ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Why I’m boycotting
‘Davos in the Desert’
action is in hand. Gavin Patterson — the
BT chief executive whose departure was
announced in June and whose successor will
be revealed any day now — writes to say he
and his chairman have both read the dossier
and taken it seriously: ‘However uncomfort-
able it is for us to read of instances where
we have not met the standards your read-
ers rightly expect of us, their input is invalu-
able and we will treat it with the respect and
response you would expect.’
Fine words butter no parsnips and make
no better broadband speeds, I hear you say
— but Patterson’s letter also details, for
example, how BT has reversed a six-year
rise in faults on the Openreach network and
slashed the proportion of missed appoint-
ments by engineers. I’m not suggesting we
should be collectively ready to give BT the
benefit of the doubt, but I’ll try to ensure
that this initial response translates into indi-
vidual follow-up.My Riyadh boycott
Saudi Arabian shares (of which there are
186 listed, with a combined value of around
$450 billion) were also down by as much as
9 per cent at the beginning of the week, as
investors worried about deteriorating inter-
national relations after the alleged killing
of Jamal Khashoggi — but my man in the
Riyadh camel market had no clever trading
ideas to suggest, other than to buy faster
camels. Meanwhile I’m shoulder to shoul-
der with Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase
and other titans in refusing to attend Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Future
Finance Initiative conference next week.
Indeed I’m virtuously ahead of the pack on
this one, having shunned last year’s so-called
‘Davos in the Desert’ too. A formal invita-
tion to this gathering of ‘visionary, innova-
tive and renowned leaders’ from around
the world arrived at 22 Old Queen Street
from an official styling himself ‘His Excel-
lency’ but I challenged it as bluntly as any
veteran journalist should: ‘Is this a freebie?’
It wasn’t, so I didn’t go.T
he current stock-market correction
has been steaming down the track
since August and I claim no wisdom
for having predicted it: the FTSE100 dipped
below 7,000 at the start of the week, hav-
ing shed all of the 10 per cent it had gained
since it began to surge in April. Weaker UK
growth forecasts from the EY Item Club,
reflecting the impact of the Brexit impasse
on business and consumer confidence, are
just one factor in the autumnal mood.
But let’s cheer ourselves up with a round
of applause for our veteran investor Robin
Andrews, whose ‘Faangs to Banngs’ trading
idea I offered you on 1 September. His prop-
osition was that soaring US tech stocks led
by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and
Google (via listed parent Alphabet) were
bound to run out of road, while a swing to
pessimism would bring a revival in leading
goldminers such as Barrick, Agnico Eagle,
Newmont Mining, Newcrest Mining and
Goldcorp, of which Agnico and Barrick
were his favourites. He turns out to have
been — how can I put it? — Banng-on.
Let’s use big numbers. If you started
September with a million dollars spread
equally between the five Faang shares, your
holding would have sunk to $901,400 by
Monday’s close. But if you had sold them
and reinvested equally in the five Banngs,
you’d be worth $1,081,000; and if you had
followed Robin’s tip and bought only Agni-
co and Barrick (the Canadian-based group
whose shares were boosted in late September
by news of a merger with an African miner,
Randgold), you would be sitting on $1,159,500
— more than a quarter of a million better off.
‘The validity of the switch remains as trade
wars and currency fears increase,’ says our
man, and I’m sure he’s right.
Luke’s luck turns
Would it be wrong to sympathise with Patis-
serie Valerie chairman Luke Johnson after
what he called ‘the most harrowing week of
my life’, just because he happens to be a fel-
low columnist in his spare time? Or should
the fractious fraternity of hacks give him
a drubbing for taking his eye off the till in
one of his own businesses, having so often
lectured us on the financial disciplines of
entrepreneurship? The chain of 200 cake-
and-coffee shops built by Johnson and his
partners since 2006 turns out to have a huge
hole in its accounts: far from having ‘a strong
balance sheet... with net cash of £28.8
million’, as its March interim statement
claimed, it is being pursued by HMRC for
unpaid taxes and has been running ‘secret
overdrafts’ of £9.7 million.
Finance director Chris Marsh was sus-
pended and arrested on suspicion of fraud.
Attention also focused on the performance
of the auditors, Grant Thornton. Johnson
himself, who owns 37 per cent of the Aim-
listed company, has injected £20 million in
emergency loans and is scrambling to mus-
ter other investors to help save a business
with 2,800 employees.
His personal fortune, estimated at £250
million in the latest ‘rich list’, will be dented
by the episode, but won’t be wiped out. So
should we feel sorry for him? Perhaps not,
but I think we might give him the benefit of
the doubt. In a long career as a risk-taker in
the catering sector he has owned enjoyable
eateries from Pizza Express to Le Caprice,
made money for many investors beside him-
self, and given encouragement to a genera-
tion of younger would-be business builders.
When I spoke to him about The Spectator’s
Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards, he
talked of the key ability of entrepreneurs to
‘pivot’ swiftly when real-world circumstanc-
es change. He certainly needs to do that at
Patisserie Valerie. I hope it survives.A message from BT
Readers who contributed tales of woe to
the ‘broadband dossier’ I delivered to BT
chairman Jan du Plessis last month must
have wondered whether our 15,000-word
document provoked any reaction at all, or
had perhaps been referred to a call centre in
Bangalore. Well, I’m pleased to report that