Michael Stone
Head of one of the world’s largest financial services conglomerates
MICHAEL STONE, who has died aged 82, was a City commodity trader who led the transformation of his firm, ED&F Man, into a financial conglomerate which is now the one of the world’s largest hedge fund managers. He was also a country landowner for whom grouse shooting was the finest of sport.
ED&F Man traced its history to 1783, when James Man, a cooper by trade, set up a sugar-broking and freighting business at Billingsgate and went on to win a contract (which endured until 1970) to supply rum to the Royal Navy for the sailors’ daily tot. The firm also built a commanding position in coffee and cocoa markets.
Michael Stone joined Man after National Service and became its leading sugar trader. He rose to be chief executive and chairman and to lead the firm’s development, initially driven by the need to hedge its own exposures, into new fields of futures trading and broking.
Other diversifications followed, including a New Jersey-based investment venture, and in 1994 the company was floated on the stock market with a valuation of £400million – yielding a fortune for Stone as one of the largest individual shareholders. He remained chairman until 2000, when its commodity arm was demerged and hedge fund management became the core focus of what is now Man Group.
Michael John Christopher Stone was born on May 10 1936, the son of Harry and Joan Stone. Their home was in Surrey but during the war years Michael was evacuated with his mother and brother to a farm in Devon – where he first learnt to shoot with a .410.
He was educated at Bradfield, and his National Service in the Royal Horse Artillery included a posting to Germany, where, as regimental liaison officer with local farmers, he found “lots of wild game, pheasants and partridges”. On leaving the Army he was due to go to Oxford but, as he recalled, “two weeks before starting, my father prevailed upon me not to go, saying the family firm, ED&F Man, needed me. I was disappointed at the time, but have no regrets.”
The several families involved in the Man partnership were willing to give shares to the next generation and let them develop new ideas: Michael Stone made his name as a globe-trotting sugar trader whose deep knowledge of factors affecting supply was matched – according to his friend, the Malaysian sugar tycoon, Robert Kuok – by his “fast reaction time and sense of urgency” in market dealings.
In later years Stone was also chairman of Gamma Telecom and ventured into country-house hotels as proprietor of Calcot Manor and Barnsley House in the Cotswolds, as well as the Lord Crewe Arms at Blanchland on the border of Northumberland and Co Durham, close to his shooting domains.
In 1984 he acquired from the Forestry Commission the 4,300-acre Weardale Estate, where he cleared large areas of conifers to develop a driven grouse moor, which in 2012 won a Purdey Award for conservation. He added a second moor at Eggleston in Teesdale, found time for salmon fishing in Scotland, and was a founding supporter of the Countryside Alliance.
In 1990 Stone and his wife bought Ozleworth Park in Gloucestershire, which became their principal home and where they restored beautiful gardens. He was a trustee of the Gloucestershire Community Foundation, a deputy lieutenant of the county, and its High Sheriff in 2005-06.
He was also chair of the National Hospital Development Foundation and the Bradfield College Foundation, and an adviser to the Prince’s Trust. In his honour, his family helped to create the Country Food Trust, a charity which distributes pheasant casseroles and curries to people in food poverty.
Michael Stone married Louisa Dyson in 1966; she survives him with their two sons and a daughter.
Michael Stone, born May 10 1936, died January 13 2019