I have been thinking quite a bit about Asil Nadir lately. Yes, this is the man at the centre of one of Britain's biggest corporate scandals, who has spent almost two decades eluding the authorities and has just started a 10-year jail sentence after being found guilty on 10 charges of theft from Polly Peck, the listed company he controlled and led to bankruptcy.
So, should Nadir simply be dispatched to the sordid ranks of corporate crooks? Well, there is nothing simple about Nadir. It is not easy to dismiss one of the brightest stars in Britain's corporate galaxy, courted by the powerful until he fled the law in 1993 for Turkish occupied Northern Cyprus where he is still regarded as a hero.
Many years ago, as a cub reporter for the London-based Investors Chronicle, I interviewed Nadir, who was then running a small company called Wearwell. It was later subsumed into Polly Peck, which rapidly outgrew its origins in the clothing trade and became an international conglomerate with 200 subsidiaries and branching out into food, leisure and electronics.
At the time, Wearwell's shares were languishing and Nadir was talking in a desultory manner about the prospects for the rag trade, something I knew about as my father was also a rag trader at a nearby factory and had done business with Nadir. He spoke of him as being immensely likeable, albeit somewhere on the wrong side of sharp. This judgment was later to be repeated by a number of Nadir's associates, who, with benefit of hindsight, described him as having "dangerous charisma".
I was young, impressionable and very impressed by Nadir, who summoned me to the window of his office and pointed out a piece of adjacent land that he said had been acquired by his company and was worth a sum that I calculated (with his help) to be somewhere around double the firm's stated asset value.
Nadir was giving me a scoop and I hurried back to the office with news of my great story. Michael Brett, the IC's editor, was less impressed and demanded to know if I had seen a written record of this transaction and questioned whether Nadir was merely trying to ramp his share price. I rang Nadir to confirm the information and he assured me that this story was solid and had not been given to anyone else.