Tim Haywood

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

None of that, though, would prove nearly as significant as the affair the company was about to run into. Months after leaving GAM, Solo had taken a stake in Greensill. And soon after that, he began pushing for GAM and Greensill to work together. Solo had a close and long-standing connection to one of the key investment managers at GAM, a portfolio manager named Tim Haywood. He was one of the highest-profile investors in the City, whip-smart, convivial, well known to finance journalists and well liked by colleagues. Haywood ran GAM’s biggest fund, the Absolute Return Bond Fund (ARBF), which courted investors from around the world, including the likes of the Chicago Police Pension Fund and the team that invested savings on behalf of all the municipal workers in Berlin.

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That business was safe, steady, reliable. The GAM management team was broadly behind it. Friedman decided that if his legal counsel could take a deeper look into Greensill Capital and find nothing untoward, then maybe Solo was right after all. Meanwhile, Solo himself had been lobbying for Lex. He had introduced Lex to Tim Haywood, and Haywood fell for him. Hard. They were similar in many ways. They came from farming stock. They enjoyed proximity to power and politics. And they had an unwavering belief in their own abilities. Greensill’s esoteric investments also seemed perfectly designed to appeal to Haywood’s sense that he was smarter than the average City money manager.

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And it meant Greensill was attracting interest from even larger pools of money. Eventually assets from Greensill of all shapes and sizes came to dominate Haywood’s ARBF fund. These investments were out of sight of the senior management team. But they were the cause of deep concern for one of Haywood’s oldest colleagues. NINE The Whistle-Blower Tim Haywood had known Daniel Sheard for decades. The two worked together fresh out of university, at the London office of ANZ, the Australian bank. It was the late 1980s, and the City was booming after Margaret Thatcher’s government delivered the ‘Big Bang’ – the wave of deregulation that transformed London into a modern financial capital.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

,” Evening Standard, May 11, 2021, https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-did-lex-greensill-seduce-the-world-b934517.html. 68. Duncan Mavin, “Who Is Lex Greensill? The Billionaire Banker Tied to GAM’s Crisis,” Financial News, May 7, 2019, https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/lex-greensill-billionaire-banker-tied-to-gam-tim-haywood-20190507. 69. See Mavin, Pyramid of Lies, on the relationship between Greensill and Credit Suisse. 70. Ibid. 71. Julie Steinberg and Duncan Mavin, “Greensill Used Credit Suisse Investment Funds to Lend to Its Own Backers,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/greensill-used-credit-suisse-investment-funds-to-lend-to-its-own-backers-11614982505?

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

After wobbling in late 2015 and early 2016, junk bonds over the following months put in one of their best performances on record. fn4 The used car market was bailed out by the arrival of Covid-19, which produced a surge in demand. By April 2021, the Manheim Index for used vehicles in the United States was up a record 54 per cent over the previous twelve months. fn5 In July 2018, Tim Haywood, the manager of GAM’s Absolute Return Bond Fund was suspended (and later sacked for ‘gross misconduct’) and the fund was closed down. Haywood had put a large chunk of his fund’s capital into illiquid debt securities linked to Indian steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta and Australian financier Lex Greensill.