I can pull off two giant takeover deals at once

Martin Gilbert is planning an £11bn merger for his fund firm – while negotiating the £11.7bn sell-off of Sky

WITH his ruddy face, raffish appearance and love of golf and fishing, Martin Gilbert hardly fits the image of the pin-striped, reserved fund manager.

Despite this Gilbert finds himself slapbang at the centre of two of the biggest deals the City will see this year.

This week it emerged that Gilbert – founder and chief executive of Aberdeen Asset Management – had struck up an £11bn takeover with Scottish rival Standard Life with his old fishing buddy Keith Skeoch.

Meanwhile, he is helping to steer the £11.7bn takeover of Sky, where he is deputy chairman, by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

To top it all, he is close to US president Donald Trump, having met him on the golf course in Scotland, and spent time with him at Trump Tower in New York since the US elections.

He was present as one of Trump’s major speeches, written by hard-line adviser Steve Bannon, was being heavily revised by family members.

All from a man who started with £50 invested in a law office in Aberdeen.

Gilbert, born in Malaysia and educated in Scotland, is super-confident he can pull off the deal creating Scotland’s biggest financial institution.

What if someone comes along and tries to spoil the party? ‘It’s never going to happen,’ the 61-year-old who earns £4.3m assures me. ‘Our biggest investors, Japan’s Mitsubishi and Lloyds, already are on side.’

That is more than can be said for everyone at Standard Life if the Budget day departure of David Cumming, who was head of equities there, and the investor voice on Radio 4’s morning business report, is anything to go by.

The son of a rubber planter, Gilbert endured long trips home to Malaysia from his boarding school in Aberdeen as he grew up.

HE left Aberdeen with an accountancy degree, and found work in the investment department of a law firm. Within a year he quit to set up his own firm.

‘It was great. We had £50 under management, and it took us ten years to get to £1bn, another ten years to get to £25bn and then another 15 years to reach £300bn,’ he tells me at Aberdeen’s offices on Bread Street in London.

It has endured tough times. Most notable was in 2002 during the split-capital investment trust scandal which saw millions in compensation paid out to 50,000 investors. He was dubbed ‘a sophisticated snake oil salesman,’ by one politician.

As the deputy chairman at Sky, Gilbert is at the vortex of the effort by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox to buy up the 61pc of the European broadcasting empire which it does not already own. He is now de facto chairman as James Murdoch has been required to stand aside. Gilbert has been criticised for jumping too quickly to accept the Sky offer which Culture Secretary Karen Bradley is minding to refer to media regulator Ofcom.

Gilbert is adamant that the deal is the right thing for investors and he acted properly: ‘I think Sky is a great company and they are sitting there with a 40pc holding from Fox and I am a great believer that these sorts of things have to be sorted out. They were going to either sell or buy.’

He rejects the idea that James Murdoch was unfit to have been brought back as Sky’s chairman after he was allegedly implicated in the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World.

He says: ‘Undoubtedly at Sky he is the most able director because he knows the industry so well.’

His enthusiasm for Murdoch might lead some Sky shareholders to wonder if he is indeed truly independent. Indeed, one of Gilbert’s most endearing qualities is his willingness to speak out.

He acknowledges that the last few years for Aberdeen have been rough, as the fashion for putting money into emerging markets faded. Did he come under pressure from investors to change or sell Aberdeen?

He says: ‘I think it would be right for them to get annoyed if it was something I could influence. We did a pretty good job in managing the costs base and we made the acquisition of Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (for £660m in 2013) at the right time. It stabilised the business.’

Gilbert thinks the Standard Life merger, first explored more than seven years ago, makes sense.

One big criticism of that proposed marriage is that the new outfit will have two chief executives: the sharp-elbowed Gilbert and the more cerebral Keith Skeoch from Standard. A recipe for disaster? Gilbert insists there is plenty for both to do.

One advantage that the Aberdeen chief has over Skeoch is that he has a relationship with Donald Trump: ‘The Trump effect has helped markets,’ Gilbert asserts. ‘But whether markets have gone too far is another matter.

‘When corrections happen in stock markets is when there is elation and high markets. That worries me,’ he says. But he rejects fears that Trumponomics will hurt emerging markets just as they are coming back. That is just as well.

The last thing needed as Gilbert seeks to bed down the merger is another run on his key emerging market funds.