One morning in March 2000 I received a telephone call from a retired but very well connected journalist. He had some information and wondered whether I would like to follow it up. It concerned a South African mining outfit called Petra Diamonds Ltd, then traded on the London Stock Exchange’s junior market AIM (Alternative Investment Market). He had got wind of a big deal heading towards Petra, but didn’t know what it was; he suspected that the chief executive, Adonis Pouroulis, was seeking to take the company private – to remove it from the stock exchange – against stockholders’ wishes. (This was certainly not the case. On 31 March 2020 Pouroulis finally stepped down from the firm he had founded 23 years previously.) I spent two days telephoning everyone whose number I could get hold of and eventually reached Pouroulis himself. He listened to my questions, thought for a moment, and said, ‘You’d better come for breakfast.’

Breakfast was at The Cadogan hotel in Chelsea, famous as the place where Oscar Wilde had been arrested in 1895 on charges of gross indecency. John Betjeman even wrote a ballad about it: ‘Mr Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew/Where felons and criminals dwell/We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly/For this is the Cadogan Hotel,’ sing the Cockney policemen. As you might expect from the place that Wilde chose to hang out with his louche pals, it was impossibly elegant. When I arrived at the breakfast table there were several men gathered, all suited: Pouroulis, his deputy Geoffrey White, and a lawyer called David Price. My memory is a bit hazy, 20 years later, but I think that was his name. There was also the firm’s head of security – strange – and even more strangely, a man who appeared to be connected to the Zimbabwean army. I am convinced that there were two others present who did not do much talking or breakfasting either. Pouroulis explained the proposed deal. Petra Diamonds was to become the vehicle for a reverse takeover – a kind of merger where the incoming company swallows up the host, keeping its name and, crucially, stock exchange listing.