“If you do exactly as I say, you will win,” he said softly, his buttery voice redolent of his days as a choral scholar at Oxford.

Robey occupied a substantial upholstered armchair placed in front of an east-facing window in the sparsely decorated living room of Masayoshi Son’s rental home, a French Revival-style stone manse on a flat acre in the exclusive Silicon Valley enclave of Atherton. An antique stone Buddha, about four feet tall, guarded Robey’s throne, somehow preserving its dignity despite the tragic loss of its nose. Robey’s thumbs were hooked under his black silk (braces) suspenders, and he looked magisterial in his crisp white shirt and navy suit.

He had asked me how he should dress for the meeting, and this was his interpretation of “casual”.

“But you must do as I say,” Robey added sternly, like a schoolteacher lecturing a child on the existential significance of multiplication tables. Except he was addressing Masayoshi Son, head of SoftBank Group, who was perched cross-legged on a sofa across from Robey. I was lounging on a neighbouring couch and marvelling at the pliability of Masa’s hip flexors.

It had been over ten years since I had seen my former colleague in action, but Robey had lost none of the chutzpah that had made him Morgan Stanley’s star M&A banker in Europe. He had launched his own boutique advisory firm, and he was now Sir Simon Robey, the title enhancing his patrician aura. He had been knighted a few weeks ago, I had explained to Masa. But when I tried to draw a parallel with his samurai idol Ryōma, Masa seemed offended. “No, that is not like Ryōma. Ryōma was a peasant, a man of the people,” Masa had said.

Masa was looking at Robey quizzically, trying to decide if Sir Suspenders — as he playfully christened him — was smart, stupid or just plain weird. But after navigating $2 trillion of cross-border merger deals over 30 years, Robey was a confident man with a lot to be confident about. M&A specialists are to investment banking what fighter pilots are to combat, and if there was a Top Gun school for dealmakers in Her Majesty’s realm, Robey would be the Dean.

“We need someone like him,” I had explained to Masa. Acquiring Arm Holdings, the crown jewel of British technology, would always be challenging, but in the current environment it was the equivalent of Maverick’s 4G inverted dive with a Mig-28. It was five days after England’s fateful Brexit own goal, David Cameron had announced his resignation, and a wounded London was struggling to rouse itself for the midsummer rites at Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. But in the world of finance, there is opportunity in every calamity. The pound had taken a hit, making a deal cheaper in dollar or yen terms. And perhaps the new government could be persuaded to view a SoftBank investment as a vote of confidence? We needed an insider to work the quintessential old boy network of Oxbridge-educated civil servants who run the country while the feckless politicians come and go. We needed Robey.

He was reluctant at first. His franchise was based on advising British companies, frequently defending against unfriendly overtures from foreign intruders. Besides, Masa was known to be intractable. I assured Simon I had Masa’s trust, and persuaded him to get in front of Masa and satisfy himself.

Sir Suspenders took us through the subtleties of the City of London’s unique Takeover Code. Like cricket, the spirit of the Code is sacrosanct, and all players in the M&A game, principals and agents, are expected to abide. I’m personally a fan of the Takeover Code, as I am of cricket. The Code eliminates the games people play on Wall Street, frequently to the detriment of the average investor. It pushes a prospective buyer to make a straightforward cash offer — no “funny money” in the form of complex securities — and to clarify intent publicly with limited scope for clandestine negotiations.

Robey affirmed much of what I had already told Masa: be prepared to pay a substantial premium over the £19 billion market value of Arm, have the cash lined up, and get ready to move confidentially and expeditiously. Any formal approach to the company would be directed to Arm’s chairman, who would negotiate on behalf of its shareholders. Robey would work his network to make sure we had the support of key constituencies: the media, the investment community and the various government agencies.

By the time we were done, I could tell Masa was impressed. Robey was no samurai, but you do not bring a baseball player to a cricket match.

After Robey’s clear direction, there was no stopping Masa. I drafted a letter from Masa addressed to Arm’s chairman, Stuart Chambers, outlining SoftBank’s all-cash bid for 100 per cent ownership of Arm, offering each shareholder a substantial premium to the previous day’s closing price, with no antitrust or regulatory contingencies.

In military parlance this was “shock and awe”; in M&A lexicon this was a “bear hug”. A parallel is making an unsolicited bid to buy an unlisted expensive home you had long coveted, but had never viewed from the inside, with no financing contingency. You might find the home termite-infested or be denied the use of the pool, that risk was all yours. And since the owners had no expressed intention of selling, you needed to offer a price well above market value to get their attention.

My keystrokes, as I drafted the letter, were concerningly tentative rather than fondly lingering: in over 30 years of deal-making this was as audacious as I had seen. We were paying a hefty premium over an already inflated price. Should I be restraining Masa? But then again Arm was a terrific global business, with a dominant market share and a protective moat in the form of patented technology. And Masa’s vision for Arm was no crazier than ubiquitous smartphones might have seemed in 2005.

To maximise impact, we agreed the proposal needed to be delivered in person. But Stuart Chambers was on vacation, on a boat in the Mediterranean and unavailable for another two weeks. Masa would have none of it. If Stuart had been on a hiking trip to Tora Bora, Masa would have parachuted in, his trusty valet Kota-san at his side, in full-on Rambo mode to ward off Taliban interference. He inquired if Stuart’s boat was large enough to accommodate a helicopter landing. Mercifully, we never found out.

