Some girls still dream of marrying a prince and living in a gilded cage, but
few decide to turn this reverie on its head. Amanda Staveley jilted Andrew,
Duke of York, in order to earn millions in her own right. Her inverted
fairytale has led her to be hailed as the key player in a controversial deal
between Barclays bank and Gulf sheikhs.
Staveley’s coup, the climax to years of nurturing the ruling elite in the
Middle East, earned a £40m commission for the 35-year-old financier and her
colleagues at PCP Capital Partners, the small private equity firm she runs
in Mayfair, central London.
Of course it’s not about money, the former model insisted last week. “It
wouldn’t matter if I was making £8m or £200m. I just want to go to bed at
night and say I’d done a good job.”
By contrast, some Barclays shareholders lie awake gnashing their teeth at the
thought that the transaction initiated by Staveley is too high a price to
pay for the bank’s refusal to accept state help. The restrictions that would
have entailed, such as a ban on executives’ inflated bonuses, were anathema
to the Barclays bosses.
It was Staveley’s second sensational move in weeks: she netted a reported £10m
for steering through the purchase of Manchester City football club by Sheikh
Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family – the
same financier whom she persuaded to pump £3.5 billion into Barclays, giving
him a 16% stake.
The Gulf’s shopping list of juicy acquisitions, including the planned takeover
of Liverpool football club, allows no respite for this driven businesswoman.
“She’s a workaholic who works seven days a week,” said a business associate.
“I said to her last Sunday she should take a week off. She said, ‘You must
be joking’. She doesn’t have much of a social life.
“This makes her sound like a hard, ruthless businesswoman, but actually she’s
a very warm individual who’s likely to give you a cuddle. I’ve never met
anyone quite like her.”
Others describe Staveley as a sensible “Yorkshire lass” who does exactly what
she promises, has no airs or graces and calls interviewers “love” and
“sweetheart”.
Her “mates” tend to be self-made business people such as Simon Cowell, the X
Factor entrepreneur, Amanda Wakeley, the fashion designer, and Sir Philip
Green, the retail tycoon. David Mellor, the former Conservative minister,
becomes a partner of her company next month.
She has a property in London’s Park Lane but considers her real home to be a
villa in Dubai, where she is about to gain official residency status. Her
12-year strategy of wooing the Gulf’s royal families is now paying off in
spades. “They don’t trust people readily, but they clearly trust her
totally,” said a financial adviser. “She has absorbed their culture and
respects them. That has put her in an extremely strong position.”
Staveley was poised to strike at the moment that Barclays showed hesitation in
signing up to the government’s bailout of stricken banks, she revealed last
week. “We’d watched Barclays for some time.” She phoned the head honcho at
Barclays and within hours she was flying to London for a frenetic series of
meetings. The £7.3 billion proposal was topped up by the Qatari royal
family.
For such a successful matchmaker, who also happens to be blonde and
attractive, Staveley seems determined to stay single. “My PA has a name for
me. She calls me the runaway bride,” she said, adding that few husbands
would put up with her hectic life.
“She has no boyfriend or romantic attachment, and hasn’t had for some time,”
said a close friend. “She told me she has only once been truly in love.” By
this account, her inamorato was Mark Horrocks, a millionaire venture
capitalist with whom Staveley began a relationship in 2000.
To the delight of the tabloids, the couple began rowing after her reported
romance in 2002 with Prince Andrew. At an official visit where they first
met, the prince monopolised the blonde and spent most of the time speaking
to her, according to guests. “He only had eyes for Amanda,” said one. “There
was a sparkle in his eyes every time he talked to her. She seemed to be
enjoying the attention.”
Six months later, Andrew asked her to dinner. “It came out of the blue and I
was delighted but flabbergasted,” Staveley admitted. She was invited to
Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and Sunninghill Park, the house near Ascot that
Andrew continued to share with his former wife, Sarah Ferguson. Fergie was
said to approve of the match. Friends of the couple said they spent three
evenings a week together, with Andrew calling Staveley “darling” and she
calling him “babe”.
Andrew was reported to have proposed to Staveley in 2003 but she turned him
down, not wanting the media attention that would be directed at a second
Duchess of York. The real reason for the split, said a friend, was the
conflict between a royal lifestyle and her career. “Her first love is
business. She realised she would not be able to pursue her ambitions.”
Even at an early age she seems to have hit the ground running. An outstanding
athlete, at 14 she ran the 100m in 12.6sec and was aiming for the Olympics
when she snapped her achilles tendon. She had to content herself with trying
to emulate her mother, Lynne, a champion show-jumper.
Her father, Robert, was a Yorkshire landowner whose estate in the village of
North Stainley had been a gift to his ancestors from Cardinal Wolsey. Robert
founded the Lightwater Valley theme park, which featured such tempting rides
as the Sewer Rat and the Black Widow’s Web.
Staveley’s heritage includes a cousin who was an admiral of the fleet and a
grandfather who made a fortune running the biggest illegal betting shop in
the North.
As a boarder Staveley excelled academically at Queen Margaret’s School near
York, where her former headmaster, Colin McGarrigle, recalled: “She had the
most amazing smile and electric personality. She would look you straight in
the eye. There was no deception there at all.”
She won a place to study modern languages at Cambridge, working as a part-time
model to earn extra money, but found she could not cope and was admitted to
a hospital with stress. “I was very young,” she said, of her decision to
drop out of university. “My grandfather died and I was in a very unhappy
period.”
Determined to make her own way, she borrowed £180,000 from a bank and opened
her own restaurant, Stocks, between Newmarket and Cambridge. When not
standing in for the chef or cleaning up the kitchens, she found time to
study for her City exams with the aim of becoming a financial adviser.
The restaurant attracted two distinct clienteles that were to help Staveley
chart her career. Among the Newmarket racing fraternity she established a
bond with Dubai’s rulers, the Maktoums, owners of the nearby Godolphin
stables.
Other regular customers were high-tech entrepreneurs from the area’s “Silicon
Fen”, whose ideas she imbibed. Identifying a need for high-quality
conference facilities, she secured backing for a complex, Q.ton, which
included a restaurant, gym and health club.
Through the late 1990s she built her name and reputation trading stocks and
investing in start-up companies. Voted businesswoman of the year in 2000,
she was reported at one point to have made £18m. But, like many operators,
she was burnt in the dotcom boom and bust.
She had joined forces with an enterprise called EuroTelecom, which crashed
after losing more than £15m of investors’ money in less than a year.
Staveley was so incensed at the way the company had been run, and at the
finger of blame pointing at her as a non-executive director, that she hired
Kroll Associates, the detective agency, to investigate some directors.
“They’d spent money like it was going out of fashion,” she said.
Although her name was cleared, she was left owing a lot to creditors, whom
she repaid.
The scandal intensified the spotlight on Staveley just as she was spotted in
Andrew’s company. In a statement that betrayed her priorities, she said:
“Having my name connected with a member of the royal family has made me a
target for people to take pot shots at. It has not done my company any good.”
The Barclays deal is thought to be the tip of the iceberg. As Middle East
investors eye bargain acquisitions in credit-crunch Britain, Staveley is
said to be widening her network of investors to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
“Next year will be pivotal,” she said.
Meanwhile, she has high hopes of pulling off a £1 billion deal for the Qatar
Investment Authority to buy Trillium, the outsourcing arm of the giant
property group Land Securities.
The role of go-between, based in the Middle East, “just excites me”, she said
last week. “There is something about the growth of this young economy that I
saw in myself.” It sounds grand, but maybe this story would have a happier
ending if someone could persuade her to take the occasional day off.
