On a spring morning in 1987, a 30-year-old man named Robert Kilgour pulled up beside a row of foamy cherry timber within the city of Kirkcaldy, on Scotland’s east coast, to go to an previous lodge. The constructing was 4 storeys of blackened Victorian sandstone. Kilgour was a giant man, a voluble Scot with a knack for storytelling. He already owned a lodge in Edinburgh however wished to department into property growth and was planning to show this previous place, Station Court docket, into residences. A number of months after he accomplished the acquisition, nonetheless, the Scottish authorities scrapped a grant for builders that he had been relying on. He had simply sunk most of his private financial savings right into a ineffective constructing in a sodden, post-industrial city. He urgently wanted a brand new concept.
Care properties weren’t so completely different from accommodations, Kilgour thought. And the sweetness was, their aged residents had been unlikely to get drunk, steal the cleaning soap dispensers or invite intercourse employees again to their rooms. Turning Station Court docket right into a care dwelling appeared like the easiest way out of a nasty scenario. Kilgour organized a financial institution mortgage and in June 1989 he launched 4 Seasons Well being Care, taking the identify from a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan the place he had as soon as dined.
By sheer luck, Kilgour had discovered himself firstly of one thing massive. The next 12 months, the federal government in Westminster began to switch accountability for social care on to native councils. This gave businessmen similar to Kilgour an enormous alternative. Councils started paying them to offer beds that had beforehand been provided by the NHS. Demand boomed.
Kilgour opened three different properties in Kirkcaldy, one other overlooking the Firth of Forth, and an additional one close to Dundee. Alongside operating his new enterprise, he juggled the pastimes of an more and more rich man. He raised cash for a most cancers charity, performed tennis, networked ceaselessly and commenced to dabble in politics, campaigning (and failing) to develop into considered one of Scotland’s few Conservative MPs. By 1997, he owned seven care properties throughout Fife.
That 12 months, he chaired a fundraising attraction to open a brand new hospice within the grounds of Kirkcaldy’s most important hospital. The visitor of honour was an irascible TV movie star referred to as John Harvey-Jones, star of a actuality present referred to as Troubleshooter by which he distributed tough-love recommendation to underperforming British businessmen. Over tumblers of whisky, Harvey-Jones counselled Kilgour: “He stated I used to be caught in a regional consolation zone. He stated I wanted to interrupt out of it and go wider.” Deep down, Kilgour agreed.
He had few contacts in London, the place the intense cash was. It occurred to him that his finest lead could be an accountant he knew referred to as Hamilton Anstead, who had just lately left a job at a care firm within the south of England. Kilgour invited him as much as a lodge in Glasgow and the 2 males hatched a plan for Anstead to affix 4 Seasons as a joint chief govt.
Kilgour advised me all about this over espresso at his non-public members’ membership in Mayfair, a high-ceilinged, low-lit place with clusters of velvet chairs organized for quiet dialog. He had now entered the “legacy” part of his life, he stated: extra involved with what he was abandoning than what lay forward. He typically talked about the politicians with whom he was on first-name phrases, as if displaying me the images in a well-handled album. Largely, he appeared comfortable, however there have been points of his previous that bothered him.
Over the course of two years, Kilgour and Anstead constructed 4 Seasons into, if not fairly an empire, then a small dominion of 43 properties dotted throughout Britain. Because the enterprise grew, nonetheless, their relationship soured. Anstead typically felt that Kilgour was extra fascinated with his political profession than the trivialities of spreadsheets or suppliers. (“I’m a method and imaginative and prescient individual, not a element individual,” Kilgour stated. “Hamilton is an excellent micromanager and I’m an entrepreneur.”)
In 1999, the 2 males determined to promote the corporate, with the concept they might keep on as executives. Anstead recognized a purchaser, a non-public fairness agency referred to as Alchemy Companions. Shortly after they signed the deal, in August that 12 months, he referred to as Kilgour and stated they urgently wanted to satisfy. Anstead put it bluntly: neither he nor the corporate’s new homeowners wished Kilgour to remain on as an govt at 4 Seasons. Kilgour felt his mood rising. He was being requested to go away the enterprise he had created from scratch. “He began effing and blinding and calling me all types of obscenities,” Anstead recalled. (Kilgour later advised me that by this level he was exhausted, and wished out.)