Stuart agreed to meet us on dry land in the port of Marmaris in Turkey on Sunday, July 3. Lunch was scheduled for 12 noon at the Pineapple Restaurant, and Kota-san was dispatched ahead of time to manage onsite logistics. Masa would fly in on his Gulfstream G650 from Tokyo. SoftBank’s other jet — which I affectionately called Viper — was dispatched to San Jose to pick up Arm’s chief executive, Simon Segars. I would fly in, on a private charter, from London.

And so it came to be that on a midsummer holiday weekend, three days following a terrorist attack in Istanbul that left 45 people dead, local air traffic control would notice three blips converging purposefully on this sleepy backwater of the Turkish Riviera at sunrise, their mission unknown.

Alok Sama is the former president and chief financial officer of SoftBank Group International

The Money Trap by Alok Sama (Pan Macmillan £22). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

“I was trying to deal with a chute malfunction with an undone jacket billowing around my face,” he recalls of the 2013 incident in the Middle East that saw him, against the odds, deploy a reserve canopy and escape unscathed.

“In the special forces we were used to better kit [than regular army personnel] but it struck me that it was odd to spend a lot of money on a jacket but not have a better-quality zip.”

It’s the kind of detail that the 40-year-old, whose 13-year-service included stints as a Royal Marine sniper instructor and demolition expert, can better control in his career 2.0 at the helm of outdoorwear business, ThruDark.

Co-founded with fellow special forces operative and Royal Marine, Louis Tinsley, in 2016, what began with an idea to improve the quality of military wear has evolved into a £13 million turnover outdoorwear brand selling mainly online to a market prioritising technical performance in clothing, whether mountain climbing or in the gym.

Headquartered in Poole, Dorset, he credits the near 90 per cent growth in turnover in the last three years to a“hardcore following” drawn to the pair’s elite military credentials. Notably, the popularity of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, which sees ex-army officials put lay recruits through the selection process, has brought both greater visibility to a force traditionally in the shadows — as well as the ThruDark brand itself.

“We went from a handful of followers on our social media channels to an extra 10,000 overnight after our clothing was worn on the programme,” says Stazicker who appeared on the show himself in 2021.

“There’s an authenticity to the brand; we’ve operated and thrived in some of the world’s most inhospitable places, the jungle, desert and heavy snow, so we know first-hand the best fabrics and technology needed in extreme environments.”

Indeed, having regularly customised his kit during military manoeuvres — for example, sewing on tent canvas to reinforce the elbows of jackets — it’s an approach that has informed the product range, with the use of the canvas-like nylon Cordura fabric long used in the armed forces to withstand rips and tears on harsh terrain.

What began with cold-weather expedition gear, bespoke mountain suits and arctic jackets to withstand minus 40 temperatures has expanded to skiwear and “athleisure” gymwear designed by the company founders and made in factories in Italy, Vietnam and Eastern Europe. For a customer base skewed towards 30 to 40-something professional males unfazed by price tags rising to £1,000 for a parka, it is evidence that the pandemic boom for outdoor adventurewear has been sustained as an increasingly higher-end and mainstream staple.

According to McKinsey’s 2024 State of Fashion report, revenues for the outdoor category in 2022 were 24 per cent higher than pre-pandemic era, a broader traction evidenced by the UK’s largest outdoor clothing and equipment retailer, Mountain Warehouse, which revealed record revenues of £386 million last year, the highest in its 27-year history.

ThruDark’s timing has chimed with the zeitgeist, though the path from the special forces to successful first-time clothing brand entrepreneur is not well trodden.

“We had a lot of scepticism from old colleagues because it was uncharted territory, but we always had this strong vision and were determined to make it work,” says Stazicker, who credits leaving the army on his own terms and a “career high” for smoothing the transition to civilian life.

“You get people at 42 or 44 years old after a 22-year army career with a pension that’s not enough for a good standard of living, so they have to work — but the military, which is very insular, is all you’ve known, so it’s hard to move on. Going into business with someone I knew and trusted really helped. Could I have done this on my own? Probably not.”

While lacking business experience, the pair, who are both “meticulous planners” and used to leading high-stakes operational missions, have deployed the same core traits of discipline, work ethic and quick decision-making. They liken learning the trade to rising through the military ranks, with a hands-on approach to everything from learning spreadsheets, packing the goods and visiting the factories.

However, coming from a world of “harsh feedback” and “zero tolerance for slacking off” has meant tempering the army’s more typically blunt communication style when dealing with his 40-strong team.

“There’s an emotional detachment often needed when operating in highly stressful environments, and I’ve had to learn to be much more empathetic to build rapport in the business environment,” he says, adding that he struggled initially with having too high expectations of the people around him.

“In the special forces everyone is emotionally invested and part of something bigger than them, but it can be harder in business to find people with the same passion for what you’re trying to achieve: you have to hold on to those that have it, because they’re like gold dust.”

