Corporate charmer coaxing cash for children's charity

By Phillip Inman. The Guardian, Friday May 9 2008

A hard summer awaits Vanni Treves as he tries to empty the pockets of friends and business contacts for his favourite charity, the NSPCC. Twisting arms for charity is his chief occupation between chairing headhunters Korn/Ferry, the FTSE-250 product-testing firm Intertek and the infamous insurer Equitable Life.

But his five years of fundraising for the NSPCC, and for the dance venue Sadler's Wells, and acting as trustee for two large donor charities, including the Paul Getty trust, has sharpened his sense of how little rich Britons give to charity compared with those in the US. It is not something the business community does very well and with the gap between rich and poor getting wider every day, he thinks the time is right for the people who benefited most from a decade-long boom to dig deep.

The next few months are likely to stall his fundraising if, as many predict, the credit crunch continues and cuts into City bonuses. Treves, who came to prominence in the 1990s as chairman of the London Business School and Channel 4, said City people were bottom of the giving league and those who did give were notorious for switching off the funds at the first sign of trouble. "When you are an investment banker and along comes a cheque for £1m, they say I'll buy that Henry Moore, I'll buy that house in the south of France and shut Vanni Treves up and give him £100,000.

Suffering

"When the bonus cheque is £200,000, they don't say, well, I've only earned 20% of what I earned last year so I'll only give Vanni £20,000. They don't give anything at all. So I think it will be substantially harder this year and I think charities will have to anticipate that they will be poorer and there will be a great deal of suffering as a result."

There is also a tendency to write cheques but avoid getting more involved. "The people making huge sums of money, like the investment bankers, are so incredibly busy and self-centred, they believe that they don't have time. However busy you are, you can bloody well put 20 minutes aside once a month to think and do something like this. But it's the way they think."

Treves recently stepped down as head of the NSPCC's Stop Organised Abuse committee for a more free-wheeling role as a fixer and fundraiser. He handed the reins to Roland Rudd, founder of the financial PR firm Finsbury, whom he had recruited. Treves' skills at recruitment also attracted the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, Sir David Frost, BBC boss Mark Thompson, ITV chairman Michael Grade and Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre to the children's charity. To crack the Square Mile, he put together media friends with executives boasting fat contacts books.

All are asked to give at least £100,000. More importantly, they must attend four or five meetings a year or send a deputy. And there are functions and meetings to keep the fundraising show on the road.

Treves said the committee must not only help the charity raise the £100m a year it needs to function, but also delve into how it operates and whether it gives value for money. Concerns that business people exercise undue control over how donations are spent are brushed aside by Treves, who argues that their expertise can prevent charities getting fat and lazy. His board checked the NSPCC's campaigns and advertising budgets to ensure they kept costs low.

It was a crucial exercise to reassure a sceptical public fed stories of charities feathering their nests and leaving little money for good causes. He said the NSPCC passed with flying colours.

Their involvement includes visits to NSPCC centres to get a sense of what it means to confront child abusers and support their victims. Ten centres around the country track paedophiles and the names of abusers appear on boards with their movements. Anything out of the ordinary and staff are alerted. About 110,000 convicted paedophiles live in the community and most child protection experts agree that most will re-offend. If there is any suspicion of abuse, the charity informs the police and social services to co-ordinate action.

Treves is an evangelist for the cause and is steeped in facts about child abuse in Britain. Talks by charity workers can make meetings harrowing. "If I think about it too much I can get depressed."

However, gloomy is not a word one associates with Treves. More than 40 years at the corporate law firm Macfarlanes gave him the diplomatic skills and charm for the charity circuit.

At Channel 4 he operated largely out of view, only surfacing to defend the station from accusations of dumbing down and to appoint Mark Thompson as chief executive. He also defended C4 when its satirical show Brass Eye invited celebrities, most famously the musician Phil Collins, to back a fictional campaign against paedophiles. It encouraged them to make videos using ludicrous "facts", illustrating how little they knew.

Was the programme a spur for him to get involved with the NSPCC? He said he wanted to give something back because of his life of "incredible privilege".

But his start in life has also played a part. He was born in Florence in 1940 to parents in the resistance. While his father fought to liberate Florence, he and his Jewish-Italian mother moved from house to house, mainly in Rome, to escape arrest by the Nazis. He said his family had a "very bad war". Most relatives were sent to concentration camps and his father, whom he hardly knew, was killed in 1944.

Excess

After the war his mother remarried an Englishman and they settled in Swiss Cottage, London. Treves won a scholarship to the private St Paul's school, then Oxford and on to the US as a Fulbright scholar. "All that was free and a tremendous privilege," he said.

He joined Macfarlanes in 1963 and considered the firm part of his family until retirement 40 years later. An expert on corporate governance, he joined the Saatchi & Saatchi board in 1987. It was a controversial beginning as its founders were soon ousted following allegations of corporate excess. In the 1990s he started a new career as a serial chairman. But it was only in 2001 when he took the reins at Equitable Life that he was forced out of the shadows.

Thousands of policyholders who lost money when the insurer crashed sent him hate mail and put excrement through his letterbox as he became the face of the failed insurer. Next month the parliamentary ombudsman will publish her long-delayed report on how Equitable, darling of the pensions business, came unstuck. She will rule on whether it was a failure of regulation and whether the government should compensate the million policyholders. Given that refunds on pensions could run to billions, ministers are reluctant to offer a blank cheque. The government ignored her last report on mis-selling occupational pensions and may attempt to ignore this one.

Treves is realistic and wants to sell the business. "The market for closed insurance books is incredibly good at the moment. There is Hugh Osmond's Pearl and Mark Wood's Paternoster and several other outfits looking to buy."

Does he regret taking the job? It was, he said, a hugely worthwhile project that helped rescue thousands of pensions, including his own. "I don't think many of us would have accepted the invitation if we knew what was coming but in hindsight it has been a hugely fulfilling role." A sale of the business would free him. Is that a spur in talks? "We won't sell if independence offers a better, safer route for Equitable. The measure must be what's in the interests of policyholders."

CV

Born Florence 1940

Educated St Paul's School, London. Law degrees at University College Oxford and University of Illinois

Career Joined corporate law firm Macfarlanes in 1963, rising to senior partner. Chairman of Korn/Ferry, Intertek, Equitable Life and the National College for School Leadership. Previously chairman of Channel 4 and the London Business School. Adviser to consultants Oliver Wyman and trustee of the J Paul Getty Charitable Trust

Family Married with two sons and a daughter

Interests Walking, travelling, collecting clocks and watercolours