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When Man Fingers introduced he was stepping down as chair of Terra Firma final yr, one of many UK’s most tenacious dealmakers indicated he was beginning a brand new, more-benevolent chapter. “Man needs to alter the main focus of his life,” the non-public fairness agency stated of its founder’s plans to dedicate himself to philanthropy. Whereas nonetheless controlling Terra Firma-backed companies, comparable to property group Annington and McDonald’s eating places within the Nordics, Fingers recognized range, inclusion and psychological well being initiatives as his charitable goals.
Within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Hands kick-started the UK non-public fairness increase, turning into a billionaire and one of many nation’s most influential financiers. However his popularity was later bruised by enterprise failures, expensive authorized feuds and caustic public recriminations.
Simply final week, the UK’s Ministry of Defence paid Annington £6bn to take again 1000’s of navy houses, after years of authorized wrangling. For Terra Firma, the deal appears like a win. For the federal government and taxpayer, it was “one of many worst-ever” offers, according to the UK defence secretary.
Fingers’ retirement announcement final yr was consistent with a renovation of his popularity that had begun a number of years earlier. In his 2021 memoir, The Dealmaker: Classes from a Life in Personal Fairness, Fingers vowed to reform each his private habits and “philosophy of enterprise”. His objective, he wrote, would change into “to go away the world a greater place”.
One instance was Mansfield Faculty at Oxford college, to which he and his spouse donated thousands and thousands of kilos over time. This largesse supplied the funds for The Fingers Constructing, a glass and stone construction combining pupil housing and the college’s human rights institute. The annual Fingers Lecture, which takes place there, welcomed audio system together with Sir Bob Geldof and Lord William Hague, an in depth buddy of Fingers, who’s now Oxford’s chancellor.
However two dozen former workers and enterprise associates described a special facet of Fingers to the Monetary Instances. The people, who labored for Terra Firma between 2002 and 2023, variously accused him of screaming and raging at employees, humiliating underlings and repeatedly telling sexually express tales at work. The FT has additionally seen WhatsApp exchanges, dated from 2019 to 2023, between workers by which they talk about Fingers “pushing us all to the sting”. In a single, a lady says she is “scared to be alone” with him, after he decreased her to tears.
Former workers spoke to the FT on the situation of anonymity for worry of reprisal. Many stated they felt Fingers’ current positioning as a philanthropist and mental-health advocate was hypocritical, given the best way he handled them. “Individuals know they’re signing up for lengthy hours, arduous work and no boundaries,” stated one former worker. “Nobody indicators up for bullying and intercourse discuss.”
One junior worker, who left Terra Firma in 2020, stated Fingers instructed her privately that he cherished studying about sadomasochism. “He was speaking about how he’d actually suggest Story of O, that Fifty Shades of Gray was basically actually beginner, introductory stuff. It wasn’t hardcore sufficient for him,” she stated. Story of O is a 1954 erotic novel a few feminine photographer who’s educated to be a intercourse slave by her lover.
The accusations make Fingers the latest high-profile UK figure to be accused of failing to reform their office behaviour. “There was this tradition for 25 years within the Metropolis of individuals like that, and so they’ve simply gotten away with it,” stated one former senior male colleague of Fingers. “His story is likely one of the trade.”
This yr, the Monetary Conduct Authority, the Metropolis’s regulator, launched efforts to enhance how complaints of bullying and different non-financial misconduct are handled. Since October, all UK corporations have a legal obligation to anticipate and stop sexual harassment within the office.
Terra Firma is now run by Fingers’ son, Richard, whom workers stated was well-liked and had a notably completely different administration model. A press release supplied by the corporate learn: “We have now at all times regarded the wellbeing of our folks as our high precedence. To be clear, there is no such thing as a place for bullying, intimidation or inappropriate conduct of any type at Terra Firma and there by no means has been.”
It added that Terra Firma had “sturdy processes and whistleblowing mechanisms in place” and that “problems with this nature have and can at all times be handled significantly and confidentially, and our folks have been made conscious of tips on how to escalate them.” The corporate maintains that its HR operate labored properly and that it was by no means notified in regards to the allegations in opposition to Fingers referred to on this article.
When allegations had been put to them for remark previous to publication, attorneys for each Terra Firma and Fingers stated that “this story under no circumstances displays the tradition of Terra Firma now or up to now”.
