Since we launched our Economic Innovator (originally ‘Disruptor’) awards in 2018, I’ve had enjoyable contacts with well over 100 entrepreneur-led high-growth companies picked as finalists from across the UK. Most I met at convivial pitching lunches; the rest told me their stories by Zoom or phone. Only one chosen finalist has ever shunned both the lunch and the opportunity for a call: it was Revolut, the London fintech venture that’s currently hustling for a UK banking licence.

Revolut’s 38-year-old Russian-born founder Nikolay Storonsky has built a serious disruptor, valued in 2021 at $33 billion. Though Schroders – as a Revolut shareholder – has marked that figure down to $18 billion, it still bears comparison with Barclays and NatWest at £25 billion each. Storonsky was and is a busy man, but I also sensed a certain dismissive arrogance and I suspect the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has a similar feeling. Why should a banking regulator hasten to licence a business whose auditors were unable to verify ‘the completeness and occurrence’ of three-quarters of its 2021 revenues; which has yet to present clean 2022 accounts; and which has parted company in the past year with, among others, its chief financial officer, UK chief executive and heads of risk and compliance?

Storonsky’s response is to call the PRA ‘extremely bureaucratic’ while threatening to apply for a licence in France or Spain instead – and to list Revolut on the Nasdaq exchange in New York rather than in London. He was due to meet Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch this week and has made mileage out of Jeremy Hunt’s praise for Revolut as ‘a shining example of our world-beating fintech sector’.

The spin is that PRA box-tickery, like the Competition and Markets Authority’s blocking of the Microsoft-Activision merger, is evidence for Big Tech’s view that the UK is ‘closed for business’. The truth is we should be glad to have sharp-pencilled regulators: Revolut should stop grandstanding and prove it meets City standards.

The hard stare

S.P. Hinduja, who died a fortnight ago, did not live to read this year’s Sunday Times Rich List – which placed his family top for the fifth time, with a fortune of £35 billion. Indeed, having succumbed to dementia, he had probably been oblivious of such matters for some time. And even though my sole encounter with him was one of the stickiest of my career, I felt sadness for him at the end.

Back when the Hinduja brothers (two in London, one in Geneva, one in Bombay) were still a new-rich mystery, chiefly known for having prospered in Iran, I was commissioned to write a profile for the Sunday Telegraph and invited to brunch at their communal apartment in Carlton House Gardens. While the second brother Gopichand (G.P.) held forth about the ‘hubs’ of their industrial conglomerate, S.P. glared through big spectacles and asked repeatedly: ‘What will you write about us?’ When I asked him in return to explain the family’s Vedic philosophy, he spoke tersely of their sharing of worldly goods and their urge to avoid media attention: ‘Be silent, be generous, be modest.’ Then the hard stare again.

What I did write about them provoked a fierce letter from their lawyers but also, oddly, a place on their Christmas card list. Subsequently I watched their fortune multiply – and read with surprise about a court battle between S.P. and his siblings over his claim to be sole owner of Hinduja Bank in Switzerland. As his mental state declined, a judge threatened to place him in a local authority nursing home before a family truce made that unnecessary.

Attention now turns to the Hinduja Group’s latest flagship venture: Raffles Hotel at the Old War Office in Whitehall, opening shortly, which G.P. has described (a touch immodestly, you might think) as ‘my greatest legacy to London’. But when I enter its grand portals I’ll still feel S.P.’s baleful gaze – and recall his fellow billionaire Warren Buffett’s remark that ‘money can’t change how many people love you’.

Caricature and parable

One of my first commissions for The Spectator, long ago, was to write about domestic insurance premiums – rising sharply at the time as large insurers took a battering in every category of claim. How dull a topic was that? But how lucky I had just read Martin Amis’s London Fields, from which I borrowed and elided two poetic passages to light up my piece: ‘In these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires… burglars were forever bumping into one another… There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways…’

How lucky too, to have shared these pages with Jeremy Clarke, whose exquisite column (9 April 2022) on his prison-officer son’s debt problems – illuminating the cruelty modern capitalism sometimes inflicts – moved me close to tears. Business and finance, potentially dry as dust, are always best explained in caricature and parable. That, at least, is the principle of this column.

Lunch in Lugano

You may wonder why I haven’t tipped any restaurants lately. The answer is that inflation has rendered my quest for the sub-£30 set menu all but meaningless because with service, cover, water and coffee, I’m too often in sight of £50 without a sniff of the wine list.

But I’ll praise St Jacques in St James’s (£29 for two courses) for a delicious skate wing with shredded ham and broad beans. And I’ll offer the cautionary tale of Iberica’s Victoria branch, which boasted a £20 four-choice tapas offer on its website but presented only an à la carte menu until I insisted, then charged £12.50 for a modest glass of Fillo da Condesa Albarino that retails at less than £15 a bottle.

It’s coming to something when there’s better value in Switzerland: a captain of industry in exile swears by the business lunch at the Ristorante AnaCapri, opposite Lugano railway station, for 19.50 Swiss Francs.