Indeed, the old adage of being surrounded by the right people has been absolutely central to success. Having been introduced to the Poole-based Clark investment group in 2017, its founder Steven Clark came on board with the investment needed to propel the early product development and provide additional mentorship and incubation.

With a portfolio skewed towards opportunities rooted in founder experience, the firm has invested a significant proportion of the £5 million it has raised to date and believes ThruDark can be a £100 million concern within the next six years, primarily by capitalising on the nascent American market. Currently the brand’s fastest-growing market and one worth $10.5 billion in 2023, the focus will be on social media influencer marketing and tapping into Stazicker’s existing network of contacts, including US Navy Seals.

Despite the fast growth and optimistic trajectory, caution prevails regarding plans to expand into bricks and mortar, currently limited to a small presence in Selfridges department store in London and a unit on a business park at ThruDark’s Poole headquarters.

“It’s still a challenging climate on the high street. Business is stressful, particularly as you grow, because you’re very aware that more people are reliant on the company being a success, and cashflow is always an issue. But at the end of the day it’s just problem-solving — and we’ve always been able to make decisions,” says Stazicker.

ThruDark was the No 61 company on The Sunday Times 100 in 2024, our annual ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies. To nominate your company for the 2025 programme visit thetimes.com/st100

AYBL’s pre-tax profits raced up from £1.6 million to £6.2 million in the year to March, on sales that grew 32 per cent to £38.6 million, accounts to be filed soon will show. Its gross profit margin rose 6 percentage points to 69 per cent, helped by reduced discounting and tight control of its stocks.

Reiss Edgerton, 32, who set up the Redditch-based retailer with his brother, Kristian, 30, in 2018, says: “Yes, we have been making good products that everyone likes, but we have managed our stock really well.”

Edgerton says a number of recent senior hires were important delivering AYBL’s record profits, including in its merchandising and ecommerce operations. However, his decision to hire a chief financial officer has proved the “driving factor” behind much of the improvement, he says.

Rob Pound, a former chief operating officer at one of KPMG’s divisions, joined in 2022 as AYBL’s chief financial officer. “Hiring Rob is the best thing we have ever done,” says Edgerton. “Initially I, maybe a bit naively, dismissed [the idea of hiring him] as the advice we had been given was to get a CFO who had experience in our sector and not from a big four [accountancy firm] or a really big corporate. The advice was that those people try to bring the KPMG mindset to your business and that’s not how you want to run it.

“But because of the experience Rob had previously [at KPMG] in a chief operating officer role, he understands people and is a good listener. When he came in his first thing was ‘I have to unlearn what I have learnt for the last 25 years. I just want to see how you run your business’. He spent the first six months learning, and he has done it in a really good way. He has everyone on his side. It is a skill in itself to be like that.

“He has been a big driving factor in lots of different things, working with our suppliers, expanding our supply chain, moving into Bangladesh and Vietnam where we have a trade deal [with those countries, reducing import duties].

Edgerton said that while he and his brother still tried on all the product samples for its menswear range, launched last autumn, as part of their quality control process, he accepted that his role in the business had changed as it has grown. “I have to get the right people into this business, that is what my job has become,” he says.

Many direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands outsource parts of their operations to specialist third-party logistics (3PL) companies, which store the stock, dispatch it to customers, and manage returns. AYBL has decided to retain all those operations in-house. “If we were with a 3PL we would definitely not be as profitable as we are. It’s been difficult to do, but I am glad we have done it,” says Edgerton.

He has just signed a lease on its first overseas warehouse in the Netherlands to better serve its customers in Europe, who account for about a third of its sales. “We almost doubled our sales in Europe last year and this year they are growing really quickly,” says Edgerton.

“We found as our average order value has increased it is getting closer to the €150 limit, the point above which the customer has to pay tax on the goods. We’ve spent a lot of money on freight and, running the numbers, again we realise we will end up with a net gain by opening up a warehouse in the Netherlands. We will actually save money by doing it.”

He is less convinced by the merits of opening physical shops, as many other ecommerce brands have done. “We are not going to jump into anything like that at the moment,” says Edgerton. “Potentially there is wholesale and there are ways that we can get into physical retail that are less risky than going gung-ho and opening lots of stores.

“We want to build this business in a controlled and disciplined manner. Let’s test the market first and if it works we’ll go all in.”

In 2021, the Edgertons sold a minority stake in their business for a “significant investment” to Lewis Morgan, a former school friend and the co-founder of Solihull-based gym wear brand Gymshark, who became executive chairman. In the trading year to March, the company paid its shareholders a £275,000 dividend, up from £62,500 the year before, with the directors receiving a low salary.

For the moment Edgerton said they had decided to reinvest, rather than extract more money from the business, despite it having £9 million in cash on its balance sheet at the end of its trading year. “This business is the biggest opportunity I might ever have in my life. I want to try to make the most of it. If we can invest the profit back into the business, and make more money, we can build a bigger and better business because of it,” he said.

AYBL was the No 1 company on The Sunday Times 100 in 2022, our annual ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies. To nominate your company for the 2025 programme visit thetimes.com/st100

The company said that Will Shu, 44, sold 9.4 million shares between September 12 and September 16, worth a total of £14.8 million, to “cover personal property investments”. Following the sale, he retains 95.8 million shares, the group said, adding that Shu does not take part in its annual bonuses or long-term share award schemes.

