Sarah Sands, former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, last week landed herself a cushy role on the board of the FTSE 100 housebuilder Berkeley Group. It is her second board gig since leaving the Beeb last year — she had already added Hawthorn Advisors, the PR firm co-founded by the Tory chairman Ben Elliot, to her growing list of lucrative extracurricular activities.
As editor of the Standard, Sands had a knack of wooing corporate sponsors, reeling in big names to fund extravagant projects. Her baby was the Progress 1000, an annual list of “London’s most influential people”, which managed to pull in Citi among heavyweight backers.
In 2016, the list was “supported” by none other than Berkeley, whose founder Tony Pidgley and chief executive Rob Perrins were named, no doubt purely on merit, at the top of the list of most influential property figures. Perrins even gave a speech at the event at the Science Museum, warning that market forces in London’s housing market “haven’t worked and nor has government intervention”.
Now Sands, 59, finds herself holding Perrins to account as a non-executive, a role that commands a fee of £68,000 a year. She will surely apply the same rigorous independence that typified her Standard career.
In 2015, when Perrins and Pidgley failed the make the list at all, the paper named then England rugby captain Chris Robshaw as the most influential Londoner, which raised a few eyebrows and led to headlines such as “England rugby captain Chris Robshaw ‘more influential than The Queen’”.
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The best man at Sands’ son Henry’s wedding? Chris Robshaw! Funny, that.
Bad boy’s missed cash injection
The surge in bitcoin has put a rocket under the share price of Argo Blockchain, a cryptocurrency mining company listed in London that now has a valuation of more than £850 million. Chief executive Peter Wall, a Canadian former journalist, is sitting on a £17 million profit thanks to Argo’s stunning rise despite its tiny profits from mining bitcoin.
But what of Frank Timis? The entrepreneur was Argo’s biggest shareholder with about 13 per cent of the shares in November. It is unclear when he sold out, but the company says the latest share registry analysis from last month showed that his First Investments vehicle owned “well below 3 per cent”, meaning he could have missed out on a possible £100 million profit. London-based Australian-Romanian Timis, 58, was in charge of Regal Petroleum, which was fined by the City regulator in 2009 for misleading the market with positive oil well announcements. He was also a convicted former heroin dealer. So did he miss out on a cash injection at Argo?
Keith, don’t list it like Beckham
Former manager Harry Redknapp might be known as football’s wheeler-dealer, but behind the scenes, that title goes to Keith Harris, the former boss of the City stockbroker Seymour Pierce.
Harris, 68 today, has turned his hand to esports, an increasingly lucrative market. He is backing and chairing Semper Fortis Esports, which is poised to float on the challenger Aquis Stock Exchange. The company has recruited its first football video game team, Top Blokes, and is understood to be eyeing a prominent footballer as its ambassador.
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The float will raise about £2.5 million and will value Semper at about £5 million. Let’s hope it fares better than David Beckham’s Guild Esports, which floated on the LSE last year but has slumped since. Harris shouldn’t list it like Beckham.
● A master at skewering professions, the Duke of Edinburgh, who passed away on Friday aged 99, would often have a sly dig at politicians, and — needless to say — journalists.
But Prince Philip, who was known for saying what he thought, also had his views on the City. Barry Norris, chief executive of hedge fund Argonaut Capital, which bet against the collapsed German payments giant Wirecard, fondly recalls a lunch at Frogmore Cottage with the Duke of Edinburgh, who asked what he did for a living. When Norris replied that he was a fund manager, the Duke of Edinburgh — as usual — pulled no punches. “It’s all luck, isn’t it? All luck,” he said. He probably had a point. Prufrock likes to imagine that Prince Philip would have made a ruthless short-seller.
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JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon forecasts a post-pandemic boom for the US economy lasting at least two years
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