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 desires to alter the main target of his life,” the personal fairness agency mentioned of its founder’s plans to commit himself to philanthropy. Whereas nonetheless controlling Terra Firma-backed companies, corresponding to property group Annington and McDonald’s eating places within the Nordics, Fingers recognized variety, inclusion and psychological well being initiatives as his charitable goals.
Within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Hands kick-started the UK personal fairness growth, changing into a billionaire and one of many nation’s most influential financiers. However his fame 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 to be like 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 in step with a renovation of his fame 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 function, he wrote, would turn into “to depart the world a greater place”.
One instance was Mansfield School at Oxford college, to which he and his spouse donated thousands and thousands of kilos through the years. 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 pal of Fingers, who’s now Oxford’s chancellor.
However two dozen former workers and enterprise associates described a unique 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 workers, humiliating underlings and repeatedly telling sexually express tales at work. The FT has additionally seen WhatsApp exchanges, dated from 2019 to 2023, between workers through which they focus on Fingers “pushing us all to the sting”. In a single, a girl says she is “scared to be alone” with him, after he diminished her to tears.
Former workers spoke to the FT on the situation of anonymity for worry of reprisal. Many mentioned they felt Fingers’ latest positioning as a philanthropist and mental-health advocate was hypocritical, given the way in which he handled them. “Individuals know they’re signing up for lengthy hours, exhausting work and no boundaries,” mentioned one former worker. “Nobody indicators up for bullying and intercourse discuss.”
One junior worker, who left Terra Firma in 2020, mentioned Fingers informed her privately that he beloved studying about sadomasochism. “He was speaking about how he’d actually advocate Story of O, that Fifty Shades of Gray was primarily actually beginner, introductory stuff. It wasn’t hardcore sufficient for him,” she mentioned. Story of O is a 1954 erotic novel a couple of feminine photographer who’s skilled 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, they usually’ve simply gotten away with it,” mentioned one former senior male colleague of Fingers. “His story is without doubt 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 mentioned was well-liked and had a notably completely different administration type. An announcement supplied by the corporate learn: “Now we have all the time regarded the wellbeing of our individuals as our high precedence. To be clear, there is no such thing as a place for bullying, intimidation or inappropriate conduct of any form at Terra Firma and there by no means has been.”
It added that Terra Firma had “strong processes and whistleblowing mechanisms in place” and that “problems with this nature have and can all the time be handled significantly and confidentially, and our individuals have been made conscious of easy methods 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 mentioned that “this story by no means displays the tradition of Terra Firma now or up to now”.
In his memoir, Fingers described a troublesome 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 finally 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 means of a rigorous course of to show themselves: a string of interviews, numerical and verbal reasoning assessments, and psychometric evaluation. Those that made the reduce discovered themselves on the coronary heart of the personal fairness growth. “It was intense . . . thrilling, mental, egalitarian,” mentioned one former senior director who labored there within the early years.
However Fingers was a taskmaster with a mood, and he anticipated workers to match his work ethic. It was “hazard cash”, the identical individual recalled. “You’re paid for the hours you retain, for the robust discuss . . . He was not a tyrant however was positively autocratic.”
In keeping with workers, Fingers was unpredictable: “charming and charismatic” at one second, “harsh [and] domineering” the following. Seemingly minor incidents may set off him. “There was a tradition of worry and trepidation round Man, notably round what sort of temper he’d be in,” a former human assets director mentioned.
A number of former workers likened Fingers’ conduct to that of an impulsive youngster. “He’s like just a little boy who desires to show himself,” one mentioned. That always manifested in sexually inappropriate tales and express feedback. “Individuals can be fairly horrified, ladies would positively be offended,” a senior male former colleague mentioned. “He used to assume it was amusing. It wasn’t.”
At different occasions, workers mentioned, Fingers raged. “There have been in all probability numerous conferences the place he internally simply misplaced it,” mentioned a unique 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 individual is.”
