What You See is What You Get by Sugar Alan

Author:Sugar, Alan [Sugar, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-09-29T23:00:00+00:00

What to do with your money is a good problem to have and in the summer of 1988, my staff were to share this dilemma. The share options I’d granted them three years earlier were about to mature and kick in. Bob Watkins, Malcolm Miller, Jim Rice, Marion Vannier, Ken Ashcroft and my brother-in-law Mark Simons became millionaires overnight. If they came up with the money to pay for the shares I’d granted at the option price, they could immediately sell them and make themselves a fortune. Other staff, such as Dave Smith, Ivor Spital and a host of others, made in the region of £150,000–250,000. These were ordinary people and this was a load of money in those days, so you can imagine the elation.

Jim Rice, in conjunction with the brokers, worked out a scheme whereby the employees would be lent some money for about half an hour to enable them to buy the shares then immediately sell some of them, so they ended up with cash in hand.

I was delighted for everybody. It was real payback for a loyal group of people who had helped this dynamic company grow. I guess if you spoke to all of them today, they would say that never in their lifetime would they have imagined that just by being a simple employee they’d hit the jackpot like this.

Each and every person was warned that they should put aside approximately 30 per cent of their windfall to pay capital gains tax. There was also the consideration that the directors should not be seen to be selling all their shares immediately – this would have been frowned upon by the City. So although they were looking at windfalls of around £1.5m in some cases, it was inappropriate to cash in and sell the whole lot. While I couldn’t tell them what to do, I did suggest they keep half their shares and cash in on the other half. They followed my advice and understood that this would be acceptable as far as the City was concerned.

Bob, Malcolm and Mark decided to buy themselves new luxurious homes with their windfall. People like Jim and Ken, being typical accountants, were more streetwise and cautious and would never go down the path of getting themselves into potential financial problems. But there were some sad stories, similar to those you read nowadays about people who win the lottery and blow the lot. One member of the junior engineering team, a Scouser, was quite blunt when the big payday came. So much for loyalty – he copped his £250,000 and immediately resigned, saying that he was retiring to Spain with his wife to open a bar there. He was around thirty years old. When I heard this news, I shook my head, as if to say, ‘You poor, poor fellow. You’ll be back in a couple of years – a quarter of a million pounds is going to get you nowhere because there’s something called inflation.’ I don’t know

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