In his clumsy way, Guy Hands has revealed a dark truth about private equity

The problem with Guy... In a speech in Amsterdam this week, the private equity boss Guy Hands attracted ridicule by speaking of “those of us in the industry” who still “go out to ludicrously expensive restaurants, and drink ludicrously expensive wine”. He bemoaned holding conferences in five-star hotels and claimed he turned down a “multimillion-pound” pay package in investment banking to earn £85,000 a year when he first set up his own firm.

As it happened, his remarks only came after he’d appeared in a luxury magazine last weekend, saying how he enjoys eating Peking duck at Da Dong restaurant in Beijing, prawns and squid at Santiago in Marbella, and grilled pigeons in cherry sauce in Naranj in Kuwait. They were made, too, amid a debt crisis engulfing the Four Seasons Health Care group of old people’s homes, part of his Terra Firma stable.

Anyone who does not know Hands might suppose the deal-making multimillionaire tax exile fits smoothly into the world of the ultra-ambitious, uncaring super-rich.

In fact, Hands is different. There’s an element of disassociation about him – an arch-financier, certainly, but with innocence, a poor boy lost, thrown in. He’s not remotely smooth. His suits might be tailored but his appearance is still crumpled.

Like many successful City figures, Hands suffered terribly from dyslexia. Numbers, which led to finance, were his salvation – he could prove he was good at something. At Oxford, he made so much money from buying paintings from artists and employing students to sell them door-to-door that he was able to buy a house and a shop.

His other escape was argument – he loves a good spat, so at university he was a keen debater. What he does not do is empathy.

At Goldman Sachs he was disappointed when it would not back his purchase of more than a thousand pubs from Grand Metropolitan. Someone more careful might have sensed a lack of interest early on, and ceased. In the end, Hands took his idea to Nomura. Likewise, a more cautious individual may have kept a low profile after buying EMI. But Hands, who had an abiding passion for rock music, could not help himself. He attracted headlines by highlighting expenditure on “flowers and candles”. Far from displaying a love of hyacinths and flickering light, they were industry euphemisms for drugs and prostitutes.

A more sensitive soul would not have chosen to ask employees to gather in an external setting, in a cinema, before telling them, while accompanied by bodyguards, of planned redundancies. It was not, as a PR would have advised, a good look.

Likewise, before letting rip in Holland, Hands ought to have checked on the publication date of the luxury magazine, and the state of play of the care homes.

The pity, too, is that he was actually trying to say he was fed up with his compatriots, that private equity had become too greedy. “The one constant I’ve noticed is that the people I interview for jobs have, over the years, become less and less happy. Interviewing private equity people makes one feel like an agony aunt. No one seems satisfied and everyone seems envious and critical of everyone.”

Looking back, he recalled: “The few of us who were in this industry ate in modestly priced restaurants and drank modestly priced wine and held our conferences in three-star hotels. We had a great time.”

He wanted his private equity audience to examine themselves. Unfortunately, one person who does not major on self-examination is Hands himself.

The problem with Guy… is Guy.

As one wizard can’t help taking centre-stage, another departs. In many respects, Jim Slater was everything Hands is not.

Always courteous, witty, the banker turned investment guru was the consummate “get rich quick” merchant, a financial superstar hailed as “the cleverest man in the City” who inspired a huge following, and made his Slater Walker vehicle the most glamorous of firms. It was inextricably linked to the Tories: the future Welsh Secretary, Peter Walker, was the Walker; and other party stars were employed there. For a time, it seemed Slater and his all-conquering Slater Walker and the Conservative government of Edward Heath went hand in hand: Slater ruling the City, Heath ruling the country.

Captains of industry lived in fear of being “Slaterised” – code for Slater Walker taking their companies over and stripping their assets. His creed was short-term gain, piling in, making a quick profit, and then piling out again just as quickly.

In an era when regulation was, to say the least, lax, Slater was shameless. He started a unit trust, maintaining it would not invest in Slater Walker itself, and yet, within months, Slater Walker was its third largest investment. Another scheme was the investment trust that was run by Slater Walker, invested in companies in the Slater Walker empire and sold its shares to… unit trusts run by Slater Walker.

Hit by the property and secondary banking crashes, and an official inquiry in Singapore into a Slater offshoot, his empire came crashing down. He reinvented himself as a stock market guru, writing best-selling books including The Zulu Principle: Making Extraordinary Profits from Ordinary Shares.

Why Zulu? Because his wife read an article about Zulus and he realised that if she’d gone to the library and borrowed all the books on them and then journeyed to South Africa and studied them she would soon become one of a handful of world experts on Zulus. The same with companies – many are under-researched, so by doing even a small amount of research you will quickly know more than most investors.

He did not change entirely, however. I remember phoning him for help with an article about the state of the market. We got on to the current crop of companies he admired. I wrote them down – a mixture of the well known and the downright obscure. When I checked the latter I duly found that Slater and funds linked to him were among their investors.