City sees red over ex-Jarvis chief

THERE are two sides to Paris Moayedi. There is Moayedi the caring, concerned, keen-to-help, businessman I met on a day spent exploring ways of giving back the homeless their self-respect by finding them jobs.

And there is Moayedi the grasping, greedy former chairman and chief executive of Jarvis who has walked away from his company with a £260,000 bonus on top of the £600,000 he bagged for loss of office.

This from a firm which has seen its share price collapse 93% in the past year and lost Moayedi's successor, Kevin Hyde, this week.

As if that appalling performance was not enough, Moayedi's bonus related to the year during which Jarvis was responsible for track maintenance at the site of the Potters Bar train crash which claimed seven lives.

Following the tragedy in May 2002, Moayedi (pronounced My Eddie) and two other directors deferred their bonuses. They've got them now, though - despite the company's terrible show in 2003 and their subsequent departure.

If ever there was a payment for failure, this is it. If ever there was a payment that should make big business hang its head, here it is. Jarvis, of course, says it has no choice but to pay - that the criteria for assessing the bonuses were met and they were legally obliged to hand them over.

Presumably, the factors didn't include the company being unable to prove for certain that its shoddy workmanship didn't kill seven people - three inquires have failed to determine the exact cause, although poor maintenance remains the most likely.

The Association of British Insurers has stepped in, issuing a 'red-top' warning (its most severe form of alert) and calling on shareholders to rebel at the Jarvis annual general meeting next month.

Peter Montagnon of the ABI, says: 'We have to make some kind of mark here. You have to set conditions for bonus and termination payments which actually are going to pay on the basis of performance, not on the basis of no performance.'

Further stoking anger is the news that Moayedi has cleared out his holding in Jarvis, selling 1.27m shares in February when they were trading at up to 150p each, compared with their price today of less than 40p.

Second empire

OH, and he's back in work, moving into waste treatment. He's bought Tectronics, a specialist hi-tech firm, and he's thought to be looking to make other acquisitions, in construction and decontamination, to create a second empire.

To put it mildly, this particular Fat Cat has it all: apparently little shame (he originally blamed the Potters Bar crash on sabotage); incredibly thick skin; and an insatiable appetite for making money.

Yet there he was, deep in conversation with the charity workers on our day's seminar, seemingly moved by the plight of the destitute, anxious to do what he could to get them off the streets.

Of all the business leaders present, Moayedi was the one who appeared the most prepared to go back to his firm and kick-start a plan of action. Cynics will say that this was Moayedi doing a brilliant public relations job, that he knew there was a journalist in attendance and he'd seize the chance for a spot of image-making.

They might be right. But there was also a sense of someone who just didn't get it. As soon as he started talking about Jarvis there was a murmur of recognition, most of it negative. He either didn't hear or he chose not to hear. He wanted to to get across how Jarvis built halls for students (railways form only part of the vast array of Jarvis activities, which include rebuilding roads and schools, upgrading London Underground lines, facilities management and running services, many of them the fruits of Public Private Partnership contracts worth billions) and how it could do the same for the homeless.

Proud and stubborn

PERHAPS he was genuine. Or perhaps he saw them as another potential money-spinner, along with commuters, hospital patients, doctors and nurses, school and university pupils, teachers and travellers. Possibly, his eagerness came from a bit of both.

Another person in his position might have kept their counsel. That's not Moayedi's way. He can be proud to the point of arrogant, stubborn to the point of contemptuous. He can be extremely rude as well. He once told the wife of Brian Staples, his rival at Amey, that she reminded him of Boy George. He claims he meant it as a compliment, that Boy George is better looking than many women.

This real-life equivalent of Borat, Ali G's Kazakhstan reporter, has managed to make his fortune in this country. But he's also made enemies along the way (he's had rows galore, with associates, with Railtrack over the size of his fees, with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the advisers he sacked, with the GMB union which attacked him in advertisements as a 'wrecker' and now with the City).

In his homes in Essex (he lives in a 15th-century thatched house once owned by the singer, Roger Whittaker) and the Cayman Islands, he's not the sort to apologise. He's a forceful, single-minded character, always has been, since he grew up in Iran, in a mountain town near Tehran.

'Bit of a hellraiser'

HIS father was a well-to-do lawyer and he was sent to a private school in the capital. Even then he was 'a bit of a hellraiser. School was always about being told to do things. I disliked being told to do things'.

He came to Britain, aged 20, to study engineering at Bradford. After gaining his degree, he moved to London. In 1961, he married Jennifer, the 18-year-old daughter of the chief constable of Leeds.

He was bright, hard-working (all of the time) and charming (some of the time). He worked as a site engineer for a building company and when that was bought by Amec, he stayed on, becoming Amec's youngest ever contracts manager at 28.

He left in 1983 for Walter Lawrence, the housebuilder. He was to establish a new division in return for 10% of its profits. He maintains they later reneged on the agreement. His response was typically forthright: he walked out and set up a rival, Team Services.

In 1994, when Team Services formed a joint venture with Jarvis, then a struggling construction company staving off bankruptcy, he quickly became head of the whole group.

There's no denying that, on paper at least, he's right to claim he built one of the most successful companies in the UK in just seven years. It's hard to imagine now, the scale of Jarvis' operations (at one stage, for example, it fed 100,000 schoolchildren every lunchtime).

He did it by moving into railways, just as they were being privatised but were still in desperate need of infrastructure investment. He bought up the bulk of the smaller organisations which accounted for the network's track renewal programme.

Next came roads. Here, Jarvis built them, painted lines on them (the notorious bus lane on the M4 was one of theirs), erected and ran the electronic signs. The Tube, hospitals, student halls and all the other bits that made up his public finance initiative hoard all followed.

Public microscope

MANY people - senior staff, such as Moayedi, and some investors - made themselves rich in a short time, as contract after contract went to Jarvis. While Potters Bar was a turning point in the fortunes of Jarvis, putting the company under a public microscope, in truth the rot had set in well before.

Moayedi was too autocratic, too ambitious. The management checks and balances weren't in place to handle the deluge of work. Potters Bar was just one incidence, albeit severe and tragic, of the company's failure to cope.

There were others, where teachers in one area refused to countenance Jarvis on site, of students complaining of shoddy building work, of numerous delays on construction projects.

In securing the contracts, Moayedi had undercut the competition. His willingness to accept low prices meant Jarvis' own margins were always tight. There was no spare cash to pay for the delays and debts mounted. Together with a worsening public reputation, all the ingredients were in place for meltdown.

It duly came and Moayedi has gone, complete with very large cheques. He asks to be judged by what he's achieved. He means the way he grew Jarvis. Others will judge him on other, more dubious achievements.

There always was two sides to Paris Moayedi.