The first time I heard Lex Greensill’s name was in January 2019. I was a senior editor at Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal and a London-based banking publication called Financial News. I didn’t edit much and I did even less reporting. Mostly I ‘strategized’: trying to come up with ideas to improve our journalism and increase our readership.
A long-time source called me out of the blue. The source had something confidential to share and wanted to meet.
I worked with a lot of great reporters at the Journal. They were typically tenacious and incredibly thick-skinned. They badgered sources into submission. My style was a bit different. I didn’t push sources very hard. I got on their side. I probably missed stories because of this approach. This was one of the rare occasions where my more subtle style paid off.
The source – an experienced executive who asked that I never use their name in public – had information about a scandal that had been bubbling for months in the financial press. We met for a walk on a windy morning on Primrose Hill in north London.
I knew that Swiss-based firm Global Asset Management Holding was in trouble. GAM was not a household name, but it looked after tens of billions of dollars for clients – big pension funds and super-wealthy individuals. I also knew that GAM had suspended one of its star employees, the high-flying City executive Tim Haywood, after a whistle-blower had made allegations about his behaviour. The suspension had spooked investors and GAM had been forced to close the fund. Shareholders had dumped GAM’s shares. The company’s CEO had been pushed out, and its general counsel and other executives had also gone.
All of that was well known in financial circles. But my source promised proof that GAM’s hand had been forced by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s top financial regulator. The source showed me email correspondence that backed up this claim. GAM had shared details of its investigation into the whistle-blower’s allegations with the FCA, and the regulator had been so concerned about Haywood’s conduct and some of his investments that it demanded tough action. The information seemed less exciting to me than to the source. But what really piqued my interest was that all the investments at the centre of the affair were in assets generated by a little-known start-up finance firm called Greensill Capital.
I wasn’t sure whether anyone would care too much about the FCA’s role in pushing GAM’s hand. After all, given the nature of the allegations against Haywood, it seemed logical that they should ask for tough action. Nevertheless, this was new information about an ongoing major scandal. Haywood and some of his colleagues at GAM were fairly media savvy, and there was a narrative that the whistle-blower was an embittered rival, and that GAM’s executives had been hasty, pedantic, imperilling the firm over a couple of technical missteps. That wasn’t what the correspondence I had seen indicated at all. And then there was Greensill.
I decided to write something up in Financial News. Before we published, in mid-February, I called Greensill’s public relations executive, a New York-based former journalist named James Doran, to see if he wanted to comment. It was the start of a tumultuous relationship. Barrel-chested and over six feet tall, with short red hair and a goatee beard, Doran was a bombastic and erratic combatant. He had worked at The Times as Wall Street bureau chief, at Scotland on Sunday and at a Dubai-based paper called The National. Several of my colleagues and journalism friends knew him, and they all had stories to tell. He was widely known as a newsroom bully, who frequently yelled at junior reporters and had reduced colleagues to tears on many occasions. He also had a reputation for pushing the envelope on stories – several journalists I knew jokingly referred to him as ‘The Fiction Editor’ because, allegedly, he had a flexible approach to reported facts.
My first interaction with Doran was fractious. ‘Why were we mentioning Greensill?’ he barked down the phone. ‘This was GAM’s problem, not Greensill’s.’ I told him I could note in the story if he didn’t want to comment and we moved on.
It might have ended at that point. But the story about the regulator forcing GAM’s hand struck a chord with a certain cohort of readers. Other sources came out of the woodwork. One proved to be critical to the next couple of years of my life, a crucial source with detailed information about Greensill. The source wanted to know about the correspondence I’d seen between GAM and the FCA. I was careful in what I shared. Just enough to keep the conversation going, but not so much that I might compromise my arrangement with the person who had shown me the correspondence in the first place. By the end of an hour or so, I had established a terrific sourcing relationship, the best of my career. With this help, I began digging deeper and deeper into Greensill. I cracked a couple of other key source connections and started to build a picture of this hot new finance company that had brought a significant financial player, GAM, to its knees. And I began work on a story about Greensill itself.