Alchemy bought 4 Seasons in 2004, and the corporate turned infamous as a failed experiment, a byword for the folly of entrusting elder care to personal fairness. “You could possibly ask me, effectively, do I really feel responsible about what occurred?” Kilgour stated. “And sure, I do, truly.”
Private fairness depends on a fundamental approach generally known as the leveraged buyout, which works like this: you, a dealmaker, purchase an organization utilizing only a small portion of your individual cash. You borrow the remainder, and switch all this debt on to the corporate you simply purchased. In impact, the corporate goes into debt so as to pay for itself. If all of it goes effectively, you promote the corporate for a revenue and also you reap the rewards. If not, it’s the firm, not you, that’s on the hook for this debt.
Leveraged buyouts first got here to prominence within the Nineteen Eighties, when dealmakers on Wall Avenue started focusing on underperforming firms and bloated conglomerates within the US. Then, these American businessmen and their British imitators began to scour the world for different locations to place this method to work. With a dwindling provide of undervalued firms to select from, a number of the sharpest minds in finance discovered a brand new and sudden goal: care properties.
As individuals had been now residing effectively into their 80s and 90s, financiers started to consider aged individuals as recession-proof investments, and assumed that the care dwelling market in Britain and the US would continue to grow. Within the UK, many of those properties had been bankrolled by native authorities, which assured a gentle revenue from the federal government. Aged individuals who paid for his or her care out of their very own pockets usually coated the price by promoting their homes, and the ceaseless improve in property costs endowed them with a lot housing fairness that they turned the human equal of ATMs. Care properties had been the slot for withdrawing their money.
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They rubbed their fingers collectively and stated, ‘In the end, because the demand will increase, the costs should go up’
It takes a sure form of thoughts to look into the world of colostomy luggage, incontinence pads and emollient cream and see greenback indicators. Nonetheless, from the flip of the twenty first century, non-public fairness funding in care properties ballooned in each Britain and the US. Fund managers thought “there are all these prosperous child boomers heading in direction of retirement. They’ve made a fortune from their homes, or inherited cash from their dad and mom, and so they all have gold-plated pension schemes,” Nick Hood, a chartered accountant who has studied Britain’s care sector, advised me. “They rubbed their fingers collectively and stated, ‘In the end, because the demand will increase, the costs should go up.’”
Within the UK, a stream of offers happened. New firms emerged and new care properties went up, some constructed out of pale accommodations whose clientele had migrated to southern Spain after the arrival of low cost air journey. Different businessmen purchased crematoriums in addition to care properties, in anticipation of their shoppers’ last billable necessities. “Personal fairness’s presence in British care properties was negligible 30 years in the past,” stated Peter Morris, a researcher and affiliate scholar on the College of Oxford. “Since then, it’s grown inexorably.”
Anstead and Kilgour belonged to a small group of newly minted care dwelling millionaires. On the coronary heart of many of those new fortunes was a way financiers referred to as “sale and leaseback”. You’d take a care dwelling and break up it into an working firm, or “opco”, which handled the whole lot in regards to the enterprise of care, from employees to beds, drugs cupboards and cutlery. On the opposite facet you had the property firm, or “propco”, which now owned the bodily dwelling. After splitting these in two, you might unload the propco to another person, permitting you to shortly increase money (this was how Anstead and Kilgour initially managed to develop 4 Seasons to 43 properties in simply two years).
In concept, sale and leaseback was an environment friendly manner of elevating cash, with property brokers appearing as middlemen between fund managers who had been shopping for and promoting the properties. “In observe, quite a lot of the offers had been bananas,” Paul Saper, a former healthcare marketing consultant, advised me. A care dwelling that now not owned its personal property was like a household that bought its home to a rapacious landlord. If the owner determined to boost the lease, clearly the household would have much less to spend on different necessities.
“There’s a phrase my associates use when analysing firms,” Hood advised me. “Hold gliders.” Simply as a dangle glider coasts by the sky supported solely by the unfold of its wings, an organization can coast alongside for some time supported solely by the soundness of its cashflow. However whether it is crippled with debt, or locked into escalating rental funds, its cashflow dries up and “it crashes to earth. As a result of it’s obtained nothing to stick with it there.”
