A small fleet of removal vans stood in the driveway of Tony Garnier’s luxurious country home near Oxshott in Surrey. Packing boxes and bubble wrapped bundles were ferried from the house over the gravel by a small army of transpiring removal men wearing green aprons.
It was goodbye to their swimming pool, stables, wine cellar and home cinema room. Goodbye to their neighbours, an international tennis star and an Egyptian magnate. No more would Tony be able to admire the magnificent view over the one hundred acres of parkland that surrounded the old red brick country mansion. In just three days the new owner, Sergei Tarasov, would move into his new weekend country home picked-up for a snip, a mere sixteen million pounds.
Garnier’s phenomenal rise to rich had been a little less spectacular that his fall, however he was lucky compared to many of those like him, he would still have the comfort of a few million when the dust settled. In 2000 he sold the home he had inherited from his father for a million, then raised ten times that from the Irish Netherlands Bank he bought a block of newly renovated flats in Swiss Cottage from a developer who had gone bust after the dot-com crash.
His story was typical of many like him who had built empires based on residential property development, buying when the prices were down and later selling at huge profits. His business had been a success, though it could have never been so without the banks that had done their best to encourage him.
It was at a time when nightly TV programmes and daily newspaper articles encouraged buyers, speaking of endless demand and ever increasing prices, when the leaders of New Labour cited entrepreneurs like Garnier as models to be emulated by one and all.
With the collapse of Northern Rock and West Mercian times changed, the credit squeeze was on and Tony Garnier could not recycle his properties. As each day passed the pressure increased and the value of his assets fell, his empire evaporating like the morning mist. The once friendly Irish Netherlands Bank, which had plied him with loans, now put on the screw, offering a loss making deal to repay the loan on his country home. Like magicians they produced the Russian oligarch, a rabbit from a hat, an instant cash deal. Garnier had little choice if he wanted to avoid the bank pulling the plug.
His wife, Pamela, had been the model of a successful City banker’s or property developer’s wife. She, as had been expected of her, had become so used to extravagant living that she had come to believing it was her sacred right. The sky had been the limit as far as money was concerned, shopping had become a pastime, why buy one when they could buy two, or more. Weekly visits to the Knightsbridge beauty salon for pedicures and manicures were a must. Their service personel including drivers and gardeners were paid unheard of wages. For weekend entertaining at their country home the best caterers were hired, Champagne and fine wines flowed as they showed off their latest acquisitions: antiques, paintings, luxury cars and jewellery to envious friends and acquaintances. Flying down to Poole for the weekend or to his friend David Jameson in Biarritz had become part of their routine.
Garnier, in spite of everything, had got his timing right. He had signed his agreement with the bank and the sale contract for his country home in early September. A little more than a week later, one of the most extraordinary events in financial history occurred at the end of a fateful weekend that had begun in the hope of a deal being struck to save America’s fourth largest investment bank: Lehman Brothers, which ended in disaster early Monday, September 15.
Unlike many of his counterparts, Garnier had escaped the worse of the debacle, a miracle, thanks largely to his determined wife who had stubbornly refused to sign over their personal properties as guarantees and who had convinced him to cut their losses and sell-up when he did. They would not end up poor, they would survive, forced to live in their more than comfortable eight roomed Clapham Common home, waiting for times to improve when they could put their experience to use and start again.