WORLD’S RICHEST ARE ‘NUTTY’
Madders, a lawmaker from the Labour opposition party, who is not on the committee.
CHRISTO WIESE
The former chairman of scandal-hit South African retail giant Steinhoff said last Thursday he was suing the company for $4.8bn, dealing a major blow to its efforts to survive.
Christo Wiese, a billionaire retail tycoon, is seeking to recover investments he made in Steinhoff in 2015 and 2016.
He was the biggest shareholder in the company when an accounting scandal erupted in December, since when its stock has crashed 95 per cent.
Its businesses include British high-street discounter Poundland, France’s Ligue 1 sponsor Conforama and Pep Africa, which runs Africa’s largest clothing factory.
“It is in the best interest of all stakeholders in Steinhoff that a restructuring of the group be effected on fair and equitable terms,” Mr Wiese’s investment company, Titan Group, said in a statement.
Chief executive Markus Jooste and Mr Wiese both resigned in the wake of the crisis, with the company under investigation in Germany over a reported $7bn hole in its accounts. Steinhoff had been a darling of fund managers with its eclectic, sprawling, consumer-focused empire with outposts in 30 countries, but is now burdened by $12.7 billion in debt.
Mr Wiese told a South African parliamentary hearing in January that news of the accounting scandal was “a bolt from the blue”.
His wealth has plunged from more than $5bn to $2.1bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
KEN MOELIS
Few bank chief executives ever become billionaires. Jamie Dimon did. So did Lloyd Blankfein. And then there is Ken Moelis, a power dealmaker few people outside Wall Street have probably heard of.
Since taking his boutique investment bank public four years ago, Mr Moelis, 59, retains a 10 per cent stake and has a net worth normally reserved for chieftains of hedge funds or private equity giants. He is now a billionaire, even though his firm is one-hundredth the size of Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Perhaps no banker better encapsulates the rewards – and risks – of boutique firms quite like Mr Moelis, a devotee of arch capitalist Ayn Rand who got his start in the 1980s under Michael Milken. Since then he has reeled in one high-profile client after another, from Ted Turner to Steve Wynn, and Carl Icahn to Donald Trump.
Yet his prowess underscores a fundamental question faced by many firms built around a rainmaking founder: Is Moelis & Co more than Ken Moelis?
“That’s always the question with a boutique when the first generation is there,” said Blackstone Group’s Tony James, one of Mr Moelis’s bosses at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in the 1990s and now one of his biggest fans. “Who he hands the reins over to is a critical moment of risk.”
Mr James said Moelis & Co is no longer reliant on its chief executive. But there are plenty of worrying examples of boutique firms that flamed out after their founders left.