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“Virgin has a great management team led by Paul Scurrah,” Bain Capital s Mike Murphy told the airline s 9000 staff on August 24.
“And I would like to again reaffirm we are backing Paul to successfully lead Virgin through the current turbulence and back into the skies.
It was Murphy s big pitch to seal the biggest deal of his career – a $3.5 billion agreement to buy Virgin Australia out of administration. He had beaten four other bidders to get a signed deal, had tipped $125 million interim funding to keep the airline afloat and was already on the hook for at least another $750 million – win, lose or draw.
Illustration by Raj Verma
What is common between Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen? Both are automakers, both are based in Germany. But few know that both also run banks. Mercedes Benz Bank and Volkswagen Bank are well-known brands in Germany. Similarly, UK-based supermarket chain TESCO has a bank and so does Richard Branson s Virgin Group, whose bank got merged with Clydesdale Bank last year.
All these are not big universal banks that dominate the system. The UK market has big global banks such as Barclay, Lloyds, HSBC and Standard Chartered. Similarly, banks run by the German automakers don t even figure within the top ten. There are also no instances of bad governance in these corporate-backed banks. Part of the reason could be the well-developed legal system in these economies.