After Anstead and Kilgour bought 4 Seasons, it was handed between a string of various homeowners. Alchemy bought the corporate in 2004 to a German insurance coverage agency referred to as Allianz Capital Companions, which then bought it to a Qatari non-public fairness fund in 2006. When the monetary disaster arrived in 2008, the care firm’s money owed had soared to an estimated £1.56bn. As its Qatari homeowners couldn’t discover anybody keen to refinance the corporate, 4 Seasons fell into the fingers of its collectors, led by the Royal Financial institution of Scotland. “It was fantastic for the financiers, who put in these supposedly intelligent buildings that took fairness away and changed it with debt,” stated Ros Altmann, a Conservative peer who has studied the sector. “They had been taking part in monetary pass-the-parcel with aged individuals’s lives. They might pile on as a lot debt as they appreciated, and there was nothing to cease them.”
By February 2012, RBS was nonetheless in search of a purchaser, and phrase had unfold a couple of bidding battle. Among the many rivals for management of 4 Seasons had been a Canadian pension fund, the Abu Dhabi funding authority, a Hong Kong billionaire and 4 non-public fairness companies together with Terra Firma, based by Man Fingers.
After beginning on the buying and selling ground at Goldman Sachs, Fingers had made his identify on the Japanese financial institution Nomura, shopping for up trains and pubs, amongst different issues. He was formidable and had an uncompromising streak. When his crew reached the ultimate, frenetic phases of a deal, Fingers would hardly sleep. He was recognized for having a mood. “I’m not a very conciliatory human being,” he advised me. In an FT report in 2024, a number of former colleagues accused Fingers of screaming and raging at employees and humiliating junior staff. (Fingers and Terra Firma forcefully denied these accusations.)
In 2002, he broke away from Nomura to discovered Terra Firma, a phrase utilized by Seventeenth-century Venetian retailers to explain the areas of Italy dominated by Venice. Like a doge surveying his kingdom from throughout the water, Fingers relocated offshore, to the tax haven of Guernsey.
Regardless of his grand ambitions, nonetheless, his offers weren’t all the time a fantastic success. In 2007, Terra Firma purchased EMI, the long-lasting British music label that had recorded the Beatles at its Abbey Highway studios. The match was ill-fated from the beginning. Fingers had little understanding of the music enterprise or the ability that artists exerted over the label, and his scientific method to revenue creation left some musicians chilly. Paul McCartney described how EMI turned “boring” as soon as it was underneath Terra Firma’s management, whereas Radiohead had been so incensed by the brand new administration that they launched an album on their web site, sidestepping the label altogether. Two years into its new possession, EMI was reporting losses of £1.75bn, and in 2011 Fingers surrendered management to its collectors, Citibank. (Later, Fingers insisted to me that the thesis of the deal was nonetheless “100% proper” and would have made Terra Firma’s buyers over £14bn “had Citigroup not seized the corporate”.)
Together with his fame now tarnished, Fingers was determined to persuade the world that he might nonetheless do his job, and shortly alighted on the care dwelling sector.
In the early months of 2012, Terra Firma held 10 board conferences at which its companions frantically analysed pages and pages of shows. Their proposition hinged upon a easy premise: they might make 4 Seasons into the “IBM of care”, offering dependable, unglamorous providers to native councils, a lot as IBM had bought dependable, unglamorous laptop techniques to the general public sector. Within the scramble for acquisition, Terra Firma’s supply received out.
Not everybody was comfortable. Mark Drakeford, the then first minister for Wales, was involved that Terra Firma deliberate so as to add 4 Seasons to a seize bag of unrelated belongings: a garden-centre firm, a gaggle of wind farms, the Odeon cinema chain and an assortment of motorway service stations in Germany. “Older persons are fellow residents, not commodities,” Drakeford later wrote, likening the transaction to purchasing a sack of compost or a bath of geraniums. “It simply isn’t adequate.”
Fingers advised me he wished to enhance the standard of care at 4 Seasons to draw extra residents, which in flip would make the enterprise extra worthwhile. “The price of doing it will have been about £1,100 every week [per bed],” he stated. “And we had been getting paid about £550 by the native authorities.” Terra Firma had purchased the corporate for £825m, placing down £325m of its buyers’ cash and borrowing the remainder. Whereas the agency paid off a few of 4 Seasons’ current liabilities, the corporate was nonetheless hobbled with debt, and curiosity funds of £50m annually. In Might 2015, the chancellor George Osborne outlined plans to chop an additional £55bn from the state’s price range. This trickled right down to native authorities, which lower funding for care properties. That autumn, the scores company Normal & Poor’s warned that 4 Seasons was on monitor to expire of cash.
