Pilot View Capital negotiates turbulence

The accounts for the fund manager Pilot View Capital show that two of the directors had to stump up loans to it after the company breached the Central Bank’s capital requirements for fund promoters.

Pilot View is owned by some of the great and the good bodies of Irish corporate life. No, really. Bruce Ashmore, the former Goodbody stockbroker, and James Osborne, the Eason chairman and former partner in A&L Goodbody solicitors, are among its shareholders.

Captial breach
The company directors and the two lads' fellow shareholders include Charles Peel, the founder of Peel Hunt stockbrokers in London; former Deutsche banker Paddy Shanahan; Gerry O'Reilly, another Goodbody alumni; and the former chief financial officer of Smartforce Johnny Fortune, a wonderfully-appropriate name for a hedge fund manager.

Investors in its funds have included Senator Fergal Quinn, according to the Seanad’s register of interests.

The company accounts state that Peel and O’Reilly coughed up €50,000 each after the capital breach, but all is well again.

Life has been tough enough, though, for some of the Pilot View funds. The highly-geared Atlas fund was launched at the peak of the market madness in 2007, and incurred heavy losses.

To be fair to Pilot View, they weren’t alone. Investors everywhere had to fasten their seatbelts during the crash.