Insider Big wheel rolls in for Marks Hands off Green’s baby Past masters at a clash Rocco heated over the Grill Finsbury in a spin?
FORMER Merrill Lynch Europe boss Michael Marks has scored another coup at his fast-growing but yet-to-be launched investment banking boutique, Smith New Capital Partners. When he left Merrill following a night of long knives, the Smith New Court founder embarked on plans to launch Smith New Capital with departing colleagues Stephen Zimmerman and Paul Roy. They were soon in talks with the top three men in MLIM’s specialist hedge fund team and shortly after secured the services of ex-Merrill debt market boss TJ Lim. Now I hear they may soon be joined by another familiar face – that of my old friend Clive Anderson, Merrill’s former transport industry guru who left the bank in the summer after more than a decade there as the City’s most highly rated transport analyst.
PERHAPS the fund managers trying to oust Michael Green from his job at Carlton should have done more research into their target. Had they read a recent edition of Broadcast magazine, they might have noted the observations of Nick Bullen, Carlton’s controller of factual television. “What people underestimate,” cautioned Bullen, “is that Carlton is Michael’s business – he created it and he’s not going to let it go lightly. This is his baby and he’s not going to let anyone f**k about with that.”
THE awkward juxtaposition of UBS working for Michael Green and the Carlton Communications board, while UBS Global Asset Managers has demanded his resignation, is not the first time the two organisations have clashed. In the mid-1990s, as the UBS equity division was busy talking up the biggest bull market in history, Phillips Drew Fund Management (as it then was) persistently tried to throw a spanner in the works with its famously inaccurate predictions of an imminent crash.
SIR Rocco Forte cannot forget the terrible affront to himself and other former regulars at the Savoy Grill when Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing transformed it into a parlour for girlies and foodies.
“Everybody who was in charge of anything – all the big-hitters and captains of industry in London – ate at the Savoy Grill, regardless of their age,” he apoplexes in Square Meal magazine.
“Those are the people you want in a restaurant and it’s absolute madness to throw them out.” I expect these entirely understandable rants to become more frequent as Forte gets closer to the relaunch of his new project – a Savoy-style grill room at Brown’s hotel.
I WONDER why it is that, when Finsbury Group is clearly listed as Carlton Communications’ PR adviser in Crawford’s Director, all the lucrative, high-profile spinning seems to be coming from Alan Parker’s Brunswick?
Between clenched teeth, a Finsbury spokesman explains: “I think Parker is an old friend of Michael Green’s and has been brought in to help out alongside us.”