Former workers who spoke to the FT mentioned they felt they didn’t have recourse to Terra Firma human assets. “The thought of any individual coming to the human assets director eager to make a grievance about Man was inconceivable,” the previous HR director mentioned. “He dominated all people with a rod of metal.”
There have been upsides to Fingers’ idiosyncratic management. Employees had been picked from numerous backgrounds and juniors had been uncovered to high-level decision-making exceptional at different personal fairness corporations. Past profitable pay packages, workers mentioned Fingers might be personable and mentoring. “There have been cases when he actually made individuals really feel like household and supported them,” one other former director mentioned.
In an announcement to the FT, Fingers mentioned 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 surroundings there have been occasions when tempers had been misplaced, voices raised and feedback made that some could 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 workforce 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 mentioned he can’t exclude the chance that he informed jokes that will have appeared inappropriate however that he by no means meant to make individuals really feel uncomfortable.
By early 2007, Terra Firma was closing its third fund, which might in the end complete €5.4bn. That was the yr the agency acquired report 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. Traces 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 finally misplaced. In 2011, Terra Firma was pressured handy management of EMI to the financial institution. Fingers’ traders misplaced £1.5bn.
One former Terra Firma director informed the FT that Fingers was as soon as “as influential as” Stephen Schwarzman and Leon Black, the founders of US personal fairness giants Blackstone Group and Apollo International Administration, “however in the end EMI meant that he shall 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 keeping with 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 dwelling on the island. “Even when he wasn’t there,” one individual recalled, “the choices all went by means of him”.
A number of expressed sympathy for his or her former boss’s private circumstances. Fingers’ anger, some workers mentioned, 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 terrified of his personal emotions that he would then go on a rage,” one of many former workers mentioned. “As if . . . he needed to put you in your home.”
After the publication of Fingers’ memoir and articles through which he described his mental-health struggles, some workers “simply couldn’t imagine it”, as one individual 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 ebook, Fingers wrote about attempting to engineer a Terra Firma comeback, following the EMI debacle. However promising offers disenchanted, 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 meant to cut back political polarisation. “By and huge what I noticed was a person who was doing his greatest, who did in the end care in regards to the individuals who labored on the agency,” an worker who labored intently with Fingers round this time mentioned. “Somebody who . . . was attempting to have a look at how they may use their place for some good.”
However former workers mentioned altering mores in Metropolis workplaces over latest years appeared to go Fingers by. The problem was not company-wide, workers famous. “This shock went by means of the Metropolis . . . there was an actual cleanse,” mentioned a former Terra Firma funding director. “[But] it didn’t get by means of to him that issues had been altering and also you couldn’t behave that manner any extra.”
One individual, who mentioned they left Terra Firma partially due to Fingers’ outbursts and sexual feedback, mentioned Fingers as soon as informed a narrative at a piece offsite a couple of enterprise affiliate masturbating within the tub. “I’m simply him pondering, ‘what the fuck’?” they mentioned. A number of former workers mentioned he made feedback in regards to the dimension of ladies’s breasts. “Man over-sexualised every part,” added one other staffer who labored intently with Fingers and left not too long ago. At work dinners, she mentioned “the dialog would all the time revolve round intercourse . . . individuals’s kinks”.
A former senior colleague added: “He informed us as soon as a couple of 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 mentioned Fingers had informed them an analogous story. Fingers’ consultant disputed particulars of this anecdote and mentioned he had used it for example how the tradition of the Metropolis had modified for the higher. (A few 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 dwelling. She mentioned 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 lodge room after dinner. She mentioned he then hung round her room door, standing uncomfortably near her. Afterwards, in misery, she referred to as the identical relative.
The girl, who mentioned she ended up taking a number of months off work after leaving Terra Firma as a result of stress from Fingers’ bullying, mentioned 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, apart from Fingers, Terra Firma was an pleasant place to work. “If you happen to eliminated him, yeah, completely that poisonous stuff would all go,” mentioned a former senior director. “The office tradition was truly superb,” mentioned the previous HR director. “However there was all the time this spectre of, when Dad’s dwelling, all people went to their room and hides beneath their beds.”
