Convenience Big Store: Amanda Staveley, the most powerful woman in football

23 October, 2021

Hello,

The other day Peter Tiede, chief political commentator of Bild, penned a savage attack on British politics as "populist and simplistic". He was "grinning with schadenfreude" at our post-Brexit travails, he said. There was a good deal of self-delusion in this, as was pointed out at the time. Germany has been happy to court Russia to acquire cheap energy and China to sell more cars; two of France's last four presidents have criminal records, etc.

This week The New Statesman's Andreas Fulda reminds us that there is endemic corruption in Germany and that its schools are in dire shape, while the latest issue of Der Spiegel claims drug smuggling is so out of hand in the Netherlands that it's become the "Colombia of Europe" (see below). None of this is to make light of Britain's problems, but it's useful to keep things in perspective.

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All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Moneymakers

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Amanda Staveley, the most powerful woman in football

Saudi Arabia's £360bn sovereign wealth fund didn't buy Newcastle United on its own. PCP Capital Partners, a private equity firm run by Amanda Staveley, scooped up 10% of the football club's shares. The 48-year-old businesswoman, who is worth at least £110m, was the driving force behind the deal.

How did it come together?
Staveley had been trying to buy Newcastle for years. In 2019, two years after the failure of her first attempt, she met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his £450m yacht, Serene, and told him he could buy a Premier League club for less than what he'd paid for Leonardo da Vinci's painting Salvator Mundi. She was right – after another failed bid in 2020, a Saudi-led consortium this month secured Newcastle United for £305m, £20m less than the painting's price tag. Cue a bunch of boozed-up Geordies wrapping dishcloths around their heads in celebration. Hatice Cengiz, who was engaged to Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey three years ago, witheringly described the purchase as a "shame for Newcastle and English football".

Did that trouble Staveley?
She's sticking to the (debatable) line that the sovereign wealth fund is "autonomous and independent of the Saudi government". Her single-mindedness for bagging deals is "like a dog with a bone", one former chief exec tells the FT. PCP Capital Partners has a reported £28bn under management and has been involved in deals worth £8bn over the past decade. These include the Staveley-brokered £210m sale of Manchester City to the Emirati prince Sheikh Mansour in 2008, which earned PCP £10m in commission. She also tried to engineer a Middle Eastern takeover of Liverpool FC, but without success.

Where is Staveley from?
She's the daughter of Yorkshire landowner Robert Staveley, whose family was given a 1,000-acre estate by Cardinal Wolsey in 1516. All that old money didn't blunt her entrepreneurial drive, especially when it was made clear that her brother would be the one inheriting. She polished off her A-levels in a single year and was accepted by Cambridge at 16. Afflicted with an eating disorder and affected by illnesses elsewhere in her family, she dropped out. At 22 she took out a £180,000 loan and opened Stocks, a restaurant near Newmarket racecourse. She would wake up at 4am and do everything from accounting to waiting tables herself. This laid the foundations for her formidable business network – with all the Gulf racehorse owners hanging around, "you would think you were in Chelsea or Mayfair", one Newmarket veteran tells The Athletic. Her afternoons were spent studying finance in London.

Sounds exhausting. Did it pay off?
Not entirely. In 2000 she sold a share of her next business venture, a £10m Cambridge science park, to EuroTelecom. The communications company promptly collapsed, leaving Staveley with sky-high debts. Not wanting to ask her family for help, she ended up sleeping in the doorway of a City bank one night. "I thought I must be the only person with a Burberry coat who doesn't have a roof over my head," she later told the Evening Standard. She gradually rebuilt her career and moved to Dubai, where she brushed up on Islamic finance and worked her way into the inner circles of the Gulf. "I don't think there is a ruler in the Middle East that doesn't know her," one associate told The Guardian in 2008. She even dealt with Colonel Gaddafi.

That's quite an address book
It came in handy during the financial crisis of 2008, when Barclays needed bailing out but didn't fancy going cap in hand to the Treasury. Staveley, at only 35, brokered a £3.5bn investment by Sheikh Mansour, earning PCP a reported £40m. Believing she deserved a bigger fee, Staveley sued Barclays last year. But she lost the case, leaving her with a legal bill of £19.5m. Phone transcripts came to light in which Barclays execs discussed the size of her breasts and described her as a "tart" and a "dolly bird".

