Quiet assassin pulls the trigger

EVERYWHERE you look, institutional investors are suddenly standing up to be counted. Whether it's to tell Rupert Murdoch to keep his mitts off the decision on succession planning at BSkyB or spanking Barclays over its snub to boardroom rules, fund managers are on the warpath.

A new militancy is evident in an industry that has for years bred mostly sheep and poodles. Nowhere is this more evident than in the extraordinary campaign to topple Michael Green as chairman-elect at ITV.

But it is not the usual suspects - the Association of British Insurers or the National Association of Pension Funds - who have led the charge. Instead, the unlikely ringleader is a quietly spoken fund manager with more the mien of a thoughtful don than a firebrand.

Anthony Bolton of US investment giant Fidelity International has chivvied away at the Carlton and Granada boards, garnered City support and issued his crushing ultimatum. At 12.48pm yesterday, Green's head was finally delivered on a plate.

Depending on your point of view, Bolton is either the hero who took on the complacent, overpaid and barely competent establishment at ITV on behalf of millions of small mom and pop investors. Or he is a faceless, unaccountable meddler, interfering where he has no business.

One thing is certain after the events of the past few days: his days of relative anonymity are over. The Quiet Assassin, a tag he loathes, has joined the ranks of fund managers the public have actually heard of, alongside the Ice Maiden (Carol Galley, formerly of Merrill Lynch) and Superwoman (Nicola Horlick of SocGen).

It is all strangely perverse for a fund manager who prides himself on his cool, unemotional approach to investing. He is clearly uncomfortable in the limelight: ?I really hate these things. I would much rather be focused on running the money,‘ he says.

He emphatically denies charges of meddling. Insisting on an independent chairman of the planned ITV was ?exactly the sort of thing shareholders should be involved in,‘ he says. It's hard not to agree.

Certainly, he was pushing at an open door when he decided to act as a rallying point for rebels. Two weeks ago, he promised the Granada and Carlton senior independent directors that he would shut up if he found he was alone in his concerns.

A few phone calls later and he was in no doubt about the strength of feeling. ?I don't think there was a single institution I spoke to that didn't have issues with what was proposed. It was very easy to mobilise support,‘ he says.

Within six days, he had recruited some of the biggest names in fund management to his cause, including Schroders, Legal & General, Standard Life and UBS. The die was cast.

Bolton is at heart a technocrat, someone who would prefer to sell the shares if he doesn't like the smell coming out of a particular boardroom. Personalities and individual people come a long way down his list of priorities when assessing shares. ?I would rather have a good business run by average management than the other way round,‘ he once said.

Indeed he is mistrustful of stars generally. ?I find that people who impress you in meetings are not necessarily the best managers,‘ he comments, pointing to John Gunn, the once-lauded executive whose financial group British & Commonwealth later went bust. Bolton's role as éminence grise may be a recent development, but his long-term record as an unequalled stockpicker this side of the Atlantic is well established. The figures are spectacular: £1000 invested in his Special Situations Fund in 1979 has grown to £89,000. The same amount invested in the overall share market would be worth less than a quarter of that.

According to Jonathan Davis, author of Money Makers, who has put Bolton's stock-picking style under the microscope, Bolton is ?the professional's profession‘ - clear-sighted, disciplined and conscientious.

'Bolton [who studied engineering at Cambridge] has done as much as anyone in this country to demonstrate that the best principles of engineering can be profitably applied to the art of picking stocks,‘ says Davis.

'The paradox is that he has done it by investing in the kind of stocks and shares that others mostly won't touch with a bargepole.‘

Bolton's contrarian approach is almost legendary. He piled into Midland Bank when the clearer was universally sneered at, only to make a handsome profit when HSBC bid. He multiplied his money tenfold investing in Mersey Docks & Harbour when it was riddled with labour divisions and political uncertainty.

He made a fortune repeatedly dodging in and out of Securicor in the days when it owned a valuable chunk of Cellnet. He also profited from the huge consolidation in commercial television, owning as many as six ITV channels, a precursor to his starring role at Carlton and Granada.

And, with envy-inducing timing, he baled out of technology stocks at the very peak of the boom in early 2000.

He's had his share of duds. He was burnt by disasters such as Polly Peck, Mountleigh and Parkfield Group. He had a couple of poor years in the early 1990s and was accused of losing his touch. ?I did a lot of soul-searching,‘ he admitted later, wondering whether to change his approach. Fortunately for him and his investors, he stood firm and the good returns came back.

In contrast to the pyrotechnics of the past few days, his approach is diligent and methodical. His office is piled high with books of notes jotted down while talking to companies over the year. He has an army of analysts sifting research notes and crunching numbers.

Markets clearly enthral and intoxicate him. ?You have to be fanatical about it. You have to be wholly absorbed,‘ he says. But he wasn't always so driven. His barrister father virtually had to prod him out of bed to get him to apply for a job after he left Cambridge. Before university he was at Stowe, and was a contemporary of Sir Richard Branson.

He was given a leg-up, introduced to merchant bank Keyser Ullman by a family friend and started as that firm's first and last graduate trainee. It was there he caught the share-picking bug and discovered the delights of the Datastream machine - which enabled him to sieve quickly through thousands of companies according to different investment criteria, then a novelty, now standard fund management practice.

He got out of Keyser Ullman as it was caught up in the secondary banking crisis. Seeing the weekly visits of the chief executive to the Bank of England charted on the chauffeur's noticeboard, he realised it was time to move on.

Then came a spell at the South African-owned Schlesinger group. That was when he first helped run a ?special situations‘ fund - the vehicle that was later to become his forte, allowing him to take riskier-than-normal bets on bids, recoveries and other value-style investment. He joined Fidelity in 1979, just as it was setting up in the UK. He is now its longest-serving employee, running several funds but not involved in general management.

As a founder shareholder in Fidelity International, he could be expected to have accumulated a substantial stake in the business, worth several tens of millions of pounds, though strangely he doesn't appear on any rich list.

Married with three children, he lives in a West Sussex rectory and drives a Porsche Cayenne - an indulgence he jokes is ?market research‘; because he has a large shareholding in the carmaker. Another extravagance is a holiday home in Antigua.

Outside work, he likes to compose classical music. He used to play the piano, organ and cello. He raves about his Sibelius computer programme, which enables him to play back his compositions instantly. One of his carols has been performed at Winchester College Chapel.

For Green, who has had to listen to Bolton's elaborate orchestrations over the past few days, it has turned out to be more of a requiem mass.