PETER DICKS, chairman of the online gaming group Sportingbet, had to raise $50,000 on Friday for his bail. He was also forced to surrender his passport. But a lot more rides on the outcome of his Supreme Court hearing this Thursday.
That is when Dicks will be told whether he will be extradited to Louisiana to face a charge of soliciting a local citizen to make a sports bet online. If he is extradited, the fallout could be immense.
Dicks would be the latest British businessman to face criminal charges in America. But his predicament deserves more sympathy than that of many others.
Yes, Sportingbet has been taking illegal bets in America, but there were other ways of seeking redress than seizing Dicks at New York’s JFK airport. He is a non-executive chairman and has no operational interest in the company.
America has a real chance this week of lowering the temperature before this develops into an international incident. At the moment every executive of a gaming group — and many fund managers who invest in them — are refusing to travel to America for fear of being arrested. For two countries that have a special relationship, that is not a satisfactory situation.
It appears that an enthusiastic Louisiana law enforcer was behind the warrant for Dicks and he is preparing to serve a lot more of them. If Dicks is sent south, a number of things will happen. Gaming stocks will become stock-market lepers and any non-executive director of one of these companies who holds a position on another board will come under pressure to resign.
The US Department of Justice needs to send out a clear message about what is allowed at state and federal level and what is not. Under the current framework the rules and regulations are too grey. If we all know what they are, when people do step out of line, at least we will know why they are being held to account.
Stan the Man
I HAVE played golf with Stanley Fink, chief executive of Man, the hedge-fund group, on several enjoyable occasions and two things stand out. He is highly competitive — and he has one of the world’s biggest putters.
Last week he surprised the market by saying he would stand down as chief executive. Those who know him were expecting him to make that decision at least a year from now, but it came after an extended family holiday.
Fink has recovered fully from his brain tumour, but the relentless pressure of 16-hour working days was starting to take its toll and he decided to quit.
He would have liked to become chairman, but that position is held by his long-standing colleague Harvey McGrath. It is possible that Fink, who will take the new position of deputy chairman, will assume the chair some day, but it is not a pressing issue for him.
The warm tributes paid to Fink after last week’s announcement are proof that when a company’s share price since flotation goes up 1,340% (see chart on right) the chief executive doesn’t have many enemies.
Peter Clarke, who steps up from finance director, is well known among the investor and analyst community. He will need to maintain Man’s image as the friendly face of the hedge-fund community.
Most people still don’t understand how a company like Man can keep on producing turbocharged profits. The job of demystifying Man, which has metamorphosed from a sugar trader into a hedge fund, has yet to be completed.
Plane sense
LAST WEEK we saw another sign of how much our collective view of the British economy has changed. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Britain’s efforts in commercial aviation — Comet, Concorde and Airbus — were front-page news, a matter of national interest and debate.
But last week, when BAE Systems finally decided it would sell its Airbus stake, there was barely a murmur. Just as we no longer much care about shipbuilding, it appears we are not too bothered about the construction of aircraft, and our control or otherwise of it.
So be it. Only two questions arise from BAE’s decision. The first is whether the company did the right thing by selling up at what at first sight looks a low price, £1.9 billion.
The answer is yes. We are just over the peak of the current cycle in aircraft orders, meaning almost certainly that we are also just past the peak of how the stock market values planemakers.
To delay the sale while the cycle turned again might have entailed a wait of up to eight years, depending on your view of how quickly aviation cycles will run. Add to this Airbus’s problems with the A380, its flagship programme, and the big investment required in the new A350, and there was a compelling case to get out.
The second question is the commitment of EADS (which will buy BAE’s 20% in Airbus, leaving it holding 100%) to Britain. At the moment Airbus directly employs more than 10,000 people here.
Its British plants design and manufacture the wings for all its planes. It’s a big chunk of high-tech, high-added-value work, the loss of which would undoubtedly leave the British economy worse off.
The other Airbus nations, France, Germany and Spain, would love to get their hands on it, and will offer EADS all sorts of lures. Ministers must decide how far they are prepared to go to safeguard Airbus’s long-term presence here.
Freed Sainsbury
THE Sainsbury family continues to dribble out shares in the £6.2 billion retailer that bears their name — and for the first time their combined holding has fallen below 20%.
Up to now, because the stake was above 20%, the company was classified as a restricted stock. The effect of this was to reduce the amount of shares that could be owned by index-tracker funds.
But last week the group’s free float of shares was quietly increased to 100%. This was due to recent share sales by the Judith Portrait blind trust, which now owns about 15%, and sales by Simon Sainsbury, whose holding has dropped below 3%.
The reweighting should become effective on September 18. One broker estimates that tracker funds could snap up a further 40m shares, equivalent to three days of trading volume. The stock, which closed on Friday at 362&189;p, is trading at close to a four-year high. The expected buying will underpin the price.
