Dave Hart Omnibus

by David Charters

  After a night like last night, some people might take a day off. But in the fast moving world of investment banking, you go forward or die. And anyway, I’d only spend it with my chiropractor or my acupuncturist, and I’m tired enough already. After another meeting with the police, signing more statements, and a couple of press interviews, it’s back to business.

  I have a meeting scheduled, with Two Livers, at three o’clock at the Meridien Hotel on Piccadilly. Biedermann has told people in Frankfurt that we still haven’t won any ‘real’ corporate clients. He told Herman that MOSS was a one-off, and doesn’t count because no other firm would take it on. HBS doesn’t count either, because it was a basket case, and no other firm had management suicidal enough to want it. So now Two Livers and I are going to win a piece of real business.

  The Old Orinoco Trading and Investment Company is straight out of a time warp. It’s a Columbian company, state-owned, and for years was run as a private fiefdom for successive Presidents and their friends and families. But now, in a sign of the times, they are looking at a partial privatisation by way of listing their shares on an overseas stock exchange. Their senior management are in London for a beauty parade of investment banks. They own vast amounts of agricultural land, timber and mineral rights. With the right strategy, this company could be worth billions. Every major investment bank in town is after them, and quite why they’d ever give us the business is beyond me.

  But that won’t stop us trying.

  We arrive to find the meeting schedule is already running late, and a team from Schleppenheim are in the anteroom waiting to go on. They are sitting around drinking coffee and chatting, looking buttoned-up and preppy. The conversation stops as soon as I show up.

  ‘Aren’t you Dave Hart?’ The team leader, an early forties MD, puts down the paper he was reading about my adventures last night. I nod. My hands are starting to ache, my stomach is hurting from where I was punched and kicked, and I’m feeling very tired and short-tempered.

  He obviously wants to make conversation, probably so he can tell his buddies that he was chatting to Dave Hart today. Isn’t that something? Six months ago, he’d probably never heard of Dave Hart, or if he had, thought Dave Hart was some anonymous, middle-ranking turkey in Rory’s team at Bartons.

  I sit on one of the couches with Two Livers, and slowly – and rather painfully – start unwrapping the bandages around my left hand. This fascinates everyone in the room, and they even start wincing in sympathy as I have to tug to pull them free from the scabs that have formed on my knuckles.

  The team leader approaches again. ‘Painful?’

  I wince as the scab on my forefinger splits open and starts bleeding. ‘No.’

  He turns to Two Livers, perhaps wondering if she might be easier conversation. ‘So it’s just the two of you?’

  She glances across at his team of five. ‘That’s about equal.’

  He grins and nods, and I want to give her a high five, but I’m too absorbed in what I’m doing.

  Two Livers ignores him and turns to me.

  ‘So Dan wanted anal sex again last night.’

  ‘Really?’ I barely raise an eyebrow. The schmuck from Schleppenheim is standing by us, clearly taken aback by the turn in the conversation, not sure if he should join in or move away. His team are looking at him standing there like a dork, wondering what he’ll do.

  ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I told him I think it’s disgusting. He comes up with all these lines about how everyone does it, you use lots of gel, it might be painful at first, but you get used to it.’ She looks round suddenly, and the team from Schleppenheim instantly do very poor impressions of reading newspapers, glancing through their pitch books and staring out of the window. The schmuck self-consciously ambles back and sits down on a couch.

  ‘So I got Claude round.’

  ‘Claude?’

  ‘My friend from Haiti. Male model. Six-foot ten, black guy. Swinger.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I told Dan okay, we’d do it, but first I wanted to play some new games. I handcuffed him to the bed. Face down. Wrists and ankles.’

  You can hear a pin drop. When one of the Schleppenheim team turns over a page in his newspaper, the rest glare at him.

  ‘Handcuffs? Really?’ I’m still picking at my scabs. ‘Face down? What did he think was going to happen?’

  ‘Massage.’

  ‘So did you oil him up?’

