High above the bustle of Manhattan, in one of Trump Tower’s most palatial apartments, Charles Dunstone was settling down to dinner. On the menu: a succulent piece of sea bass — and the future ownership of his Carphone Warehouse empire.

The meal for four, which took place in the week before Easter last year, had been a long time in the planning.

Beaming across the table at Dunstone with a broad smile and bald pate was Brad Anderson, the chief executive of Best Buy, America’s No 1 retailer of electrical appliances.

Despite a 15-year age difference, the pair had been getting on famously since their first meeting three years earlier at Carphone’s headquarters at Acton in west London.

Their businesses were already collaborating, and Best Buy had taken a 3% stake in Carphone, prompting talk that it would eventually come back for more.

By the time the coffee arrived that night in Manhattan, Dunstone and Anderson had agreed to deepen the ties between their chains. A big overseas investment in one of Britain’s best-known retailers was on the cards.

Project Music was born. It was given this name because both sides claimed to be in tune with the other, and the accord finally bore fruit last Thursday.

Once again, Dunstone, who still owns 33% of Carphone, was up in the air. From the top of Westminster’s Millbank Tower, which he had last visited to attend Tony Blair’s 2001 general election victory party, the entrepreneur ended months of speculation that he might sell the business he founded in 1989 in a Marylebone basement flat with £6,000 of savings.

Instead of an outright exit, Dunstone announced that Carphone was selling 50% of its retail business — including 2,400 shops, its insurance arm and online retail channel — to Best Buy for £1.1 billion.

The deal gives Best Buy an easy route into Europe for its superstores that sell everything from fridges to home cinemas.

For Carphone, it more than pays off group debt of £840m, giving it the flexibility to invest further in its other division,

the Talk Talk fixed-line business, already Britain’s third-largest broadband supplier, with 2.7m customers.

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