AMIT Bhatia is famous for several things. First, and possibly least relevant to his personal success and development, is the fact that he is billionaire Lakshmi Mittal’s son-in-law, made so after a lavish wedding - to Vanisha, in Versailles, France.
“Can we not talk about it, it’s so unimportant,” Bhatia has repeatedly pleaded over the years. Because it’s also true that the jewel-encrusted Indian high-life is not a true reflection of this QPR Football Club chairman and head of Swordfish Investments.
To Bhatia, family privilege is not as important as football, and certainly, not as important as the investor that he has become, and the sort of ventures that he is betting on, including his home country – Britain.For Bhatia is a true-bred Londoner, born here and resident here, despite his subcontinental background and family ties: in addition to his highsociety marriage, he was already the scion of a wealthy Delhi real-estate clan. He says, though, that his upbringing was not a straight-forward tale of privilege: “We were comfortable but unsettled. In India, we got three months off in the summer to travel, and my parents said they were going to show us as much of the world as possible.”
It was this uncertain, peripatetic childhood that awoke in Bhatia an interest in possibilities lying just out of reach and, ultimately, led him to the world of business and new, potentially lucrative projects.Bhatia studied at Cornell University in the USA, and he retains deeply fond memories and a strong feeling of connection with the Ithaca, NY, institution, to the extent that there’s now a campus coffee shop named after him – the Amit Bhatia Libe Café – following a $500k donation to the university library in 2011.
Instead of “pursuing the rat race of life” in Manhattan straight after graduating with a degree in Economics and Investment Management in in 2001, he took a year out for charity work in Ecuador. After that, it really was time for a career. “I went into investment banking,” he says. “I worked at Merril Lynch and then Morgan Stanley in New York.”
His New York financial career was curtailed by visa headaches after the 9/11 attacks so Bhatia came to London and worked at Credit Suisse for a time. But he was ready to go his own way. “By the time I moved here I realised it just wasn’t fun working for somebody else,”
he says. “I wanted to create value for myself. I wanted to control my own destiny and be my own boss. So I decided one day that I was going to quit and start an investment business.”Last year, Brexit worries were in the air. This year, Brexit worries are in the air, but perhaps the market has them priced in. Speaking to the GG2 Power List in 2018, Bhatia says, “Throughout its history, this little island of ours has found ways to innovate, solve problems and remain resilient.”
His father-in-law and Bhatia himself demonstrated their optimism by being the only Indian-origin businessmen to donate (£10,000 each) to Boris Johnson’s campaign over the summer to replace Theresa May as the Conservative Leader, which implies they trust that the UK can survive outside the EU.
He’s football crazy, and was Vice-Chairman of Queen’s Park Rangers until he quit in 2009.
Bhatia returned two years later when Tony Fernandes bought out the others. Then in August 2018 Fernandes moved on, saying the club needed a London-based chairman, and Amit happily stepped up.The club is a refreshing change from the world of finance. “The differences between most businesses and running a football club is you run business with your head not with your heart,” he says. “...whereas in a football club it is also based on your heart. Emotion plays a key part.”The good news is the new QPR training ground and football academy at Warren Farm in Southgate has got the all clear to begin construction.
Bhatia was also elevated to non-executive chairman of Breedon Group plc where he had served as deputy chairman. Breedon bought Hope Construction Materials, one of Bhatia’s great entrepreneurial successes, in 2016 for £336 million. Another big success was Bhatia’s investment in fledgling Finnish computer games company Supercell, which gave the world Clash of Clans.
His $500k stake became 500 times more valuable when Japanese conglomerate Softbank bought a 50 per cent stake for $3 billion.His hedge fund, Swordfish Capital Management, has now been shuttered, but it still holds a large stake in Roc Capital Management, which is “a statistical arbitrage quant fund” based out of New York.Foreseeing the gin revolution, Bhatia sold his US “pre-Prohibition” style craft-brand Aviation, to actor Ryan Reynolds, but is still invested in House Spirits Distillery. Swordfish has always been deep in technology as well. “We made an important investment in Shearwater,” says Bhatia, “a digital resilience company listed on AIM which has more than quadrupled in value. I believe cyber security is an incredibly interesting vertical, and Shearwater is at the forefront in the UK.”He is also betting on the transformation of healthcare with investments in two companies that use technology for direct online access between patients and specialists: Medici and Oscar.
In the end, Bhatia tries to be an ethical investor in the very widest sense. “By simply producing its product, making a profit and providing people with jobs, a company is already making a substantial contribution to a nation’s economy,”
he says. “But there is also a more sophisticated view. Businesses are in a unique position to make a much wider contribution and should see it as a responsibility rather than a choice to actively engage with the communities in which they are present.”
