You’ve had a successful business career, with a major involvement in turnaround deals since 1980, can you tell me about what influenced you on the path of success?  

I was born and bred in Stoke on Trent; we were lower middle class in an area of basically working class. My dad had a car, no one else did. It is really hard for people to get their heads around that kind of environment. It was the days when the potteries were running, it was a hard and horribly unhealthy environment, with coal smoke everywhere. I had TB as a child and spent quite a lot of my early childhood at home, some of that time with my grandfather, who was a quite remarkable man; he had raised the family when his parents vanished when he was about 16: he was the eldest and there were four younger. There was no money but they all ended up quite rich; my grandfather promoted an engineering business and managed to make a reasonable living. And so he was a major influence. He exposed me to business, the real world of wandering around sites and seeing factories, seeing people working which got me used to the idea of how you made money.

Was making money always a major aim in life?  

Yes – absolutely, there was definitely a desire to do reasonably well. I also had a pretty serious illness in my teens, which probably had some impact on me. It was a usually fatal blood disorder, which cleared up; I rather fear I got it from playing in the chem. labs. We used to use benzene to wash our hands in, nowadays you can’t touch it without gloves. That brought me to earth properly.

Why Lancaster University?  

It was convenient. I chose to study Chemistry. Looking back, it was a less important time; I had already done most of my degree course before I went there. I don’t know why I had matured awfully early and was through my wild phase by the time I finished 6th form; by the time I went to University, I was the straight guy. It was a lively time, you just had to go through the picket lines to get into lectures. Gay rights were everywhere, flower power, free sex, marijuana, it was all there.

Do you think that generation learnt something more about life. It was the baby boomer time?  

Yes, there was a lot of us. Universities were also dynamic and growing places. There were more intellectuals than now. At the same time as sexual liberation, there was a degree of innocence that was odd. The best thing I did at university was to build a man-powered aircraft – which is one of my great glees in life. I am in one of Spike Milligan’s books, Transports of Delight, with a nice picture of my man-powered aircraft.

Did you ever have any fears or apprehensions that you would not be successful?  

I was mostly pretty confident, I always have been, you just take the blow and move onto the next bit. After university, I went directly into chartered accountancy, joining Cooper Brothers [later Coopers & Lybrand] in Liverpool (now PWC) which I saw as a step into the business world. I found it intellectually interesting; I spent most of my time on computer audit and corporate insolvency – which in those days was quite adventurous; being appointed a receiver, you had basically limitless powers and no downside; it was a very good way of getting experience very quickly and at a cost that was invisible to everybody.

In 1997 you founded Alchemy Partners?  

I was very pleased with the pace Alchemy was set up. We got ourselves from nowhere into the upper leagues in a couple of years. Competition was weak; we were dynamic and vigorous in what – by today’s standards – was a tiny market.

You never seem to have had any self-doubt?  

My wife is appalled at my absence of worry. My head hits the pillow and I go to sleep. Insensitivity has always been a key strength. I think I’d made enough money relatively early in my career for the financial stress to have gone, so we never had to be concerned; the worst that can happen is not so bad. I enjoy what I do and that is the principle reason I do it.

During the time you were Managing Partner at Alchemy Partners, thirteen turnaround investments were made. Do you have any bitterness about Alchemy’s failed attempt to buy Rover?  

No, not bitterness, but sadness about the Rover deal. There is also happiness because if we had actually purchased it, it would have been necessary to demonstrate that we were right; whereas the mob that actually bought it, made such a mess of it, we eventually became heroes for doing nothing. We actually won an award for best deal of the year for not doing it, from one of the private equity newspapers!

You’ve gained a reputation for being outspoken. In July 2007 you gave evidence to a Treasury Select Committee in the House of Commons enquiring into the private equity industry. You’ve also criticized the accountancy profession for a loss of integrity in due diligence work on private equity buyouts.  

