The deal-maker with a point to prove

Over 35 years, Martin Gilbert has built a small Scottish investment trust into a £660bn powerhouse. Yet the jury is still out on how successful his constant deal-making has been. Jane Lewis reports.

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Good for Gilbert but are SLA's investors smiling?
(Image credit: © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP)

People meeting Martin Gilbert often note how he "bursts" or "swaggers" into rooms. It's all in keeping with his reputation as the "Scottish bulldog" who came "within a hair's breadth of disappearing from view" when his firm, Aberdeen, was embroiled in scandal in 2002, noted the London Evening Standard in 2014. "Others have seen their careers ended, their reputations trashed for less." But not Gilbert.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.