In Fingers’s view, the federal government’s unwillingness to spend extra money on the sector was what triggered his plans to unravel. “We believed the federal government was going to assist care, and we obtained it fully fallacious,” he advised me. “We noticed a Conservative authorities, with previous voters, household values, and we thought, these guys are going to place cash into this sector. They usually did the reverse. They drained it.”
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You possibly can’t, on this enterprise, simply make income. You’ve obtained to take into consideration one thing extra necessary: individuals’s lives
Whereas the austerity drive undoubtedly did upset Fingers’s calculations, it was virtually unattainable to know what was actually happening inside 4 Seasons. By now, its company construction had develop into a labyrinth, with 185 separate firms organised throughout 15 completely different layers. We all know this because of analysis by forensic accountants on the College of Manchester, who studied the corporate for a 2016 report. “The foundations of capitalism have been modified by the development of opaque, complicated teams of firms,” they wrote. “4 Seasons is a black field and solely Man Fingers and some shut associates perceive what’s going on.”
Fingers insisted that, on this case, the construction was inherited from Terra Firma’s predecessors, although his agency didn’t precisely simplify issues. “It’s slightly bit like the federal government issuing legal guidelines,” he advised me. “They difficulty legal guidelines the entire time. They by no means abolish any … it’s rather more thrilling placing guidelines in than taking guidelines out.”
Personal fairness individuals are typically higher than simply about anybody else at two issues: managing big quantities of debt, and concealing the interior workings of their firms. Fund managers can cost mysterious “monitoring” and “transaction” charges to an organization they personal. Or they’ll borrow in opposition to that firm to pay themselves or their buyers a dividend. At any time when I’ve spoken to coverage researchers or commerce unionists about this dynamic, the image they’ve painted isn’t so completely different from the argument typically made about overseas assist: that it’s pointless pouring cash into nations with corrupt governments, as a gaggle of middlemen will siphon off the donations earlier than they’ll attain the individuals who want them. Likewise, if it isn’t attainable to see how a lot cash a care dwelling is definitely making, its homeowners can extra simply stress the federal government for extra funding.
“Within the previous days of unionism, you had the manufacturing facility up the highway and you might see how effectively they had been doing,” Natalie Grayson, a commerce union organiser who labored with care dwelling employees, advised me. “However you may’t try this when your employer will get purchased by an funding fund. An organization can say, ‘We haven’t obtained any cash, we are able to solely afford to pay individuals the minimal wage’ and since we don’t understand how a lot debt an organization is paying, and there are such a lot of separate firms and holding firms … it makes it unattainable for us to hint that cash and disprove their arguments.”
However, when offered with an unattainable case, generally probably the most unlikely individuals discover themselves taking part in sleuth.
It was a stifling August day once I travelled to satisfy Eileen Chubb, a slight, serene lady with completely coiffed hair and silky mannerisms, in a suburb of south London. We had been sitting in her front room which, regardless of its crowd of ornaments and bright-orange paintwork, was a spot of exceptional calm. Chubb had poured me a espresso and set out a plate of biscuits. Her rescue canine, Strider, sat at her toes.
Chubb used to work at a care dwelling, till she turned involved by its falling requirements and blew the whistle. From her front room, she then based a charity, Compassion in Care, to assist whistleblowers in related conditions. “I all the time inform individuals: go dwelling, sit in a chair for eight hours, with out meals, with out water, with out human contact. That’s what poor care is like,” she stated.
In 2013, Chubb began operating undercover inspections of care properties. She would fake she was visiting to discover a house for her aged mom, and use false names – colors (Mrs Black, Mrs Inexperienced) or nation and western names (Mrs Parton, Mrs Money). Generally she took a strolling stick with feign immobility, which let her decelerate to higher survey the panorama. Chubb had uncovered particulars of disturbing instances all around the nation, each in small, family-owned properties and people run by giant firms. A number of the worst instances she realized of had been at properties owned by Southern Cross within the late 2000s, within the years earlier than it collapsed. There was Betty Delaney, who developed excruciating mattress sores at a house in Rochdale, two of them so dangerous that they wore right down to muscle and bone. Or Alan Simper, a former electrical engineer who was staying at a Southern Cross dwelling in Leighton Buzzard and was coated in dry excrement by the point he arrived at a hospital in 2009. A coroner later discovered he died “for need of care”.
