From his luxuriously appointed offices on Victoria Street in London, Ronny Gould had seen it coming; he had been in property for three decades and had had his ups and downs. He gamble had paid. Whilst the banking world and property firms failed to see the looming financial and property crisis, Ronny had piled into cash.
In the early nineties after a close encounter with disaster, he was forced to sell off almost all of his property empire; the road back had been long, but Ronny had learnt his lesson and was now very much wiser. He had witnessed the hordes of lemmings plunging over the edge as they chased deals which made little sense in terms of serious financial investments.
Ronny cashed in at the top of the market and with a war chest of five hundred million he patiently waited for the right moment to move into commercial property. Cash was the name of the game, his hard learned lessons taught him to avoid bank credit, however good the deal seemed. Each time he bought a property he bought it for cash in the knowledge that whatever happened to the market the rents would roll in and the property would always be there.
Gould was what the press would have described as a rough diamond, brought up in the East End of London, son of a Jewish family, he rarely saw the inside of a synagogue, but often took the brunt of latent anti-Semitism, giving Ronny a very thick skin. As he grew older, whilst retaining undertones of his Cockney accent, he became more polished and made friends in the City, though many of the old establishment denigrated him as an upstart ‘Jewboy’.
Times had changed and Gould frequented the rich and even discovered it was good to be known for giving to Jewish causes. The East Ender frequented charity events and was careful to be seen talking to the Israeli ambassador, or one of the Rothschilds.
As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Gould resolved to leave a lasting mark on the City of London, he’d show the world he was not a mere flash in the pan, one of those ephemeral bog hoppers who thought they’d made it. He would build a monument to a poor boy’s rise to riches from the harsh environment of London’s East End: a vast four hundred million pound crystal tower in the heart of Britain’s hallowed financial home, a city block away from the Gherkin, the London home of the Fitzwilliams’ bank, to which he had confided the task of putting together a pool of investors for the construction of the Gould Tower.
Gould, true to his word, put up one hundred million in cash for the project. On completion, his headquarters would be located at the summit of his future landmark on Shoreditch High Street. His tower would include sixty thousand square meters of office space, plus residential apartments to provide the City with top of the market accommodation.
Few had been ready to risk their money with Gould, but Fitzwilliams saw Gould’s project as a perfect investment for the Europa Property Fund’s first landmark venture in the heart of London’s City. Times were hard and such ventures were rare if not non-existent in the capital’s cash strapped environment.
As the property market showed its first feeble signs of picking up, it seemed that Gould’s gamble had paid off, perhaps he was not the most cultivated of investors, but he was hard headed and knew how to pick winners and that was what interested Fitzwilliams. The Caseys of this world were reckless cowboys, surfing on speculative waves; they had no long-term vision and no real intuition.