James Goldsmith

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James Goldsmith as he appeared in his Referendum Party’s mass-mailed video tape, March 1997.
James Goldsmith as he appeared in his Referendum Party’s mass-mailed video tape, March 1997.

Sir James Michael Goldsmith (February 26, 1933, Paris, France - July 18, 1997, Benahavis, Spain) was a British billionaire [1] businessman and founder of the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain. He was the father of the environmentalist Zac Goldsmith.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Paris, he was the son of luxury hotel owner and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Moullier, and the younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith.

Goldsmith attended Eton, but dropped out in 1949. Two years later Goldsmith joined the army after his father had paid off the very substantial gambling debts he had incurred in the interim[2]

[edit] Business

Goldsmith's father Frank changed the family name from the German Goldschmidt to the English Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, like their neighbours and relatives the Rothschilds, had been prosperous merchant bankers in Frankfurt since the 16th century. James' grandfather Adolph came to London as a multi-millionaire in 1895.[3]

During the 50s and 60s Goldsmith's involvement in finance, which in his early years was always more as a gambler than as an industrialist, brought him several times close to bankruptcy.[4] His successes included winning the British franchise for Alka-Seltzer heartburn relief medicine and being the first person to introduce the concept of low-cost generic drugs to the UK public.

He was also notable as a greenmail corporate raider and asset stripper. With the financial backing of Sir Isaac Wolfson[5], he acquired a diverse bunch of food companies which was quoted on the London Stock Exchange as 'Cavenham Foods'. This included the Bovril company - the acquisition of which he financed by selling off its assets in South America and elsewhere.[6] As investigative journalists began to question his techniques of dealing with the funds and assets of publicly-quoted companies, Goldsmith began increasingly to deal through private companies registered both in the UK and abroad. These included the French company Generale Occidentale and Hong Kong and then Cayman registered "General Oriental Investments". During the 60s and 70s Goldsmith had been given some backing by the finance company Slater, Walker, run by Jim Slater. When Slater, Walker crashed and had to be rescued by a 'lifeboat' organised by the Bank of England in 1975, eyebrows were raised when it was handed to Goldsmith for its final dismemberment through his private companies.[7]

Goldsmith was knighted in the controversial 1976 resignation honours of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the so-called "Lavender List".

In 1986 Goldsmith's companies reportedly made $90 million from an attempted hostile takeover of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In addition, from 1983 until 1988, Goldsmith, via a series of takeovers in America, built a private holding company, "Cavenham Forest Industries", which became one of the largest private owners of timberland in the world and one of the top-five timber-holding companies of any type in America.

A key to Goldsmith's success in American timber investments was that he had identified a quirk in American accounting, whereby companies with substantial timberland holdings would often carry them on their balance sheets at a US $1 valuation (as the result of years of depreciation). Goldsmith, always a keen reader of financial statements, realised that in many instances the underlying value of the timberland assets alone, carried at nearly zero value, was, in fact, worth the target company's market capitalisation. With this key insight, Goldsmith began a series of raids that ultimately left him with a holding company with huge tracts of timberland acquired at virtually no net cost.

Goldsmith retired to base himself in Mexico in 1987, having correctly anticipated the market crash of that year and liquidated substantial assets. However he continued his involvement in corporate raiding, including an attempt on British-American Tobacco in 1989 (for which he joined forces with Kerry Packer and Jacob Rothschild). Late in this time frame, he also swapped his American timber assets for a 49.9 percent stake in Newmont Mining and remained on the board of Newmont until he liquidated his stake through a series of open-market trades in 1993. He was precluded by the terms of the original purchase of Newmont to attempt to take-over the company.

In 1990, Goldsmith also began a much lower-profile, but also very profitable, global "private equity style" investment operation. By 1994 executives working in his employ in Hong Kong had built a very substantial position in the intermediation of global strategic raw-material flows. Studies of various public filings have also found fingerprints of the same Goldsmith-backed Hong Kong based team taking significant stakes in operations as diverse as key Soviet strategic ports in Vladivostok and Vostochny, and in Zee TV, India's dominant private television broadcaster which was later sold to Rupert Murdoch. A very large Hong Kong-linked and Goldsmith-funded stake in one of the world's largest nickel operations, INCO Indonesia, was also disclosed in the 1990s, showing Goldsmith's typical ability to position his capital far before an investment trend became obvious to others.

[edit] Goldsmith and the media

Goldsmith is well known for his legendary legal attack on the magazine, Private Eye, who referred to him as "Sir Jams" and in Goldsmith's Referendum Party period as "Sir Jams Fishpaste". In 1976 the billionaire issued over sixty libel writs against Private Eye and its distributors, nearly bankrupting the magazine and almost imprisoning its editor Richard Ingrams. This story is detailed in Ingrams' book Goldenballs! The publisher of the magazine at the time was Anthony Blond, an old friend; Blond and Goldsmith themselves remained on good terms though. Goldsmith also pursued vendettas against other journalists who queried his methods, including Barbara Conway who wrote the Scrutineer column in the City pages of the Daily Telegraph.

