City profiles

Jamie Oliver

His Jamie’s Italian chain may “have been taken off the menu in Britain”, but there’s no keeping a good TV chef down, said Dominic Walsh in The Times. Oliver’s restaurant operations are expanding overseas, and he is “adding a new concept” to them – an all-day dining venture that will “showcase the best of Jamie Oliver, while giving franchise partners the flexibility to adapt menus to local tastes and trends”. Oliver, 44, founded Jamie’s Italian in 2008, but had to call in the administrators in May. “The collapse left creditors facing losses of £83m, with Oliver himself out of pocket to the tune of £24.2m.” But he rescued Jamie’s Italian International from administrators in a £500,000 deal (the chain has 70 franchises in 27 territories). For Oliver, at least, the future post-Brexit seems to lie outside Britain.

Taylor Swift

The pop icon’s feud with her record label has revealed the outsized role private equity plays in the entertainment business, said Bloomberg. In a recent tweet, Taylor Swift begged the Carlyle Group to stop record executives exercising “tyrannical control” and barring her from performing her past hits. The private equity titan owns a vast stake in Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, which bought Swift’s label, Big Machine, for $300m in June. When she took to social media to recruit her teenage fans to the cause, said DealBreaker, they “almost broke Investopedia trying to figure out WTF private equity is”. But Swift may have the last laugh: she plans to re-record her biggest hits under a new deal with Universal Music. Carlyle could be left asking: “What did we do to deserve this?”