City stock picker pockets £18m

A SECRETIVE hedge fund manager who is one of the main backers of the speculative African mining ventures of ex-England cricketer Phil Edmonds, can be revealed today as one of City's true galacticos with pay last year of nearly £18m from his job as a global stock-picker.

In one of the biggest single-year pay packets in the Square Mile, Sloane Robinson Investment Management managing director George Robinson was paid £17.8m in 2004 and received dividends on the firm's profits worth up to £100,000.

In the hush-hush, unregulated world of hedge funds, last year's pay bonanza cements 48-year-rold Robinson's place in the City's secret elite.

According to Sloane Robinson's latest report and accounts, the hedge fund had a staggering 2004, increasing its turnover sevenfold to £75m. Of that, £53.5m ended up in the bank accounts of the firm's four directors.

Robinson is believed to be the unnamed director disclosed as being paid £17.8m, leaving £35.7m to be shared between co- founder Hugh Sloane, 49, Richard Chenevix Trench, 46, and 35-year-old Mark Haworth.

A further £16m was largely shared between the firm's 17 other fund managers. Robinson declined to comment but a junior Sloane Robinson partner, Mark Leader, said: 'It was a successful year. We take risks for our clients and when they come off, we share in the rewards. But we don't like to talk about it. We do try to keep a low profile.'

Sloane Robinson, which has $5bn (£2.6bn) under management, made its name scouring stock markets, especially in Asia, for investment opportunities in which they can make a killing. 'We are looking for good companies which are inefficiently priced,' said Leader. In 2000, the four main directors shared £43m, of which Robinson is reckoned to have pocketed £13.5m.

Amid the furore of White Nile, the would-be Sudan oil explorer floated on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) by Phil Edmonds, Robinson was revealed by the Evening Standard as a 5% shareholder in White Nile and a major backer of the ex-cricketer's main stock market vehicle Central African Mining and Exploration Company. Robinson's £800,000 investment in White Nile ballooned to £10 million on paper before the stock was suspended.

Robinson is an honorary fellow of his old Oxford college Keble, where he funded the £6m Sloane Robinson Building finished three years ago.

Best-paid chief outside Footsie

PHILIP Richards has been a listed company director for just a year but latest company accounts reveal he is already safely installed as the best-paid chief executive outside the FTSE 100.

Richards, 44, a former head of equity research at Merrill Lynch, has been running Alternative Investment Market-listed hedge fund RAB Capital since it was founded in 1999 and has already made a substantial fortune with his stake of almost 40% in the business worth more than £80m.

That, however, did not stop his firm paying him more than £5.4m last year on top of the £2.5m he received in 2003. His basic pay in 2004 was £245,000 but notes to the accounts reveal that a further £3.5m is being paid into a special trust for him.

The accounts also show that he would have received another £1.6m but that he 'sacrificed' that for charitable purposes. It is understood that Richards, an evangelical Christian, made the payment to Christian charities.

Richards, like rival hedge fund manager George Robinson, is also a fan of Phil Edmonds. Both RAB funds and Richards on his own account are backers of White Nile or other companies in the Edmonds stable. Of Edmonds and his colleagues, Richards says: 'Their rough edges do not go down well in London but their style works in Africa.'