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Vanni Treves, lawyer and businessman who helped Equitable Life survive scandal and as chairman of Channel 4 denied charges of dumbing down – obituary
Vanni Treves, who has died aged 79, was an Italian-born lawyer who became chairman of Channel 4 and Equitable Life, which he steered through the aftermath of one of the most egregious financial scandals of modern times.
Having himself survived what he called, with some understatement, “not terribly auspicious beginnings” in hiding as a toddler with his widowed mother in war-torn Rome, Treves was brought up in England and rose to be senior partner of the City solicitors firm of McFarlanes.
From there he acquired a dazzling portfolio of other appointments and a reputation as one London’s best-networked boardroom operators; but for the tensions of his tenure at Equitable Life, his senior career looked very much, as one profile-writer put it, like “a charmed life”.
Treves was largely unknown in media circles when he was appointed in 1998 by Labour’s culture secretary Chris Smith to chair Channel 4 Television: sceptics were quick to point out that Treves was a long-time Labour supporter and Smith his local Islington MP.
He kept a relatively low profile in the role, but defended the broadcaster against accusations of dumbing down and deftly handled a change of chief executive.
He served for six years at Channel 4, but from February 2001 his energies were much taken up with the problems of Equitable Life. The world’s oldest life assurer had committed itself to guaranteed annuity pay-outs it could not fund, was closed for new business, with reduced payments to members, and had reached the edge of financial collapse shortly before Treves’s appointment.
Treves was an Equitable policyholder himself, eventually suffering losses along with a million others. But he complained that he would not have taken the chairmanship if he had known the full extent of Equitable’s “deep black holes”. Fierce negotiations and multiple legal actions followed in a battle to find a compromise with members and regulators that would stave off insolvency, which would have halted pension payments altogether.
“This was something we didn’t want to contemplate,” he said later, “So we kept going,” ignoring calls for his resignation from members’ action groups who felt he had too many other commitments.
A case against the company’s auditors for failing to warn of troubles ahead had to be dropped, to Treves’s frustration, but in due course an ombudsman’s report found regulators guilty of 10 counts of maladministration that had contributed to the crisis and called for compensation for policyholders. When ministers under Gordon Brown effectively kicked that demand into the long grass, Treves declared himself appalled – and as a Labour voter, ashamed – by the government’s “cynical and unprincipled behaviour”.
It was not until 2010 that the coalition government agreed to make compensation payments to Equitable members of up to £1.5 billion, well below their total estimated losses. Treves had by then retired, declaring that the job had been “very challenging … very rewarding” and “full of intellectual interest”, and having won wide admiration for his tenacity, equanimity and powers of persuasion.
Vanni Emanuele Treves was born in Florence on November 3 1940, the son of Giuliano Treves and his wife Marianna, née Baer. Giuliano, a scholar of English literature who had been forced out of his university post because he was Jewish, was one of a group of Florentines who organised assistance for Jewish refugees in 1943.
When the Germans rounded up and deported many of the city’s Jewish community, Giuliano escaped to join the Allies as they moved north, acting as a liaison officer with partisan groups; but he was killed by a bomb in Florence’s Piazza Santo Spirito on the day of the city’s liberation, August 7 1944.
Meanwhile, Marianna and little Vanni were hidden for 10 months by priests and nuns in Rome, moving from house to house every few days – then shortly after the war’s end, Marianna met and fell in love with an accountant from London, Rudoph Traub, who became Vanni’s “darling” stepfather. The new family settled in Swiss Cottage, a stepbrother was born, Marianna became a teacher and Vanni won a scholarship to St Paul’s School.
From there he went up to University College, Oxford, to read law. As a reporter for the student magazine Isis in May 1960, he covered a speech at the Oxford Union by the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, whom he described as “monstrous” – earning a riposte from Mosley’s undergraduate son Max, who called Treves “one of the minor nuisances of Oxford life”.
Treves spent a year at the University of Illinois on a Fulbright scholarship before joining McFarlanes as an articled clerk in 1963. Having qualified as a solicitor, he was seconded to the New York firm of White & Case in 1968, returning to become a partner of McFarlanes in 1970 and senior partner from 1987 to 1999.
Among many external appointments, Treves was a director of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi (one of his long-standing legal clients) during the turbulent departure of its founding brothers, and chairman of several industrial companies; an adviser to J Paul Getty Jr and a trustee of his charity; Solicitor to the Royal Academy; chairman of the development committee of the National Portrait Gallery; a governor of Sadler’s Wells Foundation; and treasurer of the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs.
He chaired two multi-million pound appeals for the NSPCC, a cause to which he was particularly devoted and for which he mustered a roll call of celebrity and media supporters.
From 1998 to 2006 he chaired the governors of London Business School. In recent years he was chairman of the headhunters Korn Ferry and a director of Homerton University Hospital NHS trust.
Appointed CBE in 2012, Vanni Treves cited “epicurean pursuits” and walking as his recreations; he also collected clocks and watercolours. He married, in 1971, Angela Fyffe, daughter of Lieut-Gen Sir Richard Fyffe, deputy Chief of the Defence Staff; they had a daughter and two sons.
Vanni Treves, born November 3 1940, died November 10 2019