Can Christopher Flowers save Northern Rock?

We profile the former schoolboy chess champion who has built up an excellent reputation - and a multibillion dollar fortune - thanks to his deal-making prowess. Could he be the one to raise the Rock?

"There's nothing Christopher Flowers likes more than a good old-fashioned banking crisis," says The Observer: he has built his reputation and multibillion-dollar fortune on them. Now the retiring 50-year-old, with his wire-framed spectacles and quizzical demeanour, could make a killing on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, he's battling to cut the price of a deal to buy Sallie Mae, troubled guarantor of America's student loans. In Britain, his private-equity firm is one of several "circling the remains of Northern Rock". Can he pull it off?

If it was down to reputation alone, Flowers has it in the bag, commanding a strong following on Wall Street and in the City. He is one of the few buy-out specialists to focus solely on financial groups and has enriched many powerful backers in the process. As an "earnest, young" Goldman Sachs banker in the 1990s, he spent so much time travelling, colleagues joked the bank's corporate jet should be named "Air Flowers", says the FT. A decade on, his deal-making has taken him to Tokyo, Hamburg, The Hague, Alabama and now Newcastle-upon-Tyne. If he lands Northern Rock, expect rapid action. Flowers "demands results and fast", says The Observer. He is used to "doubling his money in no more than a couple of years".

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