The sale comes a month after Deliveroo turned a profit for the first time and launched a £150 million share buyback. Its shares have risen by almost 30 per cent in the past 12 months.

For the six months to the end of June, the company reported a profit of £1.3 million, against an £82.9 million loss in the same period a year earlier.

The number of orders placed over the period rose 2 per cent to 147 million as food price increases and the cost of living squeeze began to ease, while its gross transaction value — the total value of all goods sold — rose by 5 per cent to £3.69 billion.

Founded in London in 2013, Deliveroo has come a long way from its humble beginnings when Shu, an American-born former banker, personally delivered pizzas to friends. Today the company is publicly listed, operating in ten markets with 140,000 delivery riders and partnering with about 180,000 restaurants.

It has had a turbulent life as a public company, with its float in April 2021 becoming something of a high-profile disaster. The shares floated at 390p with a value of £7.6 billion but fell by 30 per cent on the first day of dealings amid fears over the sustainability of its business model and concerns over the legal status of its riders.

Deliveroo was highly successful during the pandemic, when hospitality venues were forced to close. However, the cost of living crisis led to a decline in orders and it has since been expanding its range of non-food products. Last month it partnered with B&Q to deliver home improvement goods in as little as 25 minutes within London.

Shares were untroubled by Shu’s sell-off and closed up ½p, or 0.25 per cent, at 157¼p.

He added: “With that, it’s super exciting to see some very positive news for the company moving forward! Everybody may think we are done for, but Intel still has some fight left in us!”

Last Monday, the troubled American chipmaker finally had some good news for staff and investors, as it unveiled a multi-billion contract to make chips for Amazon. Intel also revealed it has secured up to $3 billion from the US government to help manufacture advanced chips for the military.

In a further boost it was reported on Friday that Intel had received a takeover approach from Qualcomm, the semi-conductor group, that would set a potential record-setting deal for the chip industry, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intel’s shares rose by 3 per cent on news of the possible bid to close at $21.84 on Friday, bringing its weekly gain to 9 per cent, but still down 54 per cent since the start of the year.

The announcements come six weeks after a bruising second-quarter earnings report, when Intel suspended its dividend and announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs as part of a drastic $10 billion cost reduction plan. It is also pausing the construction of plants in Germany and Poland by two years. The company’s cash flow has turned negative and it is weighed down by around $50 billion of debt.

So, is the turnaround plan started under Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief executive, starting to work? Gelsinger, 63, who started his career at Intel in 1979 as a quality control technician, took over as chief executive in 2021 after nearly a decade running VMWare, an American cloud computing company. He has set out to undo the errors of previous Intel leaders who had let Intel fall behind rivals after decades dominating the PC chip space. “This is a national asset,” he told analysts after taking over as chief executive. “This company needs to be healthy for the technology industry, for technology in America.”

Founded in Mountain View, California, in 1968, Intel is the only American company that both designs and manufactures advanced chips. It introduced the world’s first electronically programmable microprocessor in the 1970s which became a key part of servers and PCs. Later, the company helped to develop the USB in the 1990s.

As recently as 2020, it was the world’s largest semiconductor company, with $77.9 billion in annual revenue, compared to chip designer Nvidia Corporation’s $16.7 billion and chipmaker TSMC’s $45.5 billion.

However, Intel was subsequently overtaken by competitors as it focused on chip technology known as central processing units [CPUs] and missed out on the rise of graphics processing units [GPUs] for artificial intelligence. The GPU hardware, which Nvidia claims to have invented in 1999, can perform mathematical calculations on large datasets in parallel and at high speed.

Intel has also failed to gain market dominance for chip manufacturing with its foundry business, launched in 2010. Instead, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and Samsung Electronics Co have taken large shares of the market.

Last year, amid the AI frenzy, Intel reported annual revenue of $54.2 billion, behind Nvidia’s $60.9 billion and TSMC’s $69.3 billion.

In contrast, Nvidia’s shares, which had slipped 0.4 per cent to $116.30 over the same period this week, are up 141 per cent since the start of the year. Nvidia’s market capitalisation of $2.9 trillion is around 32 times the valuation of Intel at $88.3 billion.

When Gelsinger took over as chief executive of Intel, he set out to invest billions in building new advanced chip factories around the world. However, the factories will take years to come online and bear fruit.

Some investors have called for Intel to focus on one area, either design or manufacturing. Gelsinger has decided to continue to pursue both, but is splitting the operations by spinning off its foundry, or manufacturing business, into an independent subsidiary, which invites other companies to make chips at its foundry.

Amazon joins Microsoft, which agreed a tie-up with Intel earlier this year to use its foundry to create its own custom computer chip earlier this year. Intel previously only made chips for itself and was able to charge a premium for them because it had the manufacturing lead. However, since losing its lead to rivals, its chips have become less competitive, putting pressure on margins.

Foundry as an independent unit is a positive, said analysts at Mizuho Securities, as it will help to allay concerns around transparency for customers. However, they said that ramping up scale will be key for improving margins.

