So after the marathon questioning session at Portcullis House on Wednesday, where four private equity heavyweights came face to face with a panel of questioning MPs, what was the verdict from the hordes of media in attendance?
Nils Pratley in the Guardian is wondering who came out the most frustrated. Probably the unions, he answers. The MPs largely ignored the valid questions they raised about the workers’ position after buy-outs, instead concentrating on financing and taxation of the industry.
“This is another important area but it is dense and technical. You have to know your stuff, and most of the committee did not,” he writes. “The frustration for the private equity chiefs was obvious: they had expected financial fluency, and got next to none.”
The real burning issues got lost in confusion about terminology, he says. At FT Alphaville, we’d add that you felt somewhat for the private equity bigwigs who had the thumb-screws on for straight-forward answers, but were tacitly accused of being obscure if they used quite standard financial jargon, and risked seeming patronising if they moved to explain.
There were gags about the fact that the four had invested in coaching to prep for the hearing. Says Pratley: “It was the MPs, though, who needed the coaching. They asked a handful of good questions but simply didn’t understand the answers to ask decent supplementaries. It was not the promised grilling. It was embarrassing.”
Tom Stevenson at the Telegraph, which has gone to town including a rather late-in-the-day “private equity primer“, comments that the politicians relishing the chance to pummel the industry should pay attention to the old adage about being careful what you wish for. “It is hard to believe,” he muses, “that the parliamentarians or their brothers in the unions have really thought what it would be like if Permira, KKR and the rest packed their bags and moved somewhere more congenial.”
No one would argue, he adds, that wealthy financiers should pay no tax, “but the leap from there to painting private equity as a burden on British industry, as the GMB union has done, is absurd.”
Matthew Engel in the FT comments that the queues outside Portcullis House conjured up the atmosphere of “one of those juicy, old-fashioned murder trials…..what the crowds had come to see was four more leaders of the private equity movement being cut, diced and fricasseed.”
The end result it seems was a tie - or a lose-lose. Frustrating for everyone involved, blood-thirsty crowds included, despite the skirmishes and needling jokes.
Ultimately, said the FT’s Martin Arnold, “The private equity princes, as they have been dubbed, left with their honour intact, but the influential committee members seemed dissatisfied with their answers.”
