City profiles

Lekan Akinyanmi

One “fake sheikh” was enough to fool the Duchess of York and former England football manager SvenGoran Eriksson, who both fell for the same newspaper sting, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. So you can’t really blame Lekoil boss Lekan Akinyanmi for getting duped by a whole “bunch of them”. Akinyanmi thought he’d secured a $184m loan from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, learning too late that he was the “victim of a sheikhdown”. By the time Lekoil wised up, it had handed $450,000 in fees to an “iffy middleman”. Since Akinyanmi – a Nigerian who founded the Aim-listed oil explorer in 2010 – ‘fessed up in January, there’s been a Kroll inquiry and a board shake-up. It hasn’t stopped the share-price “dissolving”, with a 24% dip this week.

John Hays

The sudden death of John Hays, who started a company in his mother’s Sunderland clothes shop in 1980 and grew it into the UK’s largest independent travel agency, has left the industry bereft, said Duncan Craig in The Sunday Times. Hays, who was 71, was a “bold but selfless” businessman with a “whiff of altruism” about him. During his 40 years in the industry, he always “put staff first”. With his wife and co-founder, Irene, he will be remembered for the daring rescue of Hays Travel’s failed rival Thomas Cook in October 2019, which saved 555 shops and 2,000 jobs. “Some questioned the wisdom”, but Covid struck before the move was tested. Hays, typically, worked doubly hard this year to protect his workers – making his collapse at the group’s HQ all the more poignant.