Profiles

John Factor sold worthless penny stocks through a boiler room operation, ramping the price via his financial newsletters. But he was never held to ac…

The supermarket’s new owners are Mohsin and Zuber Issa, two brothers from Blackburn who started with a rundown petrol station 20 years ago. But their …

Reed Hastings turned Netflix – a DVD rental service rejected by Blockbuster – into a global streaming giant that has redefined the entertainment indus…

Alan Bond built an empire that encompassed brewing, mining, television on unsustainable amounts of debt, which led to his downfall and imprisonment.

Trevor Milton wanted to be the next Elon Musk, and planned to revolutionise transport with hydrogen-powered trucks. His dreams are unravelling amid al…

Pigeon-fancier Arlan Galbraith claimed to have created a new breed of elite racing pigeon, but his Ponzi scheme defrauded investors of over £200m.

Terence Conran, who has died aged 88, introduced a country of grey houses and colourless mackintoshes to the dolce vita. He instigated a revolution in…

AS CEO of pharmacy chain Rite Aid. Martin Grass borrowed heavily to fund a string of acquisitions, then cooked the books to manage the debt, inflating…

Daniel Loeb is known as a sharp-tongued investor who buys stakes in companies and then shakes them up. But the pandemic caught him flat-footed and he …

Joyti De-Laurey forged the signatures of her bosses at Goldman Sachs and started writing cheques to herself. Over many years, she netted £4.3m.

Forrest Li was there when Apple founder Steve Jobs delivered his famous Stanford graduation speech. The experience inspired him to aim for big things …

Jacob and CH Butcher plundered their $3bn banking empire, leaving investors short of almost $400m.

Steve Bannon, the American president’s combustible former chief strategist, has gone down in flames, accused of milking a political fund for personal …

Ruja Ignatova convinced punters to put up to $12bn into her worthless "OneCoin" cryptocurrency – then disappeared with the loot.

Sumner Redstone, a legendary dealmaker and eccentric star of the film industry, said that he was never going to die. It’s one of the few things he was…

Henry Fauntleroy's embezzlement Berners Street Bank cost his clients their fortunes and Fauntleroy his life.

Bernard Looney wants to turn the oil giant he heads into an environmentally friendly force for good. He’s not the first to try, but there’s good reaso…

Alexander Fordyce's disastrous shorting of the East India Company led to him bankrupting the private bank in which he was a partner.

Dame Sharon White had no experience of retail when she took the top job at the nation’s favourite department store. Can she turn around an ailing indu…

Around 5,000 people paid Billy McFarland up to $100,000 each to attend the lavish Fyre Festival on a Caribbean island. They arrived to find accommodat…

A lifelong obsession with gambling helped make Stuart Wheeler his fortune. By using that to back the Brexit campaign, he changed the face of British p…

Joe Nacchio, CEO of telecoms firm Qwest, was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in 2007 and served four years in prison.

Retail baron Philip Day, once seen as the saviour of the British high street, is under fire for holding to a monastic silence as his suppliers struggl…

Berkeley’s Tony Pidgley, who has died aged 72, was a genius who transformed the housebuilding industry, says Max King