ONE morning in July, Tom Perkins called his local telephone company and asked whether his home phone records had been sent to anyone. The AT&T operator told him: “Yes, they have been sent to your designated e-mail address.” He had been the victim of “pretexting”. He had not asked for a recent record of his incoming and outgoing calls, but someone else had contacted the phone company, given his name, home address and social security number and, promptly, received a read-out of his recent calls. He did not know it at the time, but the same investigators were seeking to bug his Silicon Valley office.

No doubt Mr Perkins has a fascinating private life: he is the former husband of the romantic novelist Danielle Steel, an author in his own right of Sex and the Single Zillionaire, the owner of the world’s largest private yacht and one of the most powerful financiers on the West Coast. He is a board member of News Corporation, the parent company of The Times. And, until he discovered that he was being snooped upon by investigators from Hewlett-Packard, a board member of the computer giant.

But HP’s efforts to spy on Mr Perkins has turned a jet-set plutocrat into an unlikely whistleblower. When Mr Perkins discovered that HP was seeking to trace his calls, he e-mailed the board demanding an independent review of the investigation commissioned by Pattie Dunn, the chairman. Having been stonewalled by HP for more than two months, he went to the authorities.

Ms Dunn now faces four criminal charges and blames Mr Perkins for the assault on her liberty and reputation. Carly Fiorina, the sacked celebrity chief executive, also blames him for her ousting, suggesting that “his head does not rest easy on the pillow at night”.

Yet Mr Perkins has simply sought to put an end to paranoid lunacy at the top of one of America’s iconic companies. More than that, he has exposed the ease with which companies are perpetrating identity fraud.

Mr Perkins’s disagreements with Ms Dunn stemmed from a philosophical difference over the purpose of a board of directors. Mr Perkins believed that they should be technologically savvy experts and able to steer the business; Ms Dunn believed that they should be the good and the great, there to ensure corporate integrity. Given the dramas at ITV, at Matalan and at Misys, to name a few, Mr Perkins’ activism may yet be felt here: he has shifted the media spotlight from the cult of the CEO to the composition and culture of the board.

US studies private equity firms

THE US Justice Department, the scent of blood fresh in its nostrils after the two scalps at British Airways this week, is after new prey. It has begun an inquiry into alleged anti-competitive behaviour by private equity firms. The suspicion seems to be that private equity firms are colluding to depress the prices of assets that they want to buy.

The notion of private equity groups getting together in smoke-filled rooms to do down listed company owners will chime with many. Too many listed companies have been “flipped”, quickly bought then sold at stupendous profit. And there are increasing numbers of deals where consortiums of private equity firms combine in auctions rather than compete.

The complaint yesterday from T. Rowe Price, the American fund manager, that management teams, backed by private equity, are attempting to steal listed assets from institutional investors will also strike a chord. Private capital — in hedge funds or private equity — has grown too big to ignore. There is bound to be growing scrutiny from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Of course, no one can force public company shareholders to sell to private equity on the cheap. And if they are seeking to keep down prices, the private equity firms are doing a lousy job.

Well, he can think that. But he ought to recall not King Arthur, but Henry II, when it comes to the power of a king’s words. Henry may not have meant Becket to be done in at Canterbury, but he was all the same. Our King may not have meant to hint at a rate rise, yet his hawkish tone left little doubt over the way the wind was blowing in Winchester.

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