From the start, I had been asking Doran for a meeting with Lex. I repeated the request every few days. He usually replied that he would set something up, some time far into the future. By late March, my story was coming together. I had details about Lex’s background, his time at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, and the founding of Greensill Capital. The picture that emerged was of an aggressive, impatient risk-taker, who had some success at the banks but ultimately didn’t fit into their highly regulated, bureaucratic confines. His business, Greensill, had almost collapsed until he formed a relationship with Haywood, who had used money from GAM’s investors to prop it up.
At Dow Jones, our practice is that we run critical details of our stories past people we are going to mention before publication. The idea is that they get a chance to tell us their side. It’s called the ‘no surprises rule’. When I went to Doran, in early April, with the key details about my story, all hell broke loose.
I knew a lot about Lex at this stage. But what I didn’t know was that Greensill was already deep into talks with the SoftBank Vision Fund, a mammoth $100 billion pool of investor cash tied to Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group. The Vision Fund was shaking up the rules when it came to investing in new tech companies. Its sheer size meant it could outbid just about anyone. And its core approach was to buy huge stakes in lots of fast-growing companies, knowing that some would be duds and some would pay off big time. Typically, they made decisions fast, and in poured the money.
Vision Fund analysts had identified Greensill as a potential investment in early March and were already quickly moving towards a decision on whether to invest.
By the time I went to Doran with my list of questions, I was in a race against time. I just didn’t know it. Doran, Lex and the inner circle at the top of Greensill – including legal counsel Jonathan Lane – had one aim: to delay my story coming out until after they’d secured funding from SoftBank.
Their approach was not subtle. First, Doran called me in mid-April. I took his call in one of the soundproof booths in our office near London Bridge, next to the Shard. Doran was at rage level ten, screaming at me down the phone. I was unprofessional, he said. I was listening to disgruntled employees who shouldn’t be talking. I was on shaky legal ground and they would hit me with a lawsuit.
His arguments were scattergun and misdirected. There was no legitimate way he could know who I was talking to. If anything, his aggressive approach – and the weakness of his counterarguments – indicated I was on to something. The last thing Doran and Lex Greensill seemed to want was anyone sniffing around their business.
I was confident in my reporting and stood my ground. Next, I sent Doran all the information about Lex we planned to publish. This was late April. The response came from Jonathan Lane. An emailed letter to Dow Jones’s lawyers accused me of being vindictive and driving a false narrative about Greensill. It threatened further legal action if we went ahead with our story and said that I was unprofessional to run a story on Lex without talking to him. This was maddening. I’d been asking for a meeting with him for weeks. But I agreed with our lawyers we’d hold off if Lex would talk with us within a few days. Doran promised to set it up.
Days passed, and there was no meeting. What followed was a game of cat and mouse. Doran would set a date for a call with Lex, and when the date rolled round a few days later, Lex would be unavailable, too busy, in the wrong time zone. And then the cycle would start all over again. A date with Lex was booked then cancelled several times. In early May, we decided to push out the story. We had given Greensill plenty of time. We gave them a final hard deadline for Lex to talk. If it was so important to him and our story was so wrong, then surely he could talk. That’s when Greensill pulled out the big guns. They sent a threatening letter from Schillings, the lawyers who represented privacy cases for the likes of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and controversial retail tycoon Philip Green. It was a supremely aggressive missive, but also seemed to be full of misunderstandings about what we planned to publish. Perhaps that reflected what Lex and Doran had told Schillings, or maybe it was a kind of public relations misdirection strategy that was beyond my understanding. It held us up again.
However, by this time, our lawyers were emboldened as I’d walked them through every inch of the story. We finally decided to hit publish. The story landed on the front page of Financial News on Monday 6 May 2019. There was not a single call from Doran or Schillings or Lane or Lex. Not a single correction. The story was one of our best-read articles for months. It was flying around social media. I had won. At least, that’s what I thought.
The real celebrations were in Greensill’s offices across London on the Strand. In truth, I’d lost the race I didn’t know I had entered. SoftBank’s Vision Fund had wrapped up its incredibly fast due diligence process only a few days earlier. My victory lasted barely a week before Greensill announced it had secured a gargantuan $800 million investment from the Vision Fund. Later, Doran told colleagues that he was the most valuable employee at the firm because he had held back my story until after the Vision Fund was committed to Greensill. He compared himself to Hodor, a character in the HBO TV series Game of Thrones, who holds back a massive wooden door to prevent demons from getting through. Though, in the end, Hodor is consumed by the demons.