Thursday 23rd November 2006
Peter Earl
My name is Earl Peter Earl is a man who thrives on huge challenges. He has previously led charity sponsors to Everest Base Camp (the famous trek taking explorers into the heart of the Nepalese Himalaya), climbed Vinson Massif, the largest mountain in Antarctica, and tackled Bolivia’s third highest mountain.
Other claims to fame include work for the World Bank and the UN, introducing Richard Branson to his airline hero Freddie Laker, and lately mergers and acquisitions work in the power sector. Followers of small companies will recognise him from AIM vehicle Rurelec, where his efforts are bringing much-needed power to emerging parts of South America. ‘I was a child of the 1970s,’ says Earl, who went from Oxford to Harvard on a Kennedy scholarship (where he sometimes taught Greek), before a switch to economics prepared him for later financial and corporate machinations. From Harvard he was recruited into the Boston Consulting Group, where he kick-started his career advising state-owned companies. His travels eventually led him to the hot seat in New York at The Carter Center, which is committed to promoting human rights, where in 1994 he acted on a temporary assignment to the World Bank and a United Nations Development Programme in Bolivia. These links at the loftiest levels of the UN put him in the powerful position of being able to advise governments on privatisations in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Entrepreneurial legends Earl’s varied career has seen him tangle with true corporate heavyweights: ‘I actually did the rescue of Laker Airways’ – the airline started by Laker that pioneered the idea of budget flights. ‘We raised the money to recapitalise Laker in the early 1980s, and even Tiny Rowland got involved. During the refinancing I introduced Laker to Richard Branson, who had done ten per cent of the underwriting. Freddie was his big hero,’ recalls Earl. Virgin Atlantic went on to name one of its planes Spirit of Sir Freddie as a mark of respect for Laker, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Earl eventually ‘switched to mergers and acquisitions work before the big bang hit,’ becoming a director of Fieldstone Private Capital, ‘one of the first US investment banks to come to London,’ where he advised on cross-border acquisitions in the power sector. Then, in ’95, Earl founded Independent Power Corporation (IPC) alongside one of his great contacts, Lord Colin Moynihan, the former energy minister who was part of the team responsible for privatising the UK electricity industry under Margaret Thatcher. ‘Colin basically passed the legislation that privatised the UK electricity industry,’ remembers Earl. The duo had built up plenty of energy industry experience during their advisory work on power privatisations and acquisitions. Earl recalls: ‘On a trip back from Kazakhstan, Colin turned to me and said, “Look, these guys don’t just want advisers, they want partners, so let’s start up ourselves and act as the principals.” It was then that we decided to set up IPC.’ The venture saw them acting as principals in the privatisation of electricity companies in emerging markets. The duo were far more able to get things done than traditional investors, who failed to understand the risks involved in power projects during the rush to privatise the electricity industry in the early 1990s. In the beginning, the strategy was to team up with US domestic power companies that had yet to invest overseas, in order to attack emerging markets and use Earl’s and Moynihan’s connections to leverage a position in international power privatisations and buyouts. During the late ’90s, IPC snared partnerships with the likes of Houston-headquartered New Century Energy, and Phillips Petroleum, and became a developer of new-build power plants in its own right. Earl has gone on to buy out both Moynihan and the American backers from IPC, which has established a track record on four continents as both a developer and an operator of power plants.
James Crux
User comments
There are currently no comments on this post.
Related articles
People who read this article also read ...
Related sections
Interesting links
|