In 1977 Goldsmith bought the French weekly L'Express and between 1979 and 1981 published the UK based news magazine NOW! which ultimately failed to sell sufficient copies to survive.[8]

Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street featured a British billionaire financier, Sir Laurence Wildman. This character is believed to have been modelled on Goldsmith.

[edit] Politics

Goldsmith, like his friends Lord Lucan and John Aspinall, believed that Britain had been a victim of a socialist conspiracy and that communists had infiltrated the Labour party and the western media.[9] In the mid-1990s, Goldsmith was a major financial backer of a leading Euro-sceptic think tank, the European Foundation. In 1994 he became an elected member of the European Parliament representing France, associating himself with a right-wing coalition. L'Autre Europe.

Goldsmith founded (and funded) the Referendum Party in the UK, on the same lines as L'Autre Europe, which stood candidates in the 1997 general election. Part of its campaign was that Goldsmith mass-mailed over five million homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested that he made plans to broadcast nationwide to the UK during the election from his own offshore pirate Referendum Radio station.[10]

In the 1997 election, Goldsmith stood as a candidate for his party in the London parliamentary constituency of Putney, against Tory cabinet minister David Mellor. Goldsmith himself stood no chance of victory, but the declaration made for one of the most memorable moments of the entire election - Mellor lost his seat to the Labour candidate and was subsequently taunted by Goldsmith (who clapped his hands slowly and chanted "out, out, out!") and other candidates. Goldsmith's own electoral performance was however feeble; the 1518 votes he received did not in themselves deny victory to Mellor, who lost by 2976 votes; moreover they amounted to well under 5% of those voting and were thus not sufficient for Goldsmith to retain his candidate's deposit of £500.[11] Mellor correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it effectively died with Goldsmith who passed on two months after the election. The seat was regained by the Conservatives in the 2005 General Election.

[edit] Personal life

Goldsmith was married three times, and is said to have coined the phrase: "When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy."

His first wife, whom he married when 20, was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño, the 18-year-old daughter of tin magnate Antenor Patiño and the Duchess of Durcal, a member of the Spanish royal family. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to Antenor Patiño, Patiño is alleged to have said, "We are not in the habit of marrying Jews", to which Goldsmith is reported to have replied, "Well, I am not in the habit of marrying [Red] Indians."[3]. This story if true is typical of the raw style of Goldsmith's humour.

With the heiress secretly pregnant and the Patinos insisting the pair separate for good, the couple eloped in January 1954. The marriage was tragically brief. Rendered comatose by a massive cerebral hemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño de Goldsmith died in May 1954; her only child, Isabel, who survived, was delivered by Caesarian section.

Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette Lery, with whom he had a son, Manes, and daughter, Alix.

In 1978 he married for the third time; his new wife was his hitherto mistress Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry (gaining access to a further fortune based on real property located in the UK); the couple had three children, Jemima (born in 1974), Zacharias (born in 1975) and Benjamin (born in 1980).

After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children. He treated Ms. de la Meurthe as his wife and introduced her as such at both public and private functions during the last years of his life.

Goldsmith died at age 64 of a heart attack brought about by pancreatic cancer. His death attracted tributes from quarters as diverse as Tony Blair, who said "He was an extraordinary character and though I didn't always agree with his political views, obviously, he was an amazing and interesting, fascinating man and I think people will miss him." [12] and Margaret Thatcher who simply stated, "Jimmy was a great man, larger than life, and I will miss him".

Goldsmith's posthumous estate has provided finance for the JMG Foundation[13] which supports a diverse range of non-governmental organisations campaigning against GMO foodstuffs.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Billionaire: The Life and Times of Sir James Goldsmith by Ivan Fallon
  2. ^ Obituary, National Review, Oct 1 1997 [1]
  3. ^ a b Otto Friedrich. "The Lucky Gambler Sir James Goldsmith Is a Billionaire Buccaneer (Yes, Even After the Crash)", Time, November 23, 1987. 
  4. ^ BBC obituary [2]
  5. ^ Ketupa.net (media industry resource) article on Goldsmith
  6. ^ Ketupa.net (media industry resource) article on Goldsmith
  7. ^ End Game for Slater, TIME Magazine 10 November 1975 [3]
  8. ^ Staff. "Suddenly, Now! Is Never", Time, May 11, 1981. "With losses mounting, Goldsmith folds his newsmagazine" 
  9. ^ Martin Bright. "Desperate Lucan dreamt of fascist coup", The Guardian, January 9, 2005. 
  10. ^ Genie Baskir (February 20, 2003). Sir James Goldsmith's UK Referendum Radio of 1997 (html). Geocities.
  11. ^ UK Parliamentary election procedures
  12. ^ BBC Obituary [4]
  13. ^ The JMG Foundation

[edit] External links