Vanni Treves admits that, had he been ten or 15 years younger, he would not have taken the job of rescuing the stricken Equitable Life in 2001.

“At the time I was 60,” he says. “I thought, I've still got my marbles about me, I'm quite energetic. If it's all a failure, the reputational damage doesn't matter much because I can depart into the sunset.”

By contrast, for a younger man, he believes, a failure would have proved a serious block on any future career. As it turned out, Equitable survived and so did his reputation. Just.

“Nobody had any idea how big a can of worms it was at the time,” he says. “For well over a year, we were absolutely on the edge of insolvency — on the very edge.”

The insurer was stabilised and then chunks were sold off. Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, issued a damning report in July, which said that more than a million people who had lost savings should be compensated. They will learn of the outcome in the autumn.

“Will the fat lady sing?” Mr Treves asks. “We don't know.”

The operatic metaphor is apt. He was born in Florence in 1940. His father, a partisan with the Resistance, was killed and his mother married a visiting British businessman. They relocated to Britain, Mr Treves retaining dual nationality until he realised that it made him eligible for national service in the Italian Army up to the age of 36. “They have this malign habit that if you ask to serve in an infantry regiment in the north, they put you in a cavalry regiment in the south,” he says.

He chose the law “by a process of exclusion — I thought from the age of 11 it was one of the few things I was likely to be good at”. In the career in corporate law that followed, he sat on the boards of an array of quoted companies, such as Saatchi & Saatchi, a trio of engineers, BBA Group, McKechnie, the busmaker Dennis Group, Channel 4 and Equitable Life.

Unusually, all his non-executive fees during this period were paid to the City solicitor where he worked until 2002. He says: “I was a full-time partner at Macfarlanes and it was right that everything I did should be for the benefit of Macfarlanes.”

Now he hangs his shingle at the Buckingham Palace Road headquarters of Korn/Ferry International, the world's biggest headhunter, whose British unit he chairs. The executive search business has a reputation for being the last refuge for the well-connected but not terribly bright, who spend their time “networking” indolently at Wimbledon, Glyndebourne, Ascot and the like.

Needless to say, Mr Treves rejects this stereotype. His staff are “individualistic, intellectually adventurous and think unconventionally”. All 700 consultants at Korn/Ferry worldwide have good degrees at the minimum and most have at least 15 years experience in the real world, working for real businesses, he says.

“A job well done, as I've found as a headhunter and as a client of headhunters, has a transformational effect on a client,” he says. “The converse is true.”

It might take nine months to identify a potential hiring and get them on board, perhaps as long again to find out if they are the right person for the job. If not, it takes time to ease them out and replace them. “You've wasted at least two years on that one cycle and that's a calamity,” he says. “That's a calamity.”

Korn/Ferry, which has 88 offices in 38 countries, has a database of more than five million individuals worldwide. It uses sophisticated techniques of psychological assessment to identify the right candidate. Such techniques are also used after mergers to work out, quite ruthlessly, where jobs overlap, who should stay and who should go.

Mr Treves says that law and headhunting have one thing in common: the need to work closely with clients and ensure that their every need is catered for. He speaks slowly and carefully, weighing words in typical legal fashion. He claims, though, that he was never a very good lawyer.

“I was lucky,” he says. “My forte as a corporate lawyer was, then as now, being opinionated. Occasionally a client says: ‘If you think you're so clever, why don't you try it?'”

One client he took up on the offer was the Saatchi brothers, at the time running a quoted company. “Their worst mistake was not making Martin Sorrell [finance director at the time, who went on to build up the rival WPP Group] the third brother.”

Some might suggest, though, that their worst mistake was hubristically believing they could take over Midland Bank. At the time, most thought the idea was preposterous, but he says that the authorities had no problem with it. He recalls David Clementi, then a senior banker at Kleinwort Benson, at the head of a delegation returning from the Bank to the Saatchis' Charlotte Street headquarters. “I was absolutely convinced the Bank of England would say: ‘You're barking. No way.'

“He said: ‘The Governor has told us that if Saatchi makes a bid for Midland Bank, the Bank of England will not stand in their way.' Those were the words he used. ‘The Bank of England will not stand in their way.'

“It wasn't that barking,” Mr Treves insists two decades later. “They could hire bankers to run Midland. What Midland Bank needed was the consumer advertising magic they could bring to bear.”

It never happened. Mr Treves moved on. He seemed to have the successful headhunter's knack of putting the right man in the right job. At BBA he hired Roberto Quarta, the redoubtable Italian-American who swiftly acquired the nickname “Give No” Quarta. At Channel 4 he took on Mark Thompson, now Director-General of the BBC, as chief executive.

What does he regard, I ask, as his biggest failure? “I've been extremely fortunate. I have a good family. I'm in good nick.” He considers. “I think that I'm a barrister manqué, because most of all I would have enjoyed being an advocate. The reason I didn't become a barrister was because in those days to be a barrister you needed either to have private means, which I didn't, or to be enormously brave or self-confident. I think I would have liked ultimately to be a judge.”

Mr Treves rings later. On reflection, he says: “One thing I should have done was to have breathed more air as a youth. I never went mad as a young man. I was serious at university and thereafter. That's bad.” For a man who lists “epicurean pursuits” as his main recreation, perhaps he is now making up for lost opportunities.

The Equitable job should be worth a knighthood in due course, I suggest. Indeed, surveying the welter of good causes he has been involved with — work for the National Gallery, the NSPCC, the J Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust, Sadler's Wells, the London Business School and many others — it seems a surprise that so far the appropriate discreet letter has failed to arrive.

“The way in which honours are dispensed in this country is a mystery,” he says with a laugh. “I don't worry about these things. Most important, my wife doesn't worry about these things.”