This article was originally published in September 2020.

Walter…

In 2010 our small fund management business received a call. It was Jason, numbers man to Walter Kwok, the biggest real estate developer/owner – and the richest man – in Hong Kong. Over the next year, Jason was a complete pain: demanding detailed spreadsheets, calling late at night or on weekends, challenging the tiniest assumptions in our IRR forecasts. But like all fund managers, we jumped whenever capital came knocking. Then, in spring 2011, Jason called to invite me to lunch with Mr Kwok. The very next day. In Hong Kong.

My overnight flight reading was Walter’s Wikipedia entry. It described how, when still a young man, he had been kidnapped and locked in a coffin by gangsters as his then-wife and family haggled over the ransom fee. Hong Kong gossip had it that his girlfriend now ran both him and the family mega-real estate business. Straight off the flight, at Kwok downtown HQ, I received my pre-lunch briefing, which amounted to Jason reminding me just how rich Mr Kwok really was (“In 2009 HSBC called him to borrow money…” ).

I was then escorted, via private lift, to the top floor where, beside a table laid for two, was Mr Walter Kwok. I expected a hard-faced numbers/returns-only guy. Wrong. Softly spoken, diffident, gentle, he hardly spoke. I had to make all the conversational running, which was all the more difficult because lunch was very Chinese and I am more beans-on-toast. The only vaguely financial question he asked was: “How is the London market?” Lunch (but not much eating) over, he thanked me for my time, and I was escorted back down again.

That was it. Nothing. A year later, on an early winter’s evening in Pimlico, the receptionist called to say that I had a visitor. It was Walter, alone. Did I have time for a cup of tea? After another non-financial and somewhat rambling chat, I asked if he would like a lift somewhere. In my beaten-up Mini he reminisced about his time as a student in London and how happy he had been back then. Dropping him at Sloane Square, I experienced a weirdly protective feeling towards him. He seemed a very shy, lonely, somewhat sad, gentle man.

After the drop-off, once again, nothing. Then, a few months later, news broke that, following an alleged meeting between Walter and the Beijing authorities, as part of the mainland crackdown on corruption, the two younger Kwok brothers had been arrested for alleged fraud and bribing officials. His mother accused Walter of being the snitch. He died two years ago, one of his brothers still in prison.

Joe…

I had already come across my first billionaire some fifteen years before that. At the time I was on the dealing floor of Swiss Bank and our team had acquired a global reputation, in the foreign exchange market, for having, ahem, ‘balls’. This meant we took very large proprietary bets, with the bank’s own capital, on the hunches of my boss (who later went on to bankrupt the place). My job was to monitor global politics.

In the mid-1990s the only show in town for FX and bond markets was European monetary union and, in particular, which countries would be in the first 1999 wave. Predicting the politics of this was worth literally billions. Ahead of an upcoming European finance ministers’ Ecofin meeting, the exam question for traders was: ‘Will Germany intervene to bail out the Italian lira?’ (at the bottom of its pegged ERM rate against the D-mark). The market consensus, fed by leaks to the financial press, was that Germany would ‘help’ the Italians and buy lire. Overnight in Asia, anticipating this announcement, the lira had strengthened significantly against the D-mark. Very big bets had been placed on both sides.

At around 10am I got a frantic wave from one of our FX salesmen. Mr Joe Lewis was on the line. Joe was a legend in the markets, a whale. He bet on the same sort of scale as hedge and sovereign wealth funds. He had his own dedicated salesman at Swiss Bank. A bit like Robert Duvall in The Godfather, this salesman had only one client. Joe lived on a super-yacht with his own bank of screens, and when he bet he really bet.

I was handed the receiver. “Stephen, have you got anyone at this Ecofin meeting?” “Yes, Mr Lewis.” “I need you to do something for me.” “Yes, Mr Lewis.” “Find out if Waigel [the German finance minister] is going to arrive in his car alone, or not.” “Yes, Mr Lewis.” “I need to know who is in his car before he draws up.” “Yes, Mr Lewis.” “Before he arrives, before he steps out of the car, you need to call me.” “Yes, Mr Lewis.”

Bloody hell. I knew, sort of, a journalist who was in Dublin for the meeting and called him, offering the lunch to end all lunches if he could watch Waigel’s car as it entered the long drive of the Dublin country house and call me ASAP to tell me what he could see. Ten minutes later I phoned Mr Lewis to tell him that Waigel was in his car, alone.

Joe’s theory ran that if Germany was going to show solidarity with Italy then any deal would have been stitched up ahead of the actual meeting. Waigel would have already met with his Italian counterpart and, to calm markets, they would ensure the optics were Germany and Italy arriving and acting as one. Waigel arriving on his own suggested to Joe that Germany was going to play hard ball, not buy lire, and the D-mark was going to rise.

He thanked me, spoke to his salesman and, I am told, placed a huge order. That Christmas the salesman got a record-breaking bonus – but left anyway to work for Joe.