HANDS ON BOTTOMS
A COUPLE of months before Christmas, invitations began landing on the leather-topped desks of some of London’s most powerful businessmen.
Embossed, and carrying a quasimasonic logo based on an italicised letter P, they encouraged wealthy recipients to spend £2,000 a head bringing friends and contacts to an event at The Dorchester hotel.
Called the Presidents Club Charity Dinner, and held each January for the past 33 years, the lavish bash has, in certain rarefied circles of the property and finance industries, become a staple of the social calendar.
Like many a black-tie fundraiser, its format is simple: Guests get a chance to network with fellow high-rollers – as well as a smattering of willing celebrities – while dining on fine food and wine and giving millions of pounds for good causes in the process. Every year, a famous entertainer or two will perform. Someone well-known will deliver a knockabout after- dinner speech. Then well-refreshed punters will be invited to unfurl their chequebooks and bid huge sums for a selection of high-end luxury products, fast cars, holidays, and various money-can’t-buy special lots in a turbocharged charity auction. Afterwards, there’s a disco.
In these enlightened times there is, however, one very unusual feature of every Presidents Club dinner.
In order to attend, you are, without exception, required to be a man.
What’s more, organisers have come up with a cunning way to replace the wives and girlfriends who would usuto ally provide what’s colloquially known as ‘ arm candy’. It involves many attractive young women being paid to join punters at their tables as ‘hostesses’. Their role is to talk, entertain and, if necessary as the evening progresses, dance with the generally middle-aged men.
This strange and somewhat seedy arrangement has for years been the source of much nudging and winking in the City of London.
It also helps explain why – despite its starry guest list – the Presidents Club has chosen to keep its annual shindig firmly below the radar. Photographers are banned, mobile phones are confiscated from staff who work there, and the names of patrons have always remained a closely guarded secret. Until now, that is. Last Thursday, at least two of the 130 young female hostesses paid £150 (plus a £25 taxi allowance) to spend the evening at The Dorchester with 360- odd male revellers were not entirely as they seemed. Rather than being aspiring models and actresses, or hard-up students earning some extra pocket money, they were undercover reporters working for the Financial Times.
Details of what unfolded at the event, which ran from 8pm to 2am, were published yesterday – and have sent shockwaves through the worlds of business and politics, not to mention the charity sector.
Put bluntly, it seems that a hefty proportion of the women working at the Presidents Club dinner – which was compered by comedian David Walliams and attended by senior representatives of a host of bluechip City firms, including the advertising agency WPP, Barclays bank and the property giant Residential Land, which is run by Presidents Club cochairman Bruce Ritchie – found themselves being groped, sexually harassed and lewdly propositioned.
Some of their alleged abusers were captains of industry and household names.
Some were repeatedly fondled as they attempted to tuck into their meal of hors d’oeuvres, smoked salmon with caviar and beef aged for 40 days.
Others complained that some of the men in attendance had grabbed their bottoms, hips, stomach and legs. One shellshocked 19-year- old hostess was asked by an elderly man if she worked as a prostitute.
‘I’ve never done this before, and I’m never doing it again,’ she said. ‘It’s f*****g scary.’
As the evening wound on, one guest lunged to kiss the FT’s undercover reporter. Another invited her upstairs to his room. She later heard one young woman complain that the man sitting at her table had exposed his penis to her.
After dinner, guests adjourned to an after- party where an unnamed society figure was observed confronting at least one hostess directly. ‘You look far too sober,’ he announced, filling her glass with champagne before grabbing her by the waist and declaring: ‘I want you to down that glass, rip off your knickers, and dance on that table.’
In the centre of the room, Jimmy Lahoud, a 67-year- old Lebanese businessman and restaurateur, was, according to the FT, dancing ‘enthusiastically with three young women’.
Describing the night, Madison Marriage, recalled: ‘ I was groped several times and I know that numerous other hostesses said similar had happened to them.
‘It’s hands on bums, hands up skirts, but also hands on hips, hands on stomachs, arms going round your waist unexpectedly. One of the strangest things was you could be talking to a man and he’d suddenly start holding your hand.’
Scandalously, these unedifying scenes appear to have occurred not by accident, but by design. Artista, a Berkshire events company, was hired to source the 130 hostesses for the evening. It claims on its website
‘Unfurl their cheque books’ ‘Lunged in for a kiss’
work for a number of major firms, including Bentley, Aberdeen Asset Management, Moet Hennessy, the Economist, and, oddly, the Royal Windsor Horse Show.
Hostesses were selected for being ‘tall, thin, and pretty’, and told to wear ‘black sexy shoes’, black underwear, and the sort of make-up they might choose if going to a ‘smart sexy place’, the FT reported.
They were expected to drink alcohol, but warned that men in attendance might try to get them ‘p****d’. Their phones were confiscated and they were required to sign a five-page non-disclosure agreement banning them from talking later about the proceedings. ‘It’s a