Fleming blue bloods to run Wafic Said`s fortune

Bond News - 29-08-05

The Fleming family, one of the City’s oldest dynasties, is set to buy the family investment vehicle of Wafic Said, the Syrian-born arms dealer and philanthropist.
The move would see a large part of Said’s fortune managed by Fleming Family & Partners. Said brokered Margaret Thatcher’s $20 billion (£11 billion) al-Yamamah defence agreement with Saudi Arabia. He is also one of the country’s biggest charitable donors and a well-known patron of the arts. Said gave £20m to set up the Said Business School in Oxford, which opened in 2002 - reports Times Online.

The deal highlights the growing trend of Britain’s super-rich pooling their wealth to form bigger investment companies. Traditionally the super-rich have set up their own “family offices”, employing fund management experts to manage their money. But now those family offices are merging, a trend being led by the Fleming family in Britain.

Talks are said to be “going well” and the terms of the deal would see the approximate £700m managed by Said’s Sagitta Asset Management taken over by FF&P, which has about £2.5 billion under management.

FF&P was created after the family netted £1.5 billion by selling its investment bank to Chase Manhattan in 2000. It already manages money for 17 other super-rich families, and chief executive Gavin Rochussen’s declared strategy is to acquire other family offices with liquid assets of more than £10m.

Headquartered in the former London Palace of the Bishop of Ely in Mayfair, FF&P last month reported a 90% increase in full-year profits to £8m on sales of nearly £37m.

Sagitta is thought to manage money belonging to as many as 100 clients, including some of the Cayzer dynasty. Chris Cotteral, formerly of GAM, is now chief executive.

The company’s advisers include Charles Powell, once a private secretary to Thatcher, and Karl Otto Pohl, former president of the German Bundesbank.

The Fleming family’s wealth goes back to Robert Fleming, a Dundee merchant and rail speculator, and it still reaps the benefits of the James Bond books, written by another relation, Ian Fleming. Some 130 family members benefited from the sale of their 30% stake in Robert Fleming investment bank and they decided to continue to have their assets managed together. The cash accounts for about 40% of FF&P’s assets under management. The rest belongs to other families.

The strategy of pooling family offices started in America but had been tried in Britain before. The Scott family, which sold Provincial Insurance for £300m in 1994 and invested some of the proceeds in their vehicle Sand Aire, have successfully wooed rich families. At FF&P, advisers include Sir Brian Williamson and Edward Dawnay, the former Lazard banker.

The family patriarch, Robin Fleming, is a main board director, while Roddie, who hails from a different branch of the family, is the biggest FF&P shareholder and still one of the driving forces in the firm.

FF&P and Sagitta declined to comment.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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