Does she take all this in her stride?
Staveley, a former model, has long used financial acumen to counter being dismissed as eye candy. She once boasted that her head for figures meant she never needed to use a calculator. This combination of beauty and brains hooked Prince Andrew, who met her in 2001 and immediately asked her to dinner. They started dating and he proposed in 2003. Fearing for her independence, she declined. Staveley eventually married the British-Iranian banker Mehrdad Ghodoussi, 50, in 2011. Forty-eight hours after the ceremony, attended by Tracey Emin and Andrew Neil, she was back at her desk.

So she's happily married?
It seems so. She and Ghodoussi have a six-year-old son, Alexander, and split their time between the exclusive Dubai enclave of Emirates Hills and a £10m townhouse on Park Lane. Sadly, though, she has inherited Huntington's disease from her mother, Lynne, a champion showjumper. She found out that she had the incurable, fatal brain condition when she and Ghodoussi were thinking about starting a family. "I didn't want to get married when I found out about the disease – but he said he didn't care, and that we would find the best medical care available," she said last year. Stress can make the symptoms worse, but that doesn't seem to have deterred Staveley: she went back to work the day she was diagnosed and is known for working seven days a week, including Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Those close to her say the diagnosis has only added to her urgency and drive.

Long reads shortened

A warning about counterfeit cocaine in Amsterdam, 2014. Robin Van Lonkhuijseng/Getty Images

So much cocaine now comes into the Netherlands, it's "the Colombia of Europe", says German magazine Der Spiegel. Dutch investigative journalist Peter de Vries was shot dead in July and PM Mark Rutte is reportedly being targeted by drugs gangs. Much of Europe's cocaine arrives via the port of Rotterdam – the police hardly bat an eyelid at coke hauls of a few tons, with a street value of hundreds of millions of pounds. (South America produced an estimated 1,784 tons in 2019, worth at least £350bn.) In the past decade the drugs war has spilled into middle-class Amsterdam. "All the boundaries have gone," says one investigator.

A Dutch-raised Moroccan called Ridouan Taghi is alleged to be the "godfather" of the country's drugs cartels. The 43-year-old, nicknamed the Angel of Death, was unknown before he stepped into a power vacuum created when two rival gang leaders died in 2014. Now the Netherlands increasingly resembles Italy in the 1990s. A decapitated head appeared outside a café in 2016. Young, inexperienced contract killers with Kalashnikovs have mistakenly murdered a community centre worker, a DJ and a pot-washer. In all, there were 178 contract killings in the country between 2013 and 2019.

Taghi was arrested in 2019 and is now on trial for six of those murders: "I'm on the hunt… and I need blood," he is alleged to have texted at one point. When the star witness, one of Taghi's former associates, was revealed by the authorities, his brother – an innocent advertising executive with two children – and his first lawyer were shot dead. "Wie praat, die gaat," the local mobsters say: "Whoever talks, walks."

Read the full article here.

Property

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Inside politics

Never underestimate the importance of geography, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Aside from language, it's the only thing that ties the so-called Anglosphere together. None of its countries is landlocked and none has much experience of "territorial loss or occupation". Being so "spoilt by geography", we Anglos (British, Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders) have little idea of the anxiety that a history of invasion instils in nations that have borders with a larger or unfriendly country. Nations are shaped by physical things as well as abstract ideas – why did the Netherlands capitulate to the Nazis if not because of "hundreds of miles of German border"? It was not for a lack of love for freedom. After all, the Netherlands was the home of Spinoza, merchant capitalism and non-ecclesiastical painting.

It's the same with China and Russia: during my three years in Washington, I found the political class peculiarly blind to how important a role "humiliation" has played in so many national histories. Everyone was absorbed in China's behaviour, but had little idea of what drove it. When philosopher Theodor Adorno fled Hitler's Germany for the US, he found Los Angeles "bad for the mind even as it kept him safe. Anglosphere countries face the same quandary: that what protects them leaves them uncomprehending."