Bain Capital: A Consulting Firm Too Hot to Handle? (Fortune 1987)

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. The share scandal was the central "this is what's wrong with finance under Thatcher" case

In March 1980 Lyons retired as a director of UDS. But he continued to put his network of friends and acquaintances to good use as UK consultant to the management consultants Bain & Co, for whom he procured introductions to, among others, Margaret Thatcher, Douglas Hurd and Ernest Saunders.

Guinness rapidly became Bain's largest UK client, with one of its staff, Oliver Roux, appointed the drink group's finance director. Lyons also introduced the stockbroker Anthony Parnes to Saunders and boasted later that a letter he wrote to Thatcher was directly responsible for the Office of Fair Trading's decision not to refer Guinness's bid for Distillers to the Mergers and Monopolies Commission in 1986.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jack-lyons-financier-and-philanthropist-convicted-for-his-part-in-the-guinness-sharetrading-scandal-784372.html

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/02/16/68666/index.htm

The Alzheimer's stuff was what made Saunders the most memorable of the crooks involved, though.