Party page today. First to the Cadogan Estate, which has elegant new offices on Duke of York Square in Chelsea, SW3.
At the event, hosted by gentleman and scholar Hugh Seaborn, the Taittinger had been flowing for quite some time when a story emerged that was strong enough to sober anyone aiding and abetting tax evasion.
David Cameron’s register of beneficial owners idea had just been announced, prior to the anti-corruption summit due to take place the following day.
“Don’t worry too much,” advised a well-placed guest. “It’s three or four years away. By then the bad people will have gone deeper.”
What chilled was his view that HMRC and/or the Financial Conduct Authority are entering “crackdown mode”.
He warned that the regulators would be looking to ransack agents’ offices and scare the living daylights out of everyone to prove to their political masters they had teeth and were worth their budget – a crackdown that had already begun he said, confiding a name that I could scarcely believe I heard.
An Earl-y warning
In other matters, I recently found out that the boss of the £5.2bn Cadogan estate was not best pleased to be called the Earl of Cadogan in an article I had written. Sandwiching “of” between “Earl” and “Cadogan” is a gaffe a Tatler hack would never make, apparently.
Describing the 79-year-old Cadogan as a “high Tory, high mason, three-times married and turf-loving” may not have helped his Earlship’s temper either.
Icing on Fitzroy cake
On to Fitzroy Place, W1, for a beer ‘n’ burger celebration of the smokin’ new square at the centre of the three-acre development of 289 flats and 220,000 sq ft of office space, north of the wrong end of Oxford Street.
Much has been written about Dan Van Gelder and Clive Bush of Exemplar triumphing where Nick and Christian Candy failed in 2008. But little has been said about how the administrators of bust Icelandic bank Kaupthing have doubled their money and made a £150m profit by simply staying with the scheme. That’s about SKr80,000, or £450 for each of Iceland’s 332,000 inhabitants.
How come? By taking the advice of CBRE and not selling the site to Stanhope, which had worked up a live/work scheme in 2009-10 and a “meanwhile” use of allotments. (Yes, they were very bad times.)
A CBRE team, too shy to name themselves, flew to Reykjavik and met with the administrators in a huge room with a giant sculpture of a black crow dangling from the ceiling. Such symbolism! Anyway, the Icelandic panjandrums were told the market was improving and they should not fly away. The rest is profitable history.
PS: A reversal of fortune was of course experienced by the Fitzroy Place builders. Sir Robert McAlpine attributed a £90m loss in the year to October 2014 to the project, which took a year longer to build than planned.
“Did you really make a £90m loss on the one job,” I asked a senior (non-family) member of team McAlpine. “And the rest!” he snorted, implying that some jobs made a profit.
“Crikey, what went wrong?”
“Everything – you name it!”
There followed a long list of disasters, including a lot of subcontractors going bust.
Has McAlpine blamed the client in any way? Nope. It has taken the loss on the family chin. How impressive therefore it was to see the slim figure of family member David McAlpine circulating the party, smiling and chatting away with such gentlemanly sangfroid.
