Jim Slater (accountant)
| Jim Slater | |
|---|---|
| Born |
James Derrick Slater 13 March 1929 Heswall, Cheshire, England |
| Died | 18 November 2015 (aged 86) |
| Residence | Cranleigh, Surrey, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation |
Chartered accountant Businessman |
| Employer |
Park Royal Vehicles ACV Group AEC Leyland Motors |
| Known for |
Slater Walker Capitalist column in The Sunday Telegraph author, The Zulu Principle |
| Spouse(s) | Helen (1965–2015, his death) |
| Children | 4 |
James Derrick Slater (13 March 1929 – 18 November 2015) was a British accountant, investor and business writer. Slater rose to prominence in the 1970s as a businessman and financier, who was the founding Chairman of Slater Walker, an investment bank and conglomerate which collapsed in the secondary banking crisis of 1973–75.
Born in 1929 in Heswall, then in Cheshire, Slater qualified as a chartered accountant aged 24, and joined the Dohm Group. Quickly promoted, he became a general manager, reorganising all the company's small industrial holdings into one company within the group. After leaving Dohm, he was appointed secretary and chief accountant of Park Royal Vehicles, a wholly owned subsidiary of ACV Group. He was then made commercial director of its subsidiary AEC. After Leyland Motors took over ACV, Slater was later promoted to deputy sales director under Donald Stokes.
Whilst working for AEC as a director, Slater became interested in investing whilst recovering from an illness, and developed a system for picking stocks which would form the basis of his book, The Zulu Principle (1992). Slater then approached his friend Nigel Lawson, at that time the city editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and was hired to write an investment column under the pseudonym Capitalist. Over the following two years, Capitalist's ghost portfolio appreciated by 68.9%, against the London Stock Market's average of 3.6%.
In 1964, Slater acquired control of H Lotery & Co Ltd, a £1.5m public company, which with his business partner Peter Walker – later a Conservative MP – they renamed Slater Walker Securities. The company performed what became known as corporate raids on public, mainly industrial, companies, in which Slater would sell off under-performing assets to improve efficiency. This saw the company growing into a group capitalized at over £200 million, through which Slater became a friend and business associate of James Goldsmith. Slater Walker then changed strategy, from a corporate-conglomerate into what eventually was recognised as an unauthorised and unlicensed international investment bank, through gradual disposal of its industrial interests.
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