I believed these may simply be tragic exceptions, however Chubb advised me that at anybody time, her charity was serving to between 200 and 300 staff at properties the place they had been fearful concerning the high quality of care, lots of which had been owned by non-public fairness. “Each single day, I hear about individuals who haven’t been fed or given fluids, or are left in their very own faeces. We see it on a regular basis,” she stated. Chubb was a one-woman detective company, successfully doing the regulator’s job for it. She had little religion within the Care High quality Fee (CQC), the watchdog for social care in England, which had neither the sources nor the inclination to analyze lots of the complaints it obtained, because it misplaced greater than 10% of its price range and virtually 10% of its employees between 2016 and 2020. Within the six years main as much as 2024, in-person care dwelling inspections fell by two-thirds.
Poor care, Chubb advised me, largely occurred behind closed doorways, to individuals who had been too sick or senile to protest. Lots of the whistleblowers who referred to as her hotline had been sharing very important details about wrongdoing that might in any other case by no means be uncovered. However those that took issues into their very own fingers typically discovered themselves alone. One lady whose mom had suffered falls and a black eye whereas staying at a 4 Seasons dwelling in south-west London in 2013 tried to seek out out whether or not this was an remoted incident. She wrote to the council, which refused to present her any details about different complaints sufferers had made as a result of it stated sharing this could have an effect on the corporate’s “business pursuits”. She then submitted freedom of knowledge requests to the CQC, which stated it had obtained greater than 1,000 notifications of great harm from 4 Seasons properties over the earlier 12 months, however that it was unable to say what number of residents had died because of particular varieties of accidents, as a result of it didn’t maintain a central report of this info.
Have been these issues worse in non-public equity-owned properties? Anecdotally, Chubb observed a sample of “ingrained” cost-cutting when properties had been taken over by these buyers. “The employees are run ragged, completely exhausted. You possibly can see it of their faces,” she stated. A few of these observations had been borne out in qualitative information: in a single research from 2022, greater than a dozen nameless employees members in properties taken over by funding funds stated their employers had been “reducing corners” to curb prices. One stated there have been generally so few employees on responsibility, cleaners had been roped in to look after aged residents.
One of the unsettling research I discovered was from 2021. Atul Gupta, a well being economist on the College of Pennsylvania, had set out with a crew of researchers to analyse the modifications that happened in nursing properties within the US after non-public fairness takeovers. The crew sifted by greater than 100 offers between 2004 and 2015, and a darkish image emerged. After a takeover, deaths amongst residents elevated by a median of 11%.
This end result was so stark that Gupta initially thought it was an error. However when his crew checked their outcomes, they had been strong. At properties that had been acquired by non-public fairness funds, researchers discovered there have been fewer employees. Residents had been extra more likely to have stress ulcers and reported increased ranges of ache. “And we discovered a rise in using antipsychotic medication, that are generally used [on residents] as substitutes for restraints,” Gupta stated. “So we discovered a worsening of outcomes on a number of dimensions, together with demise.”
By the spring of 2016, 4 Seasons’ place was tenuous. An American hedge fund was now shopping for up its debt, betting on monetary meltdown. An curiosity fee of £26m fell due in December the next 12 months. Terra Firma failed to satisfy it.
The hedge fund operated out of Connecticut underneath the administration of a former Lehman banker referred to as Spencer Haber. Little was recognized about Haber save for the truth that he had giant sideburns and was enthusiastic about animal welfare, making quite a few donations to a charity for homeless cats in New York. That, and the truth that he had by no means owned a care dwelling.
As Haber purchased up extra of the corporate’s debt, he acquired extra energy to find out what occurred as soon as the agency was reorganised or liquidated. Terra Firma fought to promote a number of the extra worthwhile properties, and Fingers agreed to stay an proprietor in identify alone, whereas Haber’s fund dictated a restructure. In 2019, 4 Seasons introduced it was going into administration. It might now not pay its money owed, so the restructuring would start.
