ICAP DOES DISCO FOR DRESS-UP DEALATHON
THEY have only worked at ICAP for four days. But the twenty ex-MF Global staff who joined the firm last Thursday have already made a big impression by installing Faces nightclub on the trading floor and dressing up as the late Jimmy Savile.
“Well, we had to make a splash somehow,” said ICAP’s new global head of financial futures and options Gary Pettit, who arrived in London on an overnight flight yesterday morning after signing two more former MF Global staff to ICAP’s New York office.
Pettit claims he is not a regular at Faces, but his friends Tony Bee and John Clark, who co-own the nightclub chain, recreated one of their infamous 70s nights for free at the interdealer broker’s nineteenth global charity trading day.
Manning the phones with the brief to beat the £12m raised at last year’s event were celebrities including racing driver Lewis Hamilton, ex-boxer Frank Bruno, actors Rupert Everett and Ray Winstone, singer Rod Stewart, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who made “hundreds of thousands of pounds”, said ICAP’s group chief executive Michael Spencer, through trades on shipping, repo, forward forex and interest rates swaps.
Spencer stayed in a suit and tie at the fancy dress day where the alpha males tried to outdo each other by reinventing themselves as daleks, smurfs, American footballers, Libyan warlords and Natalie Portman’s character in the film Black Swan (right).
But there were no such concerns about looking “sensible and sober” for senior executives Tim Kidd, John Herbert and Tim Merryweather, who came as ugly sisters to improve on last year’s efforts where they dressed up as… Michael Spencer. “Our bonus pool was significantly smaller after that,” said Herbert – in jest, one hopes.