Daniel Morgan, a fund manager at Synovus Trust Co, which invests in Intel, said: “I think in the past, they were trying to do too much, because they were losing ground in the CPU [central processing unit] space to AMD [Advanced Micro Devices]. They missed out on the AI wagon, so to speak, against Nvidia. And then on top of that, they’re trying to build all these foundries. And so [in] their core business, they were lacking.

“And yet, they were doing things above and beyond, like Nvidia is not going around trying to build foundries in the US. I mean, they’re focused on bringing out the Blackwell [AI chip], right? Whereas Intel was trying to do so many different things, and I think, hopefully this division between their chip initiatives and in terms of what they’re doing with the foundries is hopefully going to help them get back on track, because they’ve been off track, really, for a couple years.”

Investors are hopeful that geopolitical risk around Taiwan, where the majority of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips are made by TSMC, will boost demand for Intel’s foundry business.

Intel has benefited from the Biden-Harris administration’s Chips and Science Act, passed two years ago to provide tax benefits, loan guarantees and grants to encourage US companies to build chip manufacturing plants in the US.

Jon Peddie, a California-based semiconductor company analyst, said making foundry independent won’t dent TMSC’s business. However, he believes Intel will be able to steal business from smaller fabs [semiconductor fabrication plants], and possibly Samsung.

Intel has faced concerns over overheating of its central processing unit [CPU] chips, in a blow to Gelsinger who has recognised the importance of “exceptionally engineered and relentlessly innovative chips” which he believes “will be the determining factor in the next phase of innovation for virtually every industry”.

After the latest update, Wall Street will be closely following any news on Falcon Shores, the GPU Intel is due to release next year, as well as Intel’s Gaudi chips, which could steal some market share from Nvidia’s AI chips.

Investors are also hoping for a seamless launch of Granite Rapids, a new server chip designed to power intensive computing in data centres, which Intel is due to start shipping in the present quarter, as well as Lunar Lake, Intel’s “next-generation” AI chip which powers PCs. Production began in July with shipments scheduled to start in the third quarter of this year.

One of Gelsinger’s biggest challenges will be maintaining staff morale and pride in the company, after it has been knocked off its pedestal for the first time in decades. “With layoffs and problems with products, morale will be dampened, but the people I’ve spoken to have faith in Pat because he doesn’t BS people, never has, so he has their trust,” Peddie said.

Could the company ever regain its position as the world’s largest semiconductor company? “Probably not for a few years,” Peddie said. “It took years to diminish the company’s position, it will take almost as long to restore it.”

Pronounced “coochinelli”, the founder of the eponymous company is as pally with real royals — Charles, for one — as he is with the royalty of Silicon Valley. The late Steve Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck? Cucinelli. Mark Zuckerberg’s classic grey T-shirt? A £390 Cucinelli.

In womenswear, think the quietly understated cashmere draped on Shiv Roy in the TV series Succession, or the whispered elegance of another Cucinelli chum, Gwyneth Paltrow.

You get nothing so gauche as a logo with this brand, but those in the know, know. “It is,” as one devotee at Goldman Sachs quipped to me over lunch last week: “What you wear when you’re walking on the tarmac from your limo to your private jet.”

Perhaps only Loro Piana and Hermes can claim similar elevated status in the world the fashion press call “quiet luxury”.

While lesser labels — Burberry, in particular — have been struggling amid a cost of living crisis and slow demand from China, Cucinelli has kept churning out the highest quality profit growth for its shareholders on the Milan stock exchange. In its recent half-year figures, the company posted 19 per cent profit growth to €105 million and a 14 per cent increase in turnover to €620.7 million.

The fact is, customers who happily drop £3,200 on the cotton men’s jacket currently featuring on the company’s website, never really feel the pinch, no matter how the rest of us are faring.

Given the discreetly loaded nature of his clientele, and the business he’s in, you might expect him to be a snooty type. But when he spies me across the hushed lobby at his HQ in the Umbrian countryside, he is anything but. “Ah!” he bellows, in loud Italian: “He is wearing a tie! Ha ha! Of course, how English!”

All in white, with a slim-cut, open-neck shirt and tapered cashmere cords that stop just above the ankle, within seconds he’s on me, fingering the material of my suit, praising its midnight blue colour while theatrically grabbing my shoulders, then shaking my hand. It’s like being jumped on by a six-foot Italian puppy dog.

The interpreter struggles to keep up as he enthuses about all things English, going faster than the beloved Bentley GT he drives down the hill to work in every day.

And what a hill that is. Cucinelli lives in a grand house in a medieval hilltop village in Umbria, a region famed for its knitwear industry. A cluster of caramel-stone houses around an ancient castle, this is Solomeo, a place he has made a key part of the Cucinelli brand.

His daughters, Camilla and Carolina, and their husbands, Riccardo and Alessio, all work in the business and live in handsome homes a few yards away with their children. They are all intimidatingly beautiful.

Solomeo, the home town of his wife (the pair were teenage sweethearts), had fallen on hard times until Cucinelli started to make serious money. When he floated his company in 2012, he cashed in €150 million and spent the lot renovating the area. Not only did he start doing up Solomeo itself, but he bought up the dilapidated industrial buildings in the valley below to return the land to nature.

