Amanda Staveley: the university dropout in the premier league of dealmakers

With Prince Andrew among her ex beaus, Amanda Staveley has used her upper-crust connections to build up PCP capital, her private equity business. She recently brokered the Abu Dhabi royal family's £3.5bn investment in Barclays bank.

By MoneyWeek

published 7 November 2008

in Features

"A woman of action, Amanda will do everything in her power to dismantle obstacles." That was the conclusion of a psychometric test conducted in 2004 barely a decade after Amanda Staveley opened her first business a small restaurant near Newmarket as an ambitious 22-year-old Cambridge University drop-out. She soon succeeded in attracting punters from the nearby Godolphin stables owned by Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai. Last week, that Gulf connection came spectacularly good, says The Daily Telegraph, although "quite how Staveley found herself alongside Goldman Sachs at the top table of one of the most extraordinary deals of the year is unclear". But having brokered the Abu Dhabi royal family's £3.5bn investment in Barclays, she has been catapulted into the "premier league of dealmakers".

Staveley, 35, who once rejected a marriage proposal from Prince Andrew, has had a roller-coaster career that has included several brushes with bankruptcy. Ironically, her last encounter with Barclays, says the Evening Standard, was when the bank sued her for £1m in 2004 to recoup a loan for her venture Q.ton (a souped-up e-conference centre outside Cambridge). Staveley responded by summoning The Mail on Sunday for an interview and launching a characterfully forceful personal defence. That, combined with Staveley's upper-crust connections, went down a storm with potential investors, says The Independent.

Soon after founding PCP Capital, a private equity outfit whose partners include former Tory MP David Mellor, Staveley had cornered the market in Arab sheikhs. "I feel very privileged that people come and talk to me about parts of their life which perhaps they wouldn't tell others," she told Nigel Dempster in 2000. Indeed, these days she is "known and trusted by her contacts in the Gulf like almost no other non-Arab". This privileged standing has made her a formidable force in Premiership football. Originally hired by Dubai to scout around for clubs, Staveley's warm-up coup this year was orchestrating the landmark takeover of Manchester City for Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi. That deal encouraged Mansour, 38, to entrust her with his strategic strike on Barclays (see below).

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Amanda Staveley had a singular upbringing, says the Daily Mail. The family wealth can be traced back to 1516 when Cardinal Wolsey handed the Staveleys a sizable chunk of land near Ripon in Yorkshire. Her father tackled the family's declining fortunes by opening a theme park on it. Indeed, Staveley's parents were workaholics and she spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents. Staveley's grandfather, Ralph Raper, made his millions running "the biggest illegal betting shop in the North" from a cellar in Doncaster. For Staveley, he remains a seminal influence: "He taught me everything", she says, including an appetite for risk that has led her into everything from broadband start-ups to firms majoring on Viagra substitutes. Staveley claims to have made her own first million aged 24, but she took a big hit during the dotcom bust and was forced to hire Kroll Associates to extricate her from the messy collapse of Aim-listed EuroTelecom. It's been a jagged graph of a career, "but her stock has risen exponentially again".

Amanda Staveley marked her Barclays coup by heading straight to Annabel's with Sheikh Mansour for a whoop-it-up celebration, says The Sunday Telegraph. She described the deal, which sees TCP Capital scoop some £110m in commission (translating into around £40m for Staveley herself), as "a vote for the UK financial system as a whole". But it went down like a lead balloon in the City, which immediately marked Barclays' shares down by 13%. The consensus, says Jeremy Warner in The Independent, is that Barclays which is handing a 31% stake to the states of Qatar and Abu Dhabi in exchange for a £7bn capital injection is paying too heavy a price "to save Bob Diamond's multi-million-pound bonus". By shunning the Government's recapitalisation programme, the bank hopes to avoid the constraints imposed on rivals Lloyds/HBOS and RBS. "Yet whether this supposed freedom outweighs the much heavier costs of raising capital from the Arabs is a moot point."

"Of course, we negotiated hard," remarked Staveley. Sure she did, says John Waples in The Sunday Times. "The timing was perfect." Having already tried for foreign cash this year, "failure was unthinkable" for Barclays and the Abu Dhabi delegation was in a strong position to drive a tough bargain. This deal is a credit to Sheikh Mansour, who bided his time as other Gulf investors snapped up bargains, only to see their investments wiped out. But it also underlines "these extraordinary times", says Richard Fletcher in The Daily Telegraph. "Power is shifting to a new breed of cash-rich investors and advisers. No matter how unconventional their past might be."

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