“THEY NEED a good slapping these banks, they do,” Sir Alan Sugar asserts – to a room stuffed with bankers tucking into a spot of Christmas lunch.
But so gruffly persuasive is the no-nonsense star of the Apprentice that those guests of the Dublin Chamber who did hail from the financial services may have been tempted to immediately fire themselves.
“They should be dishing out money to people who have a chance of doing something with it,” he says, witheringly, not living in “financial Disney World”.
There is no doubt that Sugar, to use reality show parlance, has the x-factor: he has even managed to make human resources seem sexy. If he had his own fragrance, it would be called Disdain.
Asked what advice he would give to entrepreneurs starting out, he says he doesn’t like “this word, entrepreneur”, especially when people use it to describe themselves: “That really does annoy me.”
He’s also a bit cranky when it comes to Apprentice contestants who claim that all they want is the £100,000 contract to work for him and then after a few weeks of media glare “all of a sudden, they’ve got agents,” he spits.
In a pre-lunch QA session with reporters, he was asked if any of the winners have lived up to his expectations: “Most of them, absolutely, yeah,” he says. Two of his apprentices, series three and four winners Simon Ambrose and Lee McQueen, still work for him.
He won’t talk about his controversial remarks that employers should be allowed to ask female interview candidates if they are planning to start a family (on the grounds that if the law prevents them from asking, they will simply choose not to hire women).
“I’m not answering those questions any more, because every single time I answer them they don’t get printed in the correct way,” he says.
The founder of electronics company Amstrad, humorously introduced as “the Bill Cullen of Hackney”, is sanguine about what recession and bear markets mean for his personal wealth, estimated at £830 million in the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List.
He has been through this before.
On one occasion when his paper wealth halved overnight, Terry Wogan asked him what it was like to lose £400 million. “I hadn’t lost anything . . . As far as I was concerned I got out of the same bed that morning and got in the same car.”
Having sold Amstrad to BSkyB in 2007, most of Sugar’s interests are now in real estate. But this is not as ominous as it sounds. Fortunately, “old habits die hard”, he notes, and his company is cash-rich.
“At 61, I’m an old bloke. I’ve got very old values and, to me, this was all Mickey Mouse financial time . . . No bank should give 100 per cent finance or 95 per cent finance. It was a joke. It had to go wrong.”
In 2005 and 2006, there was no real estate to buy because bank-rolled “lunatics”, some of them Irish, were snapping up everything in sight.
“Some of the banks are being a bit creative in readjusting the arrangements they have with their customers. Because, at the end of the day, what do these thick bankers know about running properties? They don’t know anything . . . It’ll end up being just a fire sale and assets will be sold for ridiculous amounts of money.”
While he waits to pounce, he sits on the British government’s business advisory committee, with some reservations. There are too many “Institute of Doing Business Societies” that do nothing, he says, and, in terms of their capacity to waste his time, they are second only to his decade-long stint as chairman of Tottenham Hotspur.
