JO Hambro
Mills later partnered with James Hambro to launch JO Hambro Capital Management (JOHCM), a business which today has £30bn of assets across a range of retail and institutional funds. A senior executive at the company when he was there was Gavin Rochussen, currently chief executive at Polar Capital, backed by Harwood. Mills says it was Rochussen “who really built up JOHCM”.
Polar Capital is one of the businesses presently being discussed in the City as a likely takeover target as consolidation grips the asset management industry. Mills says: "It will be sold, but not yet, Gavin has to build it up first.”
He confesses to being “completely unable” to speak a foreign language but displays a remarkable dexterity for maths during our interview, rattling through both the hypothetical and actual financial details of businesses in which Harwood has a stake, saying he has been “blessed with a memory for figures”.
Harwood was created when he bought the private equity and real estate businesses out of JOHCM in 2003. Harwood is one of Mills' middle names. On creating Harwood he also jointly launched Harwood Wealth, which he describes as “one of the first advice market consolidators”, but sold this in 2020 to private equity business Carlyle Capital for £91m.
There have, of course, also been poor investments including Team Rock, a company which published music magazines and on which his business lost its entire £20m investment.
For someone who has been at the heart of the corporate world for four decades, Mills displays none of the corporate speak of such an environment. He happily describes one chief executive of a listed company as “stupid”, and says of Frenkel Topping, the advice business, “they wanted it to be another advice market consolidator, but I put a stop to that. I had just sold one of those (Harwood Wealth) and if I wanted to own one, I would have kept it”.
Adviser market
Frenkel Topping specialises in providing “expert witness” statements in court cases, assessing the level of compensation needed by individuals for their future who may not be able to work again. The company has expanded by buying the providers of services to those people, and of the dozens of businesses, past and present, that Mills mentions during our conversation, it is one which he gets the most animated about in business terms.
Mills says he “doesn’t do much publicity”, barring one interview a year on a specialist investing website. The reason he is making an exception this time is out of “a duty to the other shareholders in the North Atlantic Smaller Companies trust”. This is the £800mn of net assets vehicle that Mills has run since his days at Samuel Montagu, and in which he owns 30 per cent of the shares – a stake valued at more than £250mn.
