Boots' man on a mission may just be the real deal

Yet the man who greets me is a thoughtful academic who wants to know what I think first, before answering carefully, mostly with his eyes shut, as if the dark helps him be considerate. The words leaving Stefano Pessina's mouth - care, duty, respect - don't belong to a cartoon-baddie tycoon. He has a slight lisp, as a 66-year-old physicist might, which suggests an air of vulnerability, as if he'd be upset if you took against him.

If this is an act - if in truth, he really is Blofeld - it is all highly convincing. I've met slash-and-burn merchants, and none of them is like Pessina. The Italian talks about Boots as if it were a person to be nurtured. Companies, he says, "have a life independent of their ownership".

He blasts previous management for what he calls the "strange adventures" that took Boots away from what it should be - a chemist we trust with our health.

Pessina came to England as a 16-year old, and claims to have noted even then that Boots was special, though the management didn't know it.

"The people who were in charge forgot the original message of Jesse Boot. They neglected the pharmacy," he says. He talks of restoring the staff 's self-confidence, and says it would be "suicide" to move the base from the Nottingham heartland.

Profits are up, but that's because "we have been more careful, we have bought better", not because customers are overpaying.

Pessina's mission is to turn the company into a global healthcare giant, to stop it being regarded as a mere retailer. Boots will do everything in medicine, from caring for the terminally ill downwards, while continuing to cater for, as he discreetly puts it, "ladies who desire to be more beautiful".

If you want to get angry about Pessina's wealth (about £1.5 billion) knock yourself out, but as billionaires go he's remarkably low key and - this is rare - still open to the notion that he might be wrong.

He's modest too, and it doesn't seem false. Asked what should be done about the economy, most business leaders would reel off a roster of self-serving policies. Pessina prefers: "Don't ask me, I'm just an entrepreneur."

That said, he thinks there is trouble ahead, and that interest rates will have to rise. Boots staff at least can be reassured that he intends to employ more rather than fewer of them.

"There will be a slow economy, but it will not affect us. We have momentum. We will be able to compensate," he says.

The question to ask any businessman with a High Street presence is what he is going to do about Tesco and its appetite to eat every lunch going. Usually you get a sharp intake of breath and a change of expression.

Pessina shrugs. "Tesco? They could be customers of ours. But that's it."

Before our interview, I asked one City banker, two City PR men, a union rep and one of his former colleagues for the goods on Pessina, for the one thing he wouldn't want to be asked. A tough crowd, they had nothing but praise.

It is too early to get carried away, but maybe Pessina is the real deal. Maybe he is the private-equity boss the industry has been waiting for.