“I said to my daughters: ‘This valley, it’s beautiful. We have to clean it out and turn it into orchards, vineyards. But it will mean we are €150 million poorer,’ and they said: ‘Yeah? Why not?’

The results are glorious. From the old castle tower that he uses as an office, to the hall he’s turned into a college teaching youngsters tailoring and other crafts, Solomeo is immaculate.

The valley looks straight out of a renaissance painting. “E vero, Of course,” he says, “Perugino [the 15th-century artist who taught Raphael how to draw], painted here.”

With his hand guiding the small of my back, he ushers me excitedly into the large, airy factory downstairs. I say “factory”, but it hardly looks like a factory at all. While there are dozens of Cucinelli-clad men and women stitching, tailoring and pressing garments, it feels more like a trendy open-plan office. Light floods in from huge floor to ceiling windows on all sides, each boasting a view of that delicious countryside.

Cucinelli, a keen student of classical philosophy, is famous in Italy for running his factories as an antidote to the sweatshops of fast fashion. The views, he says, are a key part of that.

“When we moved in, this place had no windows at all,” he says. “Like most factories, the idea was; if workers can see outside they will waste time looking. But that’s not natural. If I have a window and glance out 400 times a day, I waste 500 seconds but I live better. I become more creative as a consequence.”

It isn’t just the windows. Cucinelli’s staff start at 8am and stop at 1pm for an hour and a half lunchbreak, when they eat, for a nominal €3 at the excellent canteen. Then, siesta. “Some go home to see their children, some take a nap, it’s up to them, but in my opinion it’s very important to rest,” he says.

The shift ends at 5.30pm, when it’s home time, with work emails and phone calls strictly forbidden.

He says he pays his workers an average of about €2,100 a month: “That’s 20 per cent more than the average in Italy for this kind of work,” he says, adding that he cannot understand why other companies don’t do the same. When I suggest that’s because most can’t charge £1,000 for a pair of trousers, and outsource to China, he furrows his brow. “I’m not interested in Chinese ways.” The point is, he says, it’s not about the price, but the profit margin; “You know how much it costs me to pay my staff this handsomely? Just 1 per cent of my profitability a year.”

If other companies could sacrifice 1 per cent of their margin to boost their workers’ pay, “it could be a gamechanger,” he says. Cucinelli’s operating margins run at about 16-17 per cent, which is, indeed, lower than many luxury goods companies.

Now 71, he grew up in the countryside nearby. “I am a peasant,” he says proudly. His family were tenant farmers, and he recalls idyllic days helping in the fields. But Cucinelli padre eventually moved them to the city and got a job in a factory. Brunello was 15, and seeing the effect the grim conditions had on his father clearly moulded his approach to his 3,000 employees today. “I heard him complain about being humiliated by his employers. I saw him disappointed, upset, with teary eyes.”

After drifting somewhat in his early twenties, modelling for the Ellesse sports brand and hairdressers who would sometimes send him home with his locks died bright green or red, he had a sudden idea. “It was literally overnight,” he says. Benetton was making a fortune selling brightly-coloured Shetland wool jumpers; Cucinelli figured he could do the same, but with cashmere. Loading his first batch into a van, he hit the road, started selling, and hasn’t looked back since.

So, why is it that Burberry and other fashion brands are going through such tough times, while he is thriving? “I would say that, 12 to 14 years ago, Burberry had the most excellent, top quality product, made in England or made here in Umbria. They had a great way of working, and they had a great image. Then they decided to change, and that was their choice.”

A Burberry spokesman responds that, to the contrary, the brand has been busily bringing manufacturing back to the UK and Europe in recent years.

He has little sympathy for the big fashion houses warning of troubled times. “In 2019 to 2023, those very famous names, they doubled their turnover and raised their profit by 35 per cent. That doesn’t sound like a lot of trouble, does it?

“For us, over the past 20 years we basically grew by 11 per cent on average. That’s normal, not violent growth. If you grow violently, you will fail violently.”

When he floated, his advisers told him if he did not promise to expand the business 20 to 30 per cent a year, nobody would buy the shares. “I said don’t even remotely think about that. We want a growth rate of about 10 per cent and that’s that.”

Since then, despite a sharp fall along with the rest of the sector since spring, the shares are up 617 per cent even after a 5 per cent drift down since the start of the year. He and his family own roughly half of the shares, and the company’s market value is €5.66 billion.

His friend Sir Paul Smith puts Cucinelli’s success down to focus. “He’s the perfect example of beautiful quality Italian clothes. It’s a very complete style and doesn’t differ from that,” he says.

Paul Smith, like many other UK luxury brands, has been held back in Britain by the end of duty free shopping. Have Cucinelli’s London stores suffered? He shrugs: “For us, the UK is doing well. The duty-free issue does affect us a little, but the kind of target customers we have, even if they do not get their tax back, it’s not really an issue for them.”

We walk out into the sunshine, where a fountain is playing by a statue of the god Hermes. Is it a nod to the similarly named Parisian luxury rival? Not at all, the billionaire responds, “He’s the god of trade and commerce.” As we walk past, I’m sure I catch it smiling down on him.

