MediaGuardian.co.uk
Paul Murphy, financial editor Monday May 14, 2001 The Guardian
Brunswick Group, the City's premier financial public relations company, handling highly sensitive information for more than a third of Britain's top companies, has suffered a serious security lapse, apparently leaving scores of fringe stockbrokers and market speculators with secret details of planned corporate deals. A dossier of information, part of which has been seen by the Guardian, is circulating in the Square Mile, giving code names for a string of potential multi-billion-pound mergers, acquisitions and flotations.
Included are names of corporate financiers, lawyers and other City advisers for each deal, giving traders and speculators ready to deal on inside information the ability to identify possible company takeovers.
The original documents are said to have been left in a Covent Garden restaurant.
The pages seen give details on at least seven deals, each carrying a secret codename. Three of these, Project River, Project Jones and Project B2, cover transactions which have already been publicised: the £13bn takeover of the De Beers diamonds business by mining giant Anglo American; the abortive bid to buy the regional brewer Wolverhampton & Dudley by the leisure entrepreneur Robert Breare; and also a £1bn move by the Swedish packaging group Tetra to take over a French packaging specialist called Sidel with the help of London investment bank NM Rothschild.
But extracts from what is believed to be a dossier running to 80 pages, also suggests that Brunswick is working for the sprawling Russian energy group Gazprom, under the codename Project Potemkin. The fact that Brunswick may be ad vising the state-controlled company will raise eyebrows in both the City and Westminster, where it has been building its name as a political lobbiest.
Gazprom has often been described as an arm of the Russian foreign office and has rarely been far from scandal. Recently, it provoked outrage by taking over the leading Russian television company NTV, leading to accusations that criticism of President Putin was being suppressed.
Other planned transactions seen by the Guardian include Project Swan, which is believed to be a takeover of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses, a specialist insurer, by Liverpool Victoria, Britain's biggest friendly society.
Meanwhile, through Project Pictures, Brunswick is working for lawyers Allen & Overy, possibly on a merger with another law firm. Another deal, Project Sadler, remains unidentified in the documentation.
It is unclear when the dossier first leaked into the City. Neither is it known how many other secret Brunswick's projects may have been uncovered or how wide circulation of the documents might be.
Investment bankers who are named in the documents indicated yesterday that both the De Beers and Tetra/Sidel deals had seen suspicious share price movements before the transactions were announced.
The leak will spread alarm among the public relations firm's blue-chip client base, which includes names such as British Telecom, Marks & Spencer and Railtrack.
A spokesman for Brunswick said: "We assign project names to a lot of our work. It would be wrong for us to comment on individual cases. But in this instance, all projects of a price sensitive nature have been announced and are fully in the public domain."