  ‘Sure. Then I let Claude in. Claude’s huge. Dan got a shock. Went mad. Started screaming.’

  ‘Really? I’m not surprised.’

  ‘I told Dan not to worry, Claude would use lots of gel, everyone does it, it might be painful at first, but he’d get used to it.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Not the first couple of times.’

  ‘Will you see him again?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  The door to the meeting room opens and a pretty receptionist type comes out. We all stand and the Schleppenheim team start to get their pitch books together.

  ‘Excuse me.’ I wander over to the receptionist, dumping my soiled bandages in a bin. ‘Dave Hart, Grossbank. You may have heard, I had a rather eventful night last night. I’m not feeling my best. Would you mind if we went in next?’

  The schmuck is about to protest, when Two Livers gives him a beaming smile. ‘Hey come on, loosen up. You wouldn’t say no to a lady, would you?’

  No. He wouldn’t say no to her. Nor to me. His whole team stare at us, then he shakes his head and we go through into the conference room.

  Shock and awe. Moral superiority over the enemy. That’s what we just achieved. Have you read The Prince, or The Art of War? Neither have I, but at least I own them.

  We go through a reception room, where the girl sits, then into a large conference room with a broad oval table. We meet Oscar Rodriguez, the chairman, a short, fat, shiny-headed bald man with a big grin and the sort of suit worn by drug dealers in Miami Vice. He has with him his weasel-featured finance director and a couple of ‘advisers’, one of whom sits on his board, from the Orinoco Banking and Finance Corporation. They will work jointly on the deal with whichever bank is appointed, and Oscar has complete faith in them, partly because he also sits on their board.

  Oscar has on the table in front of him several newspapers, showing photographs of last night. He begins by congratulating me, saying how I must be part-Columbian, because that is how they would deal with these people – I manage not to say that I thought they just shot them – and once again everyone is fascinated by my knuckles.

  After the introductions I explain that Two Livers will give them an outline of the main issues we see facing them as they think about listing their shares, and will run through our capabilities and what we see ourselves bringing to the party. She starts talking and they stare at her breasts, her neck, her ear-lobes, her lips, her eyes, and her surprisingly strong fingers – she can do one of the best handshakes of any woman I’ve ever known, and I have known one or two. They take no notes, and she sits and purrs at them, unaided by any slides or handouts that might distract them.

  After fifteen minutes, she’s done and I ask for any questions. While they’re thinking, I ask if they mind if I smoke. Oscar actually seems relieved to have met the first non-PC banker in London.

  I take out a large Cohiba and put it on the table in front of Two Livers. Without blinking, she picks it up, sniffs it, rolls it between her fingers, nods that it’s okay and fishes out a cigar cutter from her handbag. She places the end of the cigar in the mouth of the cutter, and looks up to catch Oscar’s eye as she snaps the end off. He winces and sits up in his seat. Then she puts it in her mouth, moistening it with her lips, rolling it gently around so that the whole of the end is wet, and lights it with a lighter from her handbag. After a few puffs, she looks again at Oscar and blows a perfect smoke ring across the table at him. Then she hands me the cigar, all the while without making eye contact with me or saying a word.r />
  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Oscar sighs. ‘Thank you.’

  He motions me to get up and step over to the coffee pot on the sideboard at the end of the room. His finance director starts asking inane finance director questions of Two Livers, like how did we come to our valuation, what fees would we charge, what financial statements we’d require for the prospectus, and other such bullshit.

  Oscar puts his arm around my shoulder and leans in confidentially so that we can talk.

  ‘Are the two of you…?’

  I gesture innocently towards Two Livers. ‘Married? No. But we’re… close.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I’m close to all of my female employees.’ I smile knowingly and wink, with a man-to-man look on my face.

  He laughs and slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Hombre. You are truly a man. I thought this sort of conduct was not permitted between colleagues in this country?’

  ‘Grossbank is different. I set the rules. Any woman employee wanting to make managing director has to sleep with me at least three times. Just so I know she’s good enough.’