In his memoir, Fingers described a tough childhood. He was dyslexic and dyspraxic, he wrote, making him a goal for bullies and for corporal punishment at college. He additionally recounted being sexually abused by his piano instructor.
After attending Oxford, Fingers ultimately landed on the London outpost of Nomura in 1994. The Japanese financial institution welcomed his thought to imitate US corporations, utilizing low cost debt to purchase European companies with untapped potential. By 2002, a string of successes satisfied Fingers to go it alone. “I [wanted] to create a private equity agency to rival — and surpass — the best of the US giants,” he wrote about founding Terra Firma.
In London, potential Terra Firma recruits had been put by way of a rigorous course of to show themselves: a string of interviews, numerical and verbal reasoning assessments, and psychometric evaluation. Those that made the lower discovered themselves on the coronary heart of the non-public fairness increase. “It was intense . . . thrilling, mental, egalitarian,” stated one former senior director who labored there within the early years.
However Fingers was a taskmaster with a mood, and he anticipated employees to match his work ethic. It was “hazard cash”, the identical particular person recalled. “You might be paid for the hours you retain, for the robust discuss . . . He was not a tyrant however was undoubtedly autocratic.”
Based on workers, Fingers was unpredictable: “charming and charismatic” at one second, “harsh [and] domineering” the subsequent. Seemingly minor incidents may set off him. “There was a tradition of worry and trepidation round Man, significantly round what sort of temper he’d be in,” a former human sources director stated.
A number of former workers likened Fingers’ conduct to that of an impulsive baby. “He’s like a bit boy who needs to show himself,” one stated. That usually manifested in sexually inappropriate tales and express feedback. “Individuals can be fairly horrified, girls would undoubtedly be offended,” a senior male former colleague stated. “He used to assume it was amusing. It wasn’t.”
At different occasions, employees stated, Fingers raged. “There have been in all probability numerous conferences the place he internally simply misplaced it,” stated a special former senior director, who labored at Terra Firma for a decade. “A billionaire shouting at a 22-year-old analyst who has simply come from college about how silly that particular person is.”
Former workers who spoke to the FT stated they felt they didn’t have recourse to Terra Firma human sources. “The thought of any person coming to the human sources director eager to make a grievance about Man was inconceivable,” the previous HR director stated. “He dominated everyone with a rod of metal.”
There have been upsides to Fingers’ idiosyncratic management. Employees had been picked from various backgrounds and juniors had been uncovered to high-level decision-making unprecedented at different non-public fairness corporations. Past profitable pay packages, workers stated Fingers might be personable and mentoring. “There have been situations when he actually made folks really feel like household and supported them,” one other former director stated.
In a press release to the FT, Fingers stated he “based Terra Firma on the precept that every one voices can be heard. I deny ever having been a bully, a tyrant or behaving inappropriately, however on this setting there have been occasions when tempers had been misplaced, voices raised and feedback made that some might have discovered tactless or ill-chosen. I apologise to anybody who felt upset or offended by how I spoke or reacted up to now. I perceive that my drive to construct a profitable firm and take my staff with me generally meant I spoke harshly, for which I’m very sorry.”
Fingers’ representatives denied that he had an inclination to speak about intercourse or books about intercourse. They stated he can’t exclude the chance that he instructed jokes which will have appeared inappropriate however that he by no means supposed to make folks really feel uncomfortable.
By early 2007, Terra Firma was closing its third fund, which might finally complete €5.4bn. That was the yr the agency acquired file label EMI for £4bn. A music buff whose autobiography options lyrics as epigraphs to every chapter, Fingers quickly discovered he had misgivings in regards to the deal. Strains from Eric Carmen’s plaintive ballad “All By Myself” preface pages in his memoir about EMI.
Terra Firma struggled to service EMI’s debt, and Fingers got here to imagine that lender Citigroup had tricked him into the deal. He filed a expensive lawsuit, which he ultimately misplaced. In 2011, Terra Firma was compelled at hand management of EMI to the financial institution. Fingers’ buyers misplaced £1.5bn.
One former Terra Firma director instructed the FT that Fingers was as soon as “as influential as” Stephen Schwarzman and Leon Black, the founders of US non-public fairness giants Blackstone Group and Apollo International Administration, “however finally EMI meant that he will likely be remembered for very completely different causes”.
