Tony Shearer
Chief executive of Singer & Friedlander who opposed its sale to the Icelandic bank Kaupthing
TONY SHEARER, who has died aged 68, was chief executive of the merchant bank Singer & Friedlander until it was acquired by Kaupthing of Iceland, which rapidly drove it into bankruptcy.
Founded in 1907, Singer & Friedlander was a respected City firm specialising in finance for smaller listed companies. An accountant by background, combining an exuberantly good-humoured manner with a sharp eye for numbers, Shearer joined its senior management team in 2003.
Soon after his arrival, Kaupthing – a name little known in London but in fact the largest bank in Iceland, and one of a number of Icelandic companies that had begun investing aggressively abroad – took a 9.5 per cent stake. When the stake doubled, Shearer flew to Reykjavik to find out more about the shareholder and its intentions.
“Everyone there was incredibly young,” he later recalled, “and they had no idea what they were doing.” In particular, Kaupthing appeared to do little conventional banking business, to have no international experience, and to achieve most of its profits simply by marking up the value of investments it had bought at already inflated prices.
After some internal upheaval, Shearer was promoted from finance director to chief executive of Singer & Friedlander in early 2005. It was a major career break for him, but by then Kaupthing’s long-expected bid for full control was imminent. He sought to alert the Financial Services Authority that the Icelanders’ cavalier style made them unsuitable buyers – but the regulator, having consulted its opposite number in Reykjavik, declined to intervene.
Kaupthing’s cash offer of more than £500 million represented such a rich price that Singer’s board was obliged to recommend it to shareholders.
Shearer promptly resigned, while the renamed Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander embarked on a spree of high-risk investment and lending that ended abruptly in October 2008, when the London bank was forced into administration and its Reykjavik parent, along with most of the Icelandic financial sector, collapsed. UK retail depositors were bailed out, though those who had placed money with Singer’s Isle of Man subsidiary faced a long legal battle.
Appearing before the Treasury Select Committee in 2009, Shearer was highly critical of the FSA for its failure to act on his warnings. Of the Icelanders, he said: “I had doubts right from the beginning. We simply didn’t trust them.”
Anthony Patrick Shearer was born on October 24 1948, and was educated at Rugby. His father, Francis Shearer CBE, was a prominent accountant as a partner of Cooper Bros, and a director of the Royal Ordnance factories. The family’s antecedents were Scottish and South African; one relation of whom Tony was particularly fond was the Scottish Conservative MP Betty Harvie Anderson (later Baroness Skrimshire of Quarter), whose mother was a Shearer great-aunt.
Tony became an articled clerk with the City accountancy firm of Deloitte, Haskins & Sells in 1967, qualifying in 1971. His name first came to prominence in 1982 when as a young Deloittes partner he led a “fair-value audit” of the highflying Lloyd’s insurance firm of Howden (whose chairman, Kenneth Grob, was known in Lloyd’s circles as “the Grobfather”), with Ian “Goldfinger” Posgate as its chief underwriter.
Howden had recently been acquired by an American group, Alexander & Alexander, which sought the auditors’ reassurance that its purchase was sound. But Shearer discovered that large reinsurances had been placed by Howden’s broking subsidiary with an unauthorised Panamanian company – and that in total some $55 million had been diverted to offshore companies apparently controlled by Howden directors. Grob and Posgate were eventually acquitted of criminal charges.
In 1987 Shearer was seconded as a director of the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, then preparing for privatisation. The following year he left Deloittes to become chief operating officer of the unit trust business M & G.
In 1996 he partnered with the digital entrepreneur Hermann Hauser to found a pioneering online share-trading platform before moving again to become deputy chief executive in London of the South African-based Old Mutual financial group. Post Singer & Friedlander, he was chairman or director of a number of smaller listed companies in the financial and natural resources sectors.
Tony Shearer was an avid sportsman: a Cresta runner in younger days, he loved skiing at Arosa in Switzerland, and tennis. More unusually for a City executive, he was also a lifelong Elvis Presley devotee who listened to the King at full volume in his office in the early mornings and made annual pilgrimages to Graceland. For his leaving party at Singer & Friedlander, he swapped his customary spotted tie and red braces for a rhinestone-encrusted outfit with diamanté platform boots. He even changed his middle name in homage, Who’s Who latterly recording him as “Anthony Presley Shearer”.
He was a governor of Rugby from 1994 to 2004, joining the school’s swing band to play tenor sax. Another passion was wine: in retirement he acquired a small vineyard in Provence.
Tony Shearer married first, in 1972, Jenny Dixon. The marriage was dissolved in 2007 and the same year he married, secondly, Pam Mapes, who survives him with two daughters from his first marriage.
Tony Shearer, born October 24 1948, died October 12 2017