  He looks at me as if he thinks I might be joking. I stare back, dead pan.

  ‘Hombre.’ Another slap on the arm.

  We take our places again, and I put another cigar on the table. ‘Miss MacKay, I think Mister Rodriguez would like a cigar.’

  When he shows us out, ten minutes or so later, amid much back-slapping and laughter, the Schleppenheim team get up from their seats and prepare to go in. As she passes the most junior member of their team, a nervous looking kid in his early twenties, Two Livers opens her handbag and passes him a small tin of Vaseline.

  ‘Here – when you get inside, pass this to your boss. Tell him it might help.’

  WEEKS HAVE passed. Busy, hectic weeks.

  Our new people are arriving in droves now, scooped from the most successful firms on the street, and paid the sort of money that creates a feeling of obligation to deliver in even the most hard-nosed cynic. Everyone has heard of us – at least, they’ve heard of me – and we’re starting to do business, and not just in the pharma sector. It all feels remarkably like it might actually work, and when it does, people won’t resent it too much, because we showed we had balls, and we did something they didn’t dare to do.

  As far as regular business goes, my most spectacular coup so far was a block trade. The French government decided it was going to sell its last remaining twenty per cent shareholding in Société Financière du Sud, an industrial conglomerate and holding company previously under state control.

  Rather than trying to place their shares in an orderly manner, hiring a group of banks to market them carefully to institutional investors around the world, they decided to follow the latest market fad and conduct a sudden death blind auction, whereby all the large investment banks are told the deal’s coming and they should prepare a bid – in strictest confidence – so that after the market closes they can compete to commit commercial suicide by buying the entire shareholding and then selling it on the next day.

  The only investment bank likely to make money out of a trade like this is the one advising the government, because they’re running the auction and so can’t be a bidder. The others ought to laugh and give a short answer ending in ‘off’, but instead they work themselves up into a lather of excitement, desperate to see if they can ‘win’ this ‘prestigious’ piece of business.

  The banks have discreet conversations with large institutional investors, especially hedge funds, giving them inside information about the forthcoming sale on a strictly confidential, ‘no dealings’ basis, to establish what investor appetite there is for the shares.

  These investors, who have to be among the few people in the world even more unscrupulous than investment bankers, knowing there is a large block of shares about to hit the market, instantly start selling, knowing the price is about to fall. Hold on, you say, they just said they wouldn’t deal. As if. If they don’t already own the shares, they borrow them, selling something that they don’t actually own but expect to be able to buy back more cheaply very soon – ‘closing their short position’ in the jargon of the market. Sell it for a hundred and buy it back for ninety, and you’ve made a ten euro turn.

  When eventually the bids go in, and one lucky bank ‘wins’ the auction, everyone knows that the crazy idiot is going to have to scramble to unload the position, and the lucky losers also join the hedge funds in selling the stock, putting further pressure on the price, to rubbish the competition and make a little money along the way. It’s a horrible situation to be in. The investment bank that wins generally loses a ton of money, the company in question sees its shares get a hammering, and only the government is happy, because it got its money. And the block trade business? As someone once said, it’s a great way for investment bankers to show who has the biggest dick and the smallest brain on the block – at least until now.

  What’s different this time, is that Grossbank is on the list of bidders. Paul Ryan has called in a favour from an old buddy at Financial Solutions, the small advisory firm running the auction. The idea is that if people think we’re bidding on a trade like this, they’ll start to take us seriously. No one expects us to win, including my own team.

  Unlike the other firms bidding for the block, we aren’t really in a position to talk to many hedge funds, because we hardly know any. Unlike the other firms, we don’t yet have a proper sales force of brokers. Tripod Turner tells me not to touch it with a barge pole. I call Herman the German and he asks if I’m sure I know what I’m doing, and I say of course not, I hardly ever know what I’m doing, which makes him laugh. The shares close at sixtytwo euros ninety, and I suggest we put in a really aggressive bid at sixty-three euros a share.