After which the pandemic struck. Instantly, UK care properties had been all around the information. The fundamental drawback was that sufferers with Covid-19 had been being discharged from hospitals into properties staffed by low-paid employees with little expertise of coping with a lethal and contagious virus. Compounding this, they typically didn’t have sufficient masks or gloves to keep away from catching it themselves. Eileen Chubb advised me calls to her hotline elevated by about 60% throughout the first wave of Covid-19. She discovered herself making an attempt to console distraught care employees till 10pm every night. “Many had been in tears, scared of what was happening. Being advised to get used PPE out of a dustbin, spray it with Dettol and put it again on. Having to make use of sanitary towels for face masks,” she recalled. At first, the CQC saved information on care dwelling deaths from Covid secret, partly – by its personal admission – to guard the business pursuits of suppliers. It was as if the regulator didn’t need the general public to seek out out what was occurring inside these properties. Or maybe it didn’t know: throughout Covid, it paused routine inspections totally.
As soon as once more, the duty of analysing what was happening fell to self-appointed investigators and teachers relatively than the state. In line with one paper, on the peak of Covid’s first wave, the properties with the best money owed, the place leverage was above 75%, had a demise charge almost twice as excessive as properties with no leverage in any respect. “In dangerous occasions, leveraged operators have to chop prices greater than unleveraged operators,” the researchers defined.
The pandemic pressured the general public to deal with the trade, and the UK authorities sprang belatedly into motion. It pumped an additional £2.1bn into the sector – about £5,900 for every mattress. Properties obtained free PPE, cash to cowl employees sick pay and subsidies for empty rooms as residents died. As Amy Horton, an financial geographer and professor at UCL found, nonetheless, employees working within the largest for-profit properties, nearly all of which had been owned by non-public fairness funds, reported working longer hours and receiving lower than passable sick pay. “These variations,” Horton recommended, “might be as a result of some firms are paying out vital parts of their income to buyers, landlords and collectors, relatively than reinvesting within the service.”
Hands appeared to remorse his determination to purchase 4 Seasons. After I requested him whether or not his trade ought to ever be liable for the care of aged individuals, he advised me he felt there was a “elementary mismatch” between non-public fairness and social care. “I imply, non-public fairness’s position is to make income for its buyers. And you may’t, within the care home based business, simply make income. You’ve obtained to take into consideration one thing that’s extra necessary, which is individuals’s lives.” I didn’t disagree, although it appeared a neater factor to say when you had retired offshore, having made a large fortune.
In 2022, the remaining properties from the 4 Seasons property appeared on the web site of a real-estate dealer. The pictures confirmed an early Victorian mansion, an Edwardian pile and a Nineteen Nineties neo-Georgian housing block. In real-estate vernacular, the portfolio was described as “enticing”, with “robust common charge uplifts” and “beneficial demographics”, a euphemism for places the place home costs had boomed, as soon as once more conjuring the concept aged individuals had been asset-rich money machines.
Ever since he was ousted from 4 Seasons, Robert Kilgour had resolved to create what he advised me was a distinct sort of care enterprise. I met him on a wet day in Edinburgh to go to three of the properties he now owns. We drove between them in his SUV, which had a personalised quantity plate spelling out his surname. The primary was a crenellated, three-storey Victorian manor. Inside, Kilgour pointed with satisfaction to the artworks he had donated, and paused to understand the feel of a brass mild swap. For lunch that day, the residents might select between mushroom stroganoff and shepherd’s pie. There have been small vases of carnations on every of the eating tables. I checked: the flowers had been actual. Kilgour chatted with an attendant who ran the in-house hair salon, then we went to go searching the bedrooms. “This,” Kilgour advised me, stroking a bedstead in an empty room with a theatrical flourish, “is life stuff.”
It might be good to assume that properties similar to this offered an answer to the care disaster, however the residents of the house we visited that day paid upwards of £1,700 every week, a hefty invoice that successfully dominated out virtually everybody with out an costly property to remortgage or promote. Kilgour deliberate to develop his enterprise to 30 properties by the tip of the last decade, and stated he’d obtained varied approaches from non-public fairness funds. “You realize, ‘We’d like to speculate £100m within the care dwelling sector, and we’d love to do a take care of you’ – that form of factor.” Kilgour didn’t inform me who these had been, however he was adamant that he wouldn’t work with any of them after watching what their trade had executed to 4 Seasons.
That is an edited extract from The Asset Class: How Personal Fairness Turned Capitalism Towards Itself by Hettie O’Brien, revealed by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 9 April at £25. To assist the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
