Amanda Staveley

In 1996, Staveley borrowed £180,000 and bought the restaurant, Stocks, in Bottisham between Cambridge and Newmarket. Through the restaurant, Staveley came to know members of Newmarket's racing community, in particular those associated with the Godolphin Racing stables owned by the Al Maktoum family of Dubai, as well as people from Cambridge's high-tech businesses. Through the late 1990s she started dealing in shares and became an active angel investor, especially in dot.com enterprises and biotech firms such as Futura Medical.[11]

Staveley closed Stocks and in 2000 opened Q.ton, a £10 million conference centre and facility developed in a joint venture with Trinity College, Cambridge on Cambridge Science Park.[12] Investors in Q.ton were believed to include King Abdullah of Jordan.[13]

In 2000 Staveley sold a 49 per cent share in Q.ton to the telecoms company EuroTelecom for £2 million. Staveley joined the firm as a non-executive director. A few months later EuroTelecom went out of business in the collapse of the dotcom boom.[12][14] At the time it was claimed that Q.ton owed EuroTelecom £835,000 and that Staveley had agreed to buy back the company's stake, only for the money not to be forthcoming.[15] Staveley denied having agreed to any payments and hired Kroll Inc. to investigate the members of the EuroTelecom board.[14]

Staveley bought EuroTelecom's stake in Q.ton from the firm's administrator PricewaterhouseCooper, a deal that led to a discontinued petition of bankruptcy against her when payment was delayed.[14][16] She began raising £35 million from private investors to roll out the Q.ton concept throughout the UK and Europe. However, the company failed. Staveley agreed an Individual Voluntary Arrangement and in 2008 was paying back her creditors, including Barclays.[4]

After the failure of Q.ton Staveley moved to Dubai,[1] cultivating connections centred on Abu Dhabi but extending across the Middle East.[3]

In 2008 the Financial Times described her firm, PCP Capital Partners, as really amounting to Staveley and her legal partner, Craig Eadie, and explained that, although based in Mayfair, London,[17] the company acts "via offshore private equity affiliates" as a vehicle for the investment of Middle Eastern money, with Staveley acting as an adviser on those deals.[18]

These contacts brought Staveley to a new level of prominence at the end of 2008 with the investment of Middle Eastern funds in Barclays as the bank sought to recapitalise by raising money privately rather than accept a bail-out from the British government following the financial crisis of that year.[18] Staveley earned a fee of £30 million for her role in the transaction.[19] In 2010, The Daily Telegraph reported that Mansour's disposal of his stake in Barclays had made him a profit of about £2.25 billion.[20]

On 8 June 2020, Staveley’s firm filed a £1.5 billion lawsuit against Barclays, claiming that the bank offered her client, Abu Dhabi, “manifestly worse terms” than those offered to Qatar.[21] The Barclay’s legal team claimed that Staveley inserted herself into the capital raising while Staveley countered that the PCP was not a “facilitator” as Barclay’s claimed, but rather led the investment syndicate.[22][5] The case ended in October 2020 but a ruling has not yet been published.[23]

The Barclays deal followed Sheikh Mansour's £210 million purchase of Manchester City F.C. in September of the same year through the Abu Dhabi United Group,[18] a transaction reportedly worth £10 million in commission to PCP Capital Partners.[6] At the same time Staveley was involved in extended negotiations by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's Dubai International Capital to buy a 49 per cent stake in Liverpool Football Club, although the deal, which would have given Staveley a place on the club's board, eventually foundered.[11][24][25]

Also in 2008 Staveley fronted a bid by the Qatar Investment Authority to buy the Trillium facilities management business from the Land Securities property group, an offer reportedly totaling £1.1 billion.[4] The bid in the end came to nothing and Trillium was sold to Telereal for £750 million in January 2009.[26]

Later that year Staveley was involved in an attempt to help finance the $13.5 billion sale of Barclays Global Investors to the US firm BlackRock, offering $2.8 billion of funding in return for a shareholding of 10 per cent, an amount that reportedly included a commitment of Staveley's own money.[27] In June 2009, with details being finalised, Blackrock pulled out of the deal. Press reports at the time[27][28][29] suggested that BlackRock had sought further clarification of the identity of the investors behind the special purpose vehicle created by PCP Capital Partners to handle the offer, although alternative reports claimed that they had always been aware of the conditions of the deal. In the end BlackRock funded its purchase of BGI from other sources.[29]

In 2010 Staveley was reported to have advised the Qatari property investment company Barwa in their purchase of the Park House site on Oxford Street from Land Securities for £250 million, a deal that was said to have earned PCP Capital Partners in the region of £5 million to £7.5 million in fees.[30][31] In March 2012 it was announced that Waterway PCP Properties Ltd, a Middle Eastern private equity group fronted by Staveley, had paid Land Securities £234 million for their Arundel Great Court site on the north bank of the Thames in London.[32][33][34]