 51% stake to a hotel chain, perhaps to raise cash for his new hobby horse, Millwall Football Club.
But while De Savary told me he “talks to people about deals all the time” the chain in question denied any such thing. So I dropped it.
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But then a few days ago I was told the deal was definitely on and due to be completed towards the end of next month. So which is it? Watch this space, or Millwall’s debt mountain.
PA letter spells big trouble
AS the Competition Commission grapples with HMV’s anticipated bid for Ottakar’s, it is comforting to know it has weighty industry experts to help it out.
Take, for example, Ronnie Williams, chief executive of the Publishers Association (PA), who posted his submission last week.
Williams starts with a lofty description of the PA as “the leading trade organisation serving book, journal and electronic publishers . . . in the trade, education and academic sectors”. This will have won the commissioners’ respect — until they read about the “two merging pal-ties”, the issues “vvithout Waterstone’s”. Next, they see both “chains arid currently profitable” and other issues “relating to tllis matter.”
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Williams’s arguments are lost in an ugly mess of 28 spelling and punctuation mistakes over just three pages. He finishes by asking to “liave” a meeting.
Since the written word is central to the debate, I should say the commissioners have seen enough.