THE SPORTS NUT RAISED IN ALGERIA’S CIVIL WAR

THERE was a certain aptness to LSE chief Xavier Rolet’s description of a potential deal with Deutsche Boerse – doubtless delivered in his trademark machine gun fire-delivery – as ‘compelling’.

The adjective might be just as well be used to describe Monsieur Rolet’s inexorable rise up the financial world’s slippery pole. Though Xavier began his career in banking, his background is far removed from the chalked striped suits and club ties associated with city bigwigs. To say his upbringing in Algiers, where his military parents were dispatched during the Algerian war of independence, was hairy is putting it mildly. His father risked daily sniper attack from FLN fighters. Meanwhile, his mother juggled a clerical job with raising young Xavier in a ‘bare bones’ flat in the suburbs. Homemade bombs exploded frequently.

When the Rolets moved back to Paris to the grim Paris banlieue of Sarcelles (‘like Tower Hamlets or Stratford’) he set his sights on the US after reading of the relative riches MBA graduates from America’s Columbia University earned. He saved enough money to send himself there, whereupon he landed a job at Goldman Sachs earning a reputation for his relentless work ethic. He moved to London in 1990, working at doomed Lehman Brothers up until its collapse before landing the LSE job the following year.

He lives with his wife, Nicole, an American-Italian with whom he has three children, in Belgravia and in a converted medieval priory in Provence, where they keep bees and make wine. He is also an extreme sports nut and keen horseman. In the New Year he received his homeland’s prestigious Legion d’Honneur to add to the KBE the Queen awarded him last year. Quite a journey from that Paris sink estate…