The loss was compounded by Fingers’ private life. By then, he had moved to Guernsey, a tax haven within the Channel Islands, to publicly protest in opposition to the Labour authorities’s fiscal coverage. However his spouse and 4 youngsters stayed behind, a separation Fingers later described as “emotionally very robust”.
For a few years after the transfer, in response to his attorneys, Fingers didn’t journey to London. However workers made frequent journeys to work out of Terra Firma’s Guernsey outpost or went on abroad journeys with Fingers. Generally, they had been required to work out of his house on the island. “Even when he wasn’t there,” one particular person recalled, “the selections all went by way of him”.
A number of expressed sympathy for his or her former boss’s private circumstances. Fingers’ anger, some employees stated, usually adopted moments of vulnerability. When he was candid about his troubled childhood, these he opened as much as may discover themselves in his crosshairs. “He was nearly so fearful of his personal emotions that he would then go on a rage,” one of many former workers stated. “As if . . . he needed to put you in your house.”
After the publication of Fingers’ memoir and articles by which he described his mental-health struggles, some employees “simply couldn’t imagine it”, as one particular person put it. “How may he speak about being bullied when he was such a bully?” One other enterprise affiliate added: “In a manner, I really feel he [was] having a dialog about what he wish to be like,” referring to Fingers’ advocacy.
Within the e book, Fingers wrote about making an attempt to engineer a Terra Firma comeback, following the EMI debacle. However promising offers dissatisfied, and the corporate struggled to boost cash. Fingers admitted that, by 2019, “the rebirth of the agency hadn’t labored . . . I may lastly withstand the truth that I used to be by no means going to be Stephen Schwarzman.”
In 2020, Fingers, a frequent op-ed author, based Have interaction Britain, a charity supposed to cut back political polarisation. “By and enormous what I noticed was a person who was doing his greatest, who did finally care in regards to the individuals who labored on the agency,” an worker who labored intently with Fingers round this time stated. “Somebody who . . . was making an attempt to take a look at how they might use their place for some good.”
However former workers stated altering mores in Metropolis workplaces over current years appeared to move Fingers by. The problem was not company-wide, workers famous. “This shock went by way of the Metropolis . . . there was an actual cleanse,” stated a former Terra Firma funding director. “[But] it didn’t get by way of to him that issues had been altering and also you couldn’t behave that manner any extra.”
One particular person, who stated they left Terra Firma partly due to Fingers’ outbursts and sexual feedback, stated Fingers as soon as instructed a narrative at a piece offsite a few enterprise affiliate masturbating within the tub. “I’m simply taking a look at him considering, ‘what the fuck’?” they stated. A number of former workers stated he made feedback in regards to the dimension of ladies’s breasts. “Man over-sexualised every little thing,” added one other staffer who labored intently with Fingers and left lately. At work dinners, she stated “the dialog would at all times revolve round intercourse . . . folks’s kinks”.
A former senior colleague added: “He instructed us as soon as a few story when he joined [a City trading floor] and analysts needed to lie on the bottom and the secretaries must take their knickers off and stroll over them.” Two different workers stated Fingers had instructed them an identical story. Fingers’ consultant disputed particulars of this anecdote and stated he had used it as an instance how the tradition of the Metropolis had modified for the higher. (A number of the workers disputed this characterisation.)
The girl who left in 2020 alleged that, on one event after a piece dinner in London, she was so distressed by Fingers’ behaviour she referred to as a relative on her manner house. She stated his inappropriate feedback and overly acquainted method had been “terrible”. One other time, throughout an abroad enterprise journey in 2019, Fingers insisted on strolling her again to her resort room after dinner. She stated he then hung round her room door, standing uncomfortably near her. Afterwards, in misery, she referred to as the identical relative.
The girl, who stated she ended up taking a number of months off work after leaving Terra Firma on account of stress from Fingers’ bullying, stated she was talking out now as a result of she discovered Fingers’ advocacy “galling” and wished him to be accountable: “I’m not a shrinking wallflower, and what occurred wasn’t OK.”
She and a number of other others commented that, aside from Fingers, Terra Firma was an pleasant place to work. “For those who eliminated him, yeah, completely that poisonous stuff would all go,” stated a former senior director. “The office tradition was truly superb,” stated the previous HR director. “However there was at all times this spectre of, when Dad’s house, everyone went to their room and hides beneath their beds.”
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