What I am mostly on record about are the rather excessive tax breaks which are out there for private equity, which don’t involve you going offshore. The taxes are bizarre really, a result of a partnership tax dating from the 1960s. It’s just a question of whether a person needs a zero tax break on £1m to actually turn up for work or not. There is a limit on how much you push it in either direction. And I just think the tax breaks for private equity were too far at the zero end.

Was it a difficult decision to leave Alchemy?  

It was really rather sad; it was my mistake for not changing some personnel – we started to have mediocre performance. It wasn’t dreadful but it wasn’t good, and the only thing we made money out of in serious volume was doing turn arounds and distress type activity. My partners had ceased becoming very productive and didn’t want to become turn around lads. So I decided that it would be much easier just to clean shop and have a new one. And so I left and, as you can see, we gave birth to the new one quite quickly. I took the day off, which I told the press I would do, and had our fully fledged office running almost instantly. And so it was a mixed blessing. We started with a clean sheet which was really refreshing. We were able to recruit a team designed specifically for the task rather than people who would have made do for the task, and we have done very well so far: there are over 650 quoted private equity firms on earth and this is the highest rated.

And the name?  

The name followed my resignation letter; at the end of my resignation letter to the investors, I wrote that I would do it again but better – hence ‘Better Capital’. By a miracle, a company called Better Capital Ltd went into bankruptcy on October 17th, and I was able to grab the name. And it’s a very good name because it has nothing but positives about it. What we are normally doing is replacing gross excess of debt with equity and that is ‘better capital’.

You are on record as saying that when you turned 60, which you did in October 2010, you would retire.  

I am merely committed to do 100 days a year for the first three years of the life of ‘Better Capital.’ But if I left here today, my hours would not decline. I have an enormous range of interests, other organizations I am involved with and speaking engagements, as well as a huge wodge of personal investments. I am also heavily engaged with two charities; one is the UK Stem Cell foundation, the chairman of which is Sir Richard Skyes, and the board is full of people like Lord Winston, Mary Archer and Nick Ross. Stem Cell research is obviously reasonably pushy science – and quite interesting. I have done quite a lot of life science investing, mostly on my personal account and know my way around medicine quite well. Being a sickly kid myself, I have always been interested in medicine. I read the Lancet every week.

We also have a personal charity, the J.P. Moulton Charitable Foundation which does clinical trial funding in quite serious volume, for all kinds of illness; we fund short duration clinical trials not readily funded elsewhere, although we have kept away from cancer, which is very long term, but with a few tiny exceptions. I’ve done one trial on melanoma another on a common symptom, wasting in cancer and the [beneficial] effects of thalidomide on that process. We have now funded some thirty medical trials, some with quite serious success: One on multiple scelorosis, another in trauma. Some results don’t have an immediate effect.

Do leisure activities feature in your life at all?  

I like intellectual board games like monopoly; if I have a spare twenty minutes in the office, you’ll find me knocking off a game of on-line chess against some person from New Zealand or wherever. I do a few hours a week of gym work; we have a gym in every house I own, I travel quite a reasonable amout with my wife, we have houses in Kent, Belgravia, France and Guernsey. Our house in France has a vineyard and we have our own label, Moulton’s Recession Red, it was a use for some land we had, but if I d’ known the true cost of the vineyard, I would never have done it! I read a vast amount; novels only in desperation, if stuck, but books on history, science, medicine, economics, current affairs is the vast majority of what I read. One of the aspects of being a sickly kid is you develop a very high reading speed.

Did your interest in reading influence the purchase of the UK arm of the Readers Digest in a £13 million deal?  

Yes there was the desire to save Reader’s Digest –it was in bankruptcy but dominated by the financial considerations, we thought we could make some money out of it. It was manifestly capable of being run better and we are now generating quite useful profits.

Are you satisfied with what you have achieved?  

If I pack it in tomorrow, it will have been a reasonable innings.

J.P. Moulton Charitable Foundation – Charity Commission 1109891
The Mount, Church Street, Shoreham, Sevenoaks, TN14 7SD tel: 01959 524008

Jon is a supporter of The UK Stem Cell Foundation. Visit http://www.ukscf.org/foundation/index.htm