Jonathan Brearley, the chief executive of Ofgem, said that the watchdog needs greater powers to hold the industry to account and tackle “very poor behaviours” at some companies and the individuals leading them.

The watchdog can impose fines on energy suppliers, generators and infrastructure providers that breach regulations and cause consumer harm. However, unlike the Financial Conduct Authority, the main City regulator, it does not have authority to publicly censure or levy financial penalties against the executives personally.

In an interview with The Times, Brearley, 51, said there were lessons that Ofgem could learn from the FCA.

“Part of the reason I look to the financial industry is because their regulator does have a broader range of powers. They’re able to hold executives to account, for example. So that if a director or a shareholder behaves in a way that damages customers, you can go after that person for compensation personally,” Brearley said.

Only 66 per cent of households are satisfied with the service they receive from their energy supplier, according to Ofgem’s latest consumer confidence survey, an improvement from the low of 62 per cent last year but still below 72 per cent before the pandemic.

Earlier this week, Ovo was forced to pay £2.4 million in compensation and redress payments for failings in handling customer complaints. Ofgem said that 1,395 Ovo customers were affected by lengthy delays in having their complaints addressed, with some waiting as long as 18 months.

Asked if that could include a crackdown on executive bonuses, similar to new powers set to be given to Ofwat, the water regulator, he said that was “to be decided”.

Labour has set out plans to give the water regulator the ability to ban bonuses if water quality standards are not met, under new legislation. Companies will also be made to ringfence spending for vital infrastructure rather than dividends, salary increases or bonuses.

“I think there are some fantastic companies in the energy industry. I’m not sitting here saying that everything is a disaster and everything needs to change,” Brearley said. “But I have to say, frankly, I’ve seen some very poor behaviours, both on an individual, as well as a corporate, level.”

Chris O’ Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, was paid £4.5 million for 2022, including a bonus of £1.4 million for “exceptional financial performance”, despite the scandal over British Gas, its retail supply arm, forcibly installing prepayment meters into the homes of vulnerable customers.

Ofgem is also consulting on a change in rules that would allow it to recoup money from failed suppliers under the insolvency process. Under the current regulations, suppliers that take on the customers of a failed rival can recoup the cost, which ultimately falls on billpayers.

The old rules dictated that investment companies must add their corporate costs on top of their management charges in a reported “ongoing charge fee”, as if they were paid directly by the shareholder. Critics argued this amounted to double-counting and in some cases made investment companies “uninvestable”.

The suspension of the rules represents a “leap forward”, Richard Stone, chief executive of the Association of Investment Companies, the industry body, said.

“It’s vital that these new rules recognise the unique characteristics of investment companies, permanently end misleading cost disclosures which distort the market, and enable investors to make better informed decisions,” he said. “Investment companies are a great UK success story and have a vital role in bridging the gap between private assets and public markets.”

The Treasury said it would lay legislation for its new framework for Consumer Composite Investments (CCI) “as soon as possible”.

Changing how these costs are reported could revive demand for investment trusts among big, cost-conscious investors such as pension funds, where a drop-off in demand has pushed shares in investment companies to trade 5 per cent below the value of their net assets on average.

Gavin Trodd, an analyst at Deutsche Numis, the broker, said the reform could remove one of the biggest headwinds for the sector, particularly for alternative asset funds that had been sold or overlooked by large wealth managers and multi-asset funds.

The government and the Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, said the new regime, starting in the first half of next year subject to parliamentary approval and the consultation process, would deliver “more tailored and flexible rules”.

The reforms are part of a wider programme to help reinvigorate the UK’s capital markets. Investment trusts are among some of the oldest companies listed in London, making up more than 30 per cent of the FTSE 250 index and together investing in more than £260 billion of assets.

Trusts have been increasingly reliant on buybacks to help support their share prices, having spent more than £2 billion on their own shares this year, the highest on record.

Private equity and infrastructure-focused investment trusts have been hit particularly hard by the cost issue. Infrastructure funds have spent almost three years without raising any capital on the primary market, according to Abrdn, the asset manager, putting it on track for the longest drought since the 2008 financial crisis.

Christian Pittard, head of closed-end funds at Abrdn, said the rules had “choked” flows into investment trusts, which invest billions of pounds into critical projects such as renewable energy infrastructure.

“Cost disclosure rules, which have amounted to a distortive double counting of costs, have negatively impacted investor sentiment, therefore choking flows into investment trusts.”

Separately, Nikhil Rathi, the FCA chief executive, said in a speech that there needed to be an “open conversation about the risks and trade-offs” required if the financial industry is to pursue innovative initiatives to boost financial inclusion in Britain.

“For example, AI-enabled hyper-personalisation of insurance could benefit many by providing more tailored premiums, but at the same time runs the risk of rendering some customers ‘uninsurable’, or even potential discrimination,” he said.

“The recent controversy surrounding dynamic pricing for Oasis concert tickets shows the need for vigilance. Just because something can be done, doesn’t necessarily mean the public will accept it.”

