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Partners at elite UK boutique consultancy Robbie Warshaw have split profits of £40.5mn in the firm’s final full year before its takeover by US investment bank Evercore.
Annual accounts published on Saturday revealed that the firm’s highest-paid partner, believed to be former Morgan Stanley banker Sir Simon Roby, was paid £23.8 million for the year to March.
These accounts, which cover the year before the firm’s agreed $196 million sale to Evercore in July, underline Roby’s position as one of the best-paid dealmakers in Europe. Robbie has earned over £200 million since 2013.
The firm generated revenues of around £56mn for the year, down from the previous year’s record turnover of £86mn. Evercore acquired Robbie Warshaw as the advisory firm steps up its challenge to compete in the top tier of global investment banks in Europe.
Robbie Warshaw’s partner ranks expand in 2021 to include former UK Chancellor George Osborne. He moved to a job at OpenAI this week.
While at the firm, Osborne helped secure a high-profile mandate in the role of advising on the purchase of Chelsea Football Club by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, as well as advising on the troubled two-year sale of Telegraph Media Group.
Osborne received very little from the firm’s roughly $200 million acquisition, which is in line with how Robbie Warshaw has paid his senior dealmakers in recent years, the Financial Times reports.
Along with Roby, the firm’s co-founders are former UBS banker Simon Warshaw and former Morgan Stanley banker Philip Apostolides. Last year, it hired former JPMorgan Aviva executive Chetan Singh as a partner.
According to accounts published at Companies House, the total remuneration of the company’s 16 employees, excluding its five partners, was about £11 million for the year, down from £12.4 million the previous year.
The results have been released in a year in which dealmaking in the UK has accelerated due to increased interest from overseas buyers. According to London Stock Exchange Group data, mergers and acquisitions in Britain this year totaled about $367.3 billion.
Robbie Warshaw has continued his involvement in advising on high-profile situations this year, such as the £2.65bn acquisition of high street lender TSB by Symantec and Johnson Matthey’s sale of its catalyst technology business to Honeywell for £1.8bn.
The company is also advising ITV in negotiations to sell its television business to Sky in a potential £1.6 billion deal.
