Dutch courage with extra fridge
FAREWELL then, Stephen Barber, head of communications at Pictet and twin brother of FT editor Lionel, who hosted his 15th and final annual drinks event at Sweetings before stepping down from the wealthy Swiss fund manager. Barber bowed out in style with a tongue-incheek run through some of his favourite snaps, including one of his son laying out an opponent in a boxing match, a pic of his dog Boris and some shots of decomposing quince from his back garden. Barber founded the Prix Pictet photography competition, which is one of the best-paying prizes in the world. He can’t be angling to win it can he?
CITY guests to parties on the Stad Amsterdam, the clipper owned by Dutch recruiter Randstad which was recently moored by Tower Bridge, noticed a mysterious green vessel bobbing alongside it. What’s going on? “Here in London, they drink a lot,” explained one of the deckhands. “We keep more Heineken on board when we’re in the UK than we do anywhere else in the world. We fill all the fridges to the brim but last year, even that wasn’t enough and we ran out of beer. We sail all around the world and that has never happened anywhere else.” This year, Randstad had to stash away 20 50-litre kegs in a cabin next to the clipper to store it, a special “floating fridge”. And what did the crew make of London’s drinking culture? “Oh, it’s nothing compared to Newcastle,” she said. “When we docked there, they’d drunk everything on board before 9pm.”
INTERMEDIATE Capital Group brags, rightly, about its newly appointed chairman Mervyn Davies’ loud and lengthy advocacy for women to break the glass ceiling. But how does ICG do on this score? In terms of non-executives, not too badly — three out of nine. But as every corporate chieftain knows, diversity among non-execs is easy, you just hire from outside. The more important bit is how you promote managers from within; the future CEOs. So, how many of ICG’s nine senior managing directors are women? Er… one. The boss of HR. Work to be done here, Lord Davies.
THERE’S a nice line in Stephen Schwarzman’s excellent book What It Takes. “There’s a saying in finance that time wounds all deals.” In other words, the Blackstone billionaire explains, the longer a deal takes to complete, the more chance it will screw up. Given how the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has just gatecrashed Blackstone’s sale of the Reuters business Refinitiv to the London Stock Exchange and potentially delayed the whole thing, Spy wonders if the saying will run true on this deal.