Roger Alton, a former longstanding Observer editor who retains friends in the newsroom, said there had long been a suspicion that Guardian bosses viewed his old newspaper “as being like that mad person in the attic in Jane Eyre”. Alton led the newspaper between 1998 and 2007, a period in which it had a circulation topped 400,000 and launched several successful supplements. He said The Observer always felt like “something they had to put up with, rather than embrace. Now they just want to get The Observer off their hands.”

The Observer might not be lurking in the canal-side north London offices of The Guardian for much longer. Last week brought the news that Tortoise Media, a start-up that specialises in podcasts, had entered exclusive negotiations to buy The Observer.

• Guardian Media Group in talks to sell The Observer

Although Tortoise made its first approach late last year, staff were caught unawares and are now in revolt amid fears over job security. Rivals are trying to work out why Tortoise is interested — and how a loss-making media start-up expects to turn a 233-year-old loss-making newspaper into a sustainable business. “I can’t get my head round it,” was the verdict of one industry chief executive. “I’m not sure what the rationale is.”

Founded in 2018 as a “slow news” antidote to the 24-7 media cycle, Tortoise has won industry acclaim for its podcasts and “think-in” events, whereby guests can contribute to debates in the newsroom. However, the company, led by James Harding, a former editor of The Times and director of news and current affairs at the BBC, has never made a profit. In 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, it made revenues of £6.2 million and an operating loss of £4.6 million.

The company is chaired by Matthew Barzun, 53, a former US ambassador to the UK, and counts Nick Jones, 60, the founder of Soho House, as a director. He provides advice on subscriptions, having built Soho House into an international chain.

Its largest shareholders include David Thomson, who chairs the news and financial data company Thomson Reuters; the hedge fund Lansdowne Partners; the venture capital firm LocalGlobe; and the investment firm of Robby Enthoven, the boss of Nando’s. Tortoise is raising more money, from existing and new investors, to fund its Observer plans.

Harding’s vision is to make The Observer his main brand and emulate the success of The Atlantic, a 167-year-old American magazine that recently turned a profit for the first time in years after building up a base of a million print and digital subscribers. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Harding declined to provide an estimate on when his combined company would become profitable.

Harding, 55, who has spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent, wants The Observer to continue to build on its international, business and sports coverage, much of which comes from Guardian journalists. “We want The Observer to have its own correspondents and reporters on those beats,” Harding said.

He plans to build up The Observer’s online presence. Harding said the physical newspaper also remained “hugely valuable to this whole proposition; one, as an important shopfront for your journalism; and two, as a platform for advertising”. Harding’s commitment to print will surprise many because newspaper printing and distribution will add significantly to Tortoise’s costs. Last week, amid growing print expenses, London’s Evening Standard stopped distributing a daily newspaper.

• Oliver Shah: The media kaleidoscope has been shaken. Quality digital news will win

The Observer is reckoned to have a print circulation of about 100,000, down from a peak of about 1.3 million in 1979. The Guardian’s average print run is likely to be smaller, but it stands as one of the world’s largest news websites, having established itself in the US market. Ipsos Iris estimates that it had 22 million UK online readers in July. Last year, the company made print reader revenues of £67 million, down 3 per cent, while its digital reader revenues — from app subscriptions and donations — were £88 million, up 8 per cent. Its advertising revenues, across print and digital, came to £62 million, down 13 per cent.

Tortoise and The Guardian are still ironing out the details of their deal and it is unclear to insiders how staff of The Guardian and The Observer will be separated after years of internal mergers. Harding said there could be a “transition period, which might take some time”, where The Observer newspaper includes some work from Guardian journalists and contributors. In the longer term, he wants to invest in building The Observer newsroom so it can stand alone.

Tortoise is pledging to retain the current operating costs of The Observer while also pumping in £25 million over the next five years. The Guardian has indicated that Tortoise’s financial commitments to the title are one reason why it is entertaining a bid; it wants to find a good steward for the paper. But the newsroom is far from convinced.

Guardian and Observer journalists who are union members held an emergency meeting last Wednesday, the day after they learnt of the Tortoise talks, and issued a statement opposing the deal and expressing a statement of “no confidence” in the Scott Trust, the newspapers’ not-for-profit owner.

Observer staff fear the move into a smaller company will compromise their job security; and their Guardian colleagues, many of whom spend a large portion of their week working for the Sunday title, worry about further cuts for them after a recent round of voluntary redundancies.

For The Guardian, the financial motivation for jettisoning The Observer is clear. The company reported a loss last week of £36.5 million in the year to March. Although it is difficult to break out figures for The Observer, most insiders recognise that it has long been a loss-maker.

The media operation is owned by the Scott Trust, a company named after CP Scott, the former Guardian editor and owner, which uses a large endowment fund to absorb losses and reinvests profits into journalism. In the owner’s annual report last week, the chairman, Ole Jacob Sunde, a Norwegian media entrepreneur, made clear that the Scott Trust was “not there to fill gaps in annual operating budgets… and we must be honest about areas of the business that are not part of our future growth and adapt”.

Douglas McCabe, a media expert at Enders Analysis, reckons The Observer has “been a bit of a headache for The Guardian for some time”. He added: “It’s an elegant solution, from that point of view.”

The counterargument from company management is that, after a 31-year marriage, The Guardian and Observer may now be better off apart. Their troops will take some convincing.