If Diana Jenkins had her way, you’d be able to have a NeuroGasm right now. In fact, Jenkins would be delighted if you had multiple NeuroGasms, or at least as many as you can safely handle.
The Bosnian refugee turned entrepreneur is the creator of a range of health drinks, including NeuroGasm, designed to promote fitness and wellbeing — and her own fortune.
Some, such as NeuroBliss (“to make you happy”) and NeuroSonic (“gives you an edge”), were served at a recent party at Selfridges in central London.
Guy Ritchie, the film director, was there, mingling with Claudia Winkleman, the television presenter, and Jo Whiley, the radio DJ. Tamara Mellon, president of the Jimmy Choo shoe empire, hosted the bash, which marked the launch of a programme to help the Elton John Aids Foundation and women in South Africa.
Jenkins fits comfortably into such an A-list-heavy crowd — though she hasn’t always, having gone from nothing to multi-millionaire in little more than a decade.
Last week she dived headlong into a touchy area for the Brits. She declared that London society was riven with snobbery and had regarded her with disdain, and that this was one of the reasons she had left and gone to live in America.
As the wife of a wealthy British banker 16 years her senior, she complained that she had been treated like “a European mail-order bride”. Her husband, she told Tatler magazine, had been hurt to see “how snobbily I was treated”.
The reaction was immediate and heated. Too right, we’re cold fish, averred some commentators. Nonsense, London society is “inclusive and meritocratic”, insisted another.
While the navel-gazers engaged in a debate about the state of modern British (high) society, they glossed over the incredible trajectory of Jenkins’s life, and more pertinently her future ambitions.
Previously her success had been attributed to her profitable marriage to Roger Jenkins, a banker at Barclays. But a different picture is beginning to emerge.
The woman now openly targeting the worlds of business, charity and even international diplomacy looks like a player in her own right.
Born Sanela Dijana Catic in August 1971 into a Bosnian Muslim family, she grew up in a small flat in Sarajevo. Her father was a retired economist and under communism life was tough.
At school she was popular for her looks and bubbly personality. “She was one of the most attractive girls and all the boys were in love with her,” said a former schoolfriend last week. She was also clever and won a place at university to study economics. War broke out in 1992 before she could finish her course. At her father’s urging she escaped Sarajevo, which was coming under siege.
Jenkins has always demurred when asked how she fled, saying she was not yet ready to talk about it. According to friends in the city, she was evacuated in a refugee convoy that took her to the Croatian port of Rijeka, where she wound up in a rundown hostel turned refugee camp. Somehow she was flown to London where she arrived, with almost nothing, in 1993.
“I barely spoke the language. I was walking the streets of London looking for something to eat, or any job,” she said. She worked as a cleaner, waitress and babysitter and then ran a jewellery stall.
As if that was not hard enough, she was devastated when she learnt that Irnis, her brother, had been killed shortly before the siege of Sarajevo drew to an end.
Despite the agony over her brother’s death, she resolved to better her lot — and she knew the best route was to get a degree. “When you grow up in a communist regime the most important asset is education, not diamonds or fancy clothes,” she says.
After saving up, she applied to City University to study business computing systems. Records show she attended from 1996 until 2000 and came away with a 2.1 degree.
Although Geraint Wiggins, a professor of computational creativity who is now at Goldsmiths college, remembers her, he declined to discuss students’ work. But an outline of a dissertation, credited to Snela Catic and supervised by Wiggins, indicates she studied “network planning and data search techniques and how they can be applied to the area of multinational tax planning”.
The dissertation also examined a real case study. According to the precis: “It takes a number of HSBC Holding plc’s subsidiaries and develops an optimal corporate structure using those subsidiaries.”
That background rather alters the accepted wisdom about Jenkins and her husband, which has portrayed him as the driving force of their fortunes. When they met in 1999, at a gym in the Barbican, central London, he was a middle-ranking executive at Barclays. He went on to become its leading expert in structured finance and tax avoidance.
Although hardly endearing in today’s climate, the tax avoidance was legal and hugely profitable. Jenkins was paid a fortune: he is believed to have received £40m in 2007.
How much of his success was down to her drive? A lot, according to Jenkins. “I would not be where I am today without her,” he told Tatler. “She has pushed me through a lot of doors and given me a lot of strength.”
Last week Melissa Obadash, a model turned swimwear designer who knows the couple, said much the same: “Roger is just a normal guy, he’d be happy anywhere. He gets pushed on by her because she loves to have the success. There’s a woman behind most of these power men that eggs them on and pushes them to get to the next level.
“Sometimes you need someone strong saying, no, you’re smart, take it to the next level.”
Jenkins herself admits she modelled her ambitions on the Dynasty television series and wanted to live life to “the max”. She pushed herself hard, too. One observer recalls her waiting patiently to be photographed by society snappers at a party at the Serpentine gallery about five years ago when she was almost unknown in London. That did not last long.
Jenkins, said Odabash, is a brilliant organiser and networker, with a flair for bringing together people who hit it off socially, professionally, or both.
By some accounts it was her friendship with the wife of a Gulf sheikh that led to a £5.8 billion investment in Barclays when it needed rescuing during the credit crunch. In doing that she kept the bank out of the restrictive clutches of state ownership. A lot of bankers at Barclays have her to thank for their bumper bonuses this year.
If she is so rich, successful and well connected, why does she complain of snobbery? She is bright, witty and does good works. Why the hostility?
Obadash, whose luxury swimwear company is co-owned by Jenkins, partly blames the insecurities of other women: “You are always going to get women who judge you before you even get to speak to them. I used to live in Rome and Milan: the girls would whisper at the table about me. Diana is a striking woman. Other women feel insecure about such a woman sitting at their table.”
However, Obadash also blames Britain’s reserve and tradition for Jenkins moving to America: “She was unhappy because she didn’t know where she fitted in ... The English, you know, well, they are snobby. Don’t forget, America has so many mixed races. Here it’s much more about tradition.”
People are packaged into categories here: X is a socialite, Y is a businesswoman, Z is a charity fundraiser. Do all three and the Brits, so goes the argument, do not know what to make of you.
It does not always suit single-minded free spirits such as Jenkins, for whom the term “portfolio career” might have been invented. She took her two children and set up home in California, leaving her husband working in London.
HER Malibu mansion overlooks the ocean and she counts Kid Rock, the singer, Pamela Anderson, the actress, and Hollywood producers as her friends. In photographs she gives off both beauty and belligerence. Don’t mess with me, the images say.
In a striking image of her and Roger, she is not wearing a wedding ring. While still married, she is happy with her independence. Asked whether she would stay with her husband, she said she might or might not: “Who knows what the future might bring.”
Her many interests include the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Justice Clinic at the University of California, which she established with a $4m endowment, and the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation, which she founded in memory of her brother.
It helps charitable causes in Bosnia and has provided equipment for a children’s hospital and home for those with special needs.
In an interview with a local publication she said: “My dream is for every child and old person in Bosnia and Herzegovina to have a smile on their face.”
That does not mean she has given up striving to make more of herself. Quite the opposite. She even appears to be making moves into international affairs. Last month she was reported to have flown with Sean Penn in her private jet to Cuba so the actor could interview Fidel Castro, the country’s retired dictator.
Having pushed her husband and exploited the millions they made, she is now determined to make more money with her own ventures. A fitness addict, she came up with the idea of the health drinks. She launched the Neuro brands this year and plans to sell them in the Waitrose supermarket chain.
“That’s just a beginning,” said one aide. “She thinks they can take on the world.”
Additional reporting: Bojan Pancevski
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