  ‘The government holding’s been overhanging the share price for months. As soon as it’s gone, the price will rise. Come on – let’s win this sucker. We’re Grossbank – Grossbank rocks!’

  It’s only then that I recall that at Bartons, no one ever took any notice of my views on bidding for blocks, or much else for that matter, so it really didn’t matter what I thought. The problem is, now I’m in charge, and despite the obvious misgivings of the team, the bid goes in, to the amazement of Paul’s old buddy at Financial Solutions. Since anyone with a brain is bidding at least a small discount to the closing price, we win.

  Paul Ryan looks sick. ‘What do we do now? We own twenty per cent of the company. First thing tomorrow everyone’s going to be shorting the hell out of it, the price will go into free-fall, and if we manage to get rid of half of it, even at a huge loss, we’ll be lucky. What’s the plan, boss?’

  I like it when he calls me boss. It’s late, and I have a rendezvous with Fluffy and Thumper from the Pussy-Cat Club – beautiful Thai twins, who do an extraordinary double act guaranteed to whet even the most jaded appetite – so instead of saying how the hell should I know, I’ve never bid on a block trade before and I didn’t expect to win, I look confident, wink and tell him we’ll think about it in the morning.

  He thinks I’ve got nerves of steel, and carries on looking sick. The reality is that I still haven’t fully fathomed out exactly what I’ve got us into.

  In the morning, the shares do indeed go into free-fall. I’m scared shitless, a rabbit caught in the headlights, everyone looks to me for a lead, and on my instructions, we do… nothing.

  ‘Sit tight – don’t lose your nerve.’ No trader ever sits tight. But I’m desperately tired, it’s a 3G day. I feel like I’ve got alcohol oozing from every pore, my whole system saturated from a night of truly excessive excess with Fluffy and Thumper, and there’s a brass band marching up and down in my head. When the stock hits fifty euros a share, I panic and tell our traders to go into the market and buy a shed load more. If we own some at sixty-three euros a share, and some at fifty, our average price will be a lot lower than it was. At least that’s why I keep telling myself it’s a good move.

  By noon, we’re up to t
hirty per cent of the company. Herman wants to know what’s going on. So does Paul. So do I.

  ‘Let’s just say it’s a reverse block trade. We’re not selling these shares, we’re buying them.’ It’s a vague attempt at humour by a condemned man, as I face the imminent prospect of the whole pack of cards collapsing around me.

  I say it to Paul in the middle of the trading floor, and word spreads like wildfire. Since no investment banker can ever keep a secret, and everyone on the trading floor has at least one telephone, the word soon gets around the market.

  ‘Grossbank isn’t selling Société Financière du Sud – it’s buying it!’

  A couple of minutes later, reports are going across the wire that there is speculation in the market that Grossbank may be buying SFS, either acting on behalf of a potential acquirer – various names are mentioned – or possibly for its own account, as part of a foray into merchant banking-type principal investment. Herman calls.

  ‘Are we buying SFS?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are we?’

  The price is no longer in free-fall, but rising rapidly as the market gets wind of the fact that not only has the government overhang been removed, but there’s a predator on the loose, hoovering up shares with a view to launching a bid. An official announcement is expected imminently. Now all the short sellers are rushing to buy shares, closing out their short positions. Sell something at sixty euros a share, and buy it back at seventy, and the trade doesn’t look quite so clever, does it sucker? The institutions which actually owned SFS shares and sold them on news of the block trade are out there buying them back, not wishing to miss out on the action now that something’s happening. On the trading floor at Grossbank, the traders cheer every time the price goes up another euro. At sixty-five euros, we start unloading shares, and carry on selling them as the price reaches seventy, finally losing the last of our position at seventythree. When the French Trésor call up to ask what the hell’s going on, I don’t even need to lie. We’ve sold the whole position, and no, we have no idea where the takeover speculation came from.