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At the specially convened Northern Rock shareholders' meeting last month, Jon Wood cut a distinctive figure. Tall, whippet-thin, shaven-headed, wearing an expensive suit and open-necked shirt, he stood out.
It was a gathering Wood, the stricken bank's largest investor with 11.5%, and Philip Richards, the second biggest at 8.18%, had called. They wanted the shareholders to have more say in the bank's affairs. Into the vast hall of Newcastle's Metro Radio Arena trooped a small army of the dispossessed. They'd all lost money as the bank's shares collapsed. After they had heard from the then bank chairman Bryan Sanderson, out of the crowd stepped Wood.
He shared their pain, he said. He'd been a shareholder for 11 years and a depositor before that, just like everyone else present. Contrary to what people thought of the stakebuilding by his hedge fund, SRM Global, "it is not about short-term profit. We are longterm investors".
Wood said he wasn't acting. "I do not bluff," he stated baldly. Northern Rock was "a fantastic company". It was "a great bank", and not its fault it was in this mess - blame Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, he said. Lots of banks in Europe had adopted similar tactics to Northern Rock but only one had been publicly singled out.
This was saintly Wood, a modern-day fighter for good against evil, who had travelled up from London to help the Geordies in their struggle against the mighty Establishment. He wasn't the feared shark as he had been portrayed but one of them - a man who had also suffered at the hands of toffee-nosed, uncaring officialdom.
Later, when talking to the press, he maintained that position. "Why should Northern Rock be punished when noone else is?" he asked, his head swivelling round, challenging someone to give a reason. Alongside him, Richards, from RAB Capital, echoed his view but it was noticeable, the lack of kindred spirit between them. Richards seemed wary of his ally.
Suddenly, Wood's mood changed. It was as if he became fed up of the company he was keeping. "They call me Keyser Sˆze," he snarled, in reference to those in the City who liken him to the ruthless criminal mastermind in the gangster film, The Usual Suspects. "People don't know me."
To emphasise the point, he said: "I don't like talking to the press." Again, he added: "People don't know me."
But people do think they know Wood. On Northern Rock, he may have been a long-time shareholder as he claimed, but the bulk of his buying came much later, after the bank hit trouble. He bought in the expectation the company could be saved - and he could make a handsome profit.
He paid more than £64 million for his shares, and so far he's lost over half that amount. When they were suspended after the Government's move to nationalisation, they were priced at 90p.
If they are subsequently deemed to be worthless, he will lose the lot. Wood, though, reckons they should fetch 400p and is promising litigation against the Government for misfeasance, even using the 1998 Human Rights Act to go to the European Court if necessary.
"This is a very sad day for the stock market, banking industry and the reputation of the UK as a financial centre," he proclaimed.
The idea of Wood becoming a new North-East folk hero, alongside Alan Shearer, is risible. So, too, is the notion that he is desperately concerned about the state of UK Plc.
He's a multimillionaire who lives in Switzerland and works in Monaco. SRM - it stands for Strategic Risk Management - specialises in taking key positions in companies and calling the shots, always aiming to make a substantial profit. He's trying to do it with Northern Rock; he did it with Arcelor, the metal company, as it fought Lakshmi Mittal's takeover bid. And Countrywide Financial as it was threatened with being sold to Bank of America. In the more distant past, he led pushes for change at Lazard, Fiat and Olivetti.
In five years, while at UBS in London, he earned $2.4 billion in revenue from running a trading book worth $3 billion. When he left UBS to set up SRM in the summer of 2006, his goal was to raise $6 billion, making it the largest hedge fund launch in Europe. He'd already got $3 billion from wealthy investors and corporations, including $500 million from his former bank, UBS.
Much of Wood's problem is that he cultivates an air of bristling menace and mystery. He complains of being misunderstood, but that is the whole point of his nickname. In The Usual Suspects, there is a dramatic twist at the end that makes the viewer realise they were fooled by Sˆze's true identity - he is not who they think he is.
At a surprise party for his 40th, held at a Napoleonic fort near Portsmouth, Ali G was helicoptered in to interview Wood. "Just how rich are you?" asked Ali. "Rich enough to afford you," said Wood. "And what is it you do?" quizzed Ali. "I'm an arbitrageur," replied Wood. "And what does that involve?" " Travelling to countries, being on the phone a lot and earning lots." Said Ali: "I do a bit of smuggling too. Can we set up in business?"
The middle of three brothers, Wood was born in 1961. His family hailed from Yorkshire but he grew up in Whitstable in Kent. He was dyslexic, but good at numbers. He went to Loughborough University and studied economics. His hobby, wouldn't you know, is kick-boxing.
At Swiss Bank Corporation, which became SBC Warburg, and then at UBS, he proved to be a phenomenal trader, specialising in options. He made his name in the City working alongside the late, great Brian Keelan. Wood stayed largely in the background, a brilliant mathematician, able to predict the futures market, but Keelan was a superb broker and reader of mergers and acquisitions. Together, they made a formidable duo - so much so the Takeover Panel had to rewrite its code after being challenged by them on a deal.
Chippy and aggressive, Wood was unafraid of taking someone on - no matter how grand. Part of his animus toward Lazards stemmed from a chance encounter on a plane with the late Edouard Stern, one of the investment bank's most legendary characters.
Wood found, on the Miami-Paris flight, that Stern was the only other person in first class. "Edouard sauntered on to the plane and immediately started snapping his fingers - 'I want to watch this film, eat this meal, and put on my pyjamas.' He was hopping mad. He threw the videos to the ground. He didn't put on his seat belt. I thought to myself, 'What a w****r! Who is this guy?'"
Later, when Wood started buying Lazard shares, he said: "They really are awful, egotistical people who wouldn't give money to a person to buy a loaf of bread." Subsequently, when the mighty Bruce Wasserstein took over at Lazards, Wood delivered a cutting verdict-on the new broom: "He's so pompous, he couldn't even bring himself to talk to me."
However, the person responsible for creating Wood the Outsider is Wood himself. While at UBS, he and his team of traders remained apart from the bank, at an office in Surrey, then in the Bahamas and finally in Monaco.
In late 2005, his zeal got the better of him when, together with Peter Wilkinson, the co-founder of Freeserve, he sued Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish entrepreneur, Chris Gorman, another multimillionaire and Jim McMahon, Hunter's business partner.
All five were investors in The Gadget Shop, the chain of stores selling gizmos. Wood and Wilkinson alleged they were frozen out of a deal for the retailer to buy another company, Birthdays. Instead, Hunter and Gorman bought it privately.
The action was bizarre - Hunter and Gorman ended up losing £5.5 million on Birthdays, so it wasn't as if they made a killing - and The Gadget Shop also went down. But Wood did not back off - he argued a merger of The Gadget Shop and Birthdays would have created a £300 million business, and that's what he'd lost out on.
IT was also a highly colourful episode. Among the claims made by Wood was that Hunter had discussed Birthdays with him while "very drunk" in the men's toilet of the Amber Lounge nightclub in Monaco.
The court heard repeated references to Wood's choice vocabulary - he sent Wilkinson an email calling him a "f*****g soft git." In the end, the case came down to who was telling the truth - and Hunter and Wilkinson lost.
The judge, Mr Justice Warren, was damning of Wood. "I found his ability to remember matters favourable to him, but not those unfavourable, surprising," he said. "He came across as a very hard and calculating man, albeit attempting to present himself in a much softer way. Where his evidence differs from those of other witnesses, I prefer theirs."
