Star financier who has made giving a high art - The Standard

Life changed for £5m Tate Modern donor after his near-death experience on a German autobahn

INTERVIEW
CHRIS BLACKHURST
CITY EDITOR
STANDARD

AT THE Chelsea Flower Show on Monday night, John Studzinski bought The Secret Life of Trees. While other City highrollers networked furiously, Studzinski slipped away and browsed the book stall. “I love dogs and I love trees. Not because dogs pee on trees. I love them both separately.”

It was so Studzinski. Nobody shook more hands at Chelsea or worked the gathering more than “Studs” - but he still found time to indulge his passion for the aesthetic.

It was like that earlier in the day. In the morning, he was working in his office at Blackstone, the US private equity powerhouse in Berkeley Square. Then he was at the Lilian Baylis School in Lambeth to promote a giant sleepover at the Tate Modern. He’s a trustee of the gallery and this week he’s given £5 million to the building’s new extension. “I believe in Nicholas Serota, I believe in Tate Modern and I also believe I have more credibility as a fund-raiser if I give something myself,” he says.

He’s a very private person who rarely gives interviews about himself. When I caught up with him it was after the donation had been announced. He feels strongly we must give more than we do to good causes. “Everybody has commitments in their private life, to their family and, if they have them, to children. But people should have a view that a certain amount of their income should go to charity.” He adds: “It’s important I don’t preach or be too dogmatic about it. No two people approach the planet in the same way — I accept I am fortunate, that I can structure my life in such a way to devote a lot of my time and money to charity.”

To say he’s fortunate, by general reckoning, is an understatement. He’s 51, has earned tens of millions of pounds in his career in banking, including an estimated £25 million from three years at HSBC, and now receives what can only be a substantial amount as global head of corporate advisory services and member of the executive committee of the soon-to-be floated Blackstone.

While his success and wealth put Studzinski in the top drawer of bankers and financiers, his philanthropy distinguishes him. As well as the Tate, he is founder of the European arm of Human Rights Watch, a former chairman of Business Action for the Homeless, a trustee of The Passage, the London homeless centre, and runs his own Genesis Foundation that supports young artists. In all, he gives away about half his pay each year.

He’s a devout Catholic who was made a Knight of the Order of St Gregory by Pope John Paul II for his humanitarian work (his 1771 Robert Adam house in Chelsea has its own private chapel, complete with candlesticks that used to belong to Ignatius Loyola, and he set up Genesis after commissioning an opera to celebrate the 75th birthday of Cardinal Basil Hume).

“Blackstone is my 24/7 job,” he says. “I’ve organised myself to be in the charitable sector since I was a child and doing things with the homeless. If you try hard enough you can make charity a way of life. In my case, I tend to get involved - I’m not interested in charity look-at-me photography. So many charities call to take our money and not your complexity.”

He laughs - “with me, they have to take my complexity.” He’s single and lives in sumptuous, well-organised style in London, New York and New England (where his trees are a pride and joy). His antique and art-filled house in London has a domestic staff, including a uniformed butler. Works by Man Ray and Picasso adorn the walls. He leaves nothing to chance. His chauffeur-driven car has two phones in the back — one for Vodafone and the other for O2, in case he can’t get a connection.

STUDZINSKI’S London dinner table seats royals (the Duchess of Kent is a friend, and it was Studzinski who took Princess Diana along The Strand to meet those sleeping rough in doorways), British and European aristocrats, leading figures from the arts (Sting, PD James), business (Lord Browne is a very close chum), media and the church (Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor). But his famous guests will also be joined by the less well-known, from among  those who work in his charitable projects. He may not have children of his own but he has 39 godchildren who stand to inherit his art. His money he will give away during his lifetime - he doesn’t believe in what he calls “postmortem philanthropy”, saying: “It’s better to give when you’re alive, to see what good the money’s doing.”

He spends lavishly. His 50th birthday party was held in the Leopoldskron Palace in Salzburg - used as the Von Trapp family residence in The Sound of Music. The 100 guests, including children, were treated to opera performances and what locals billed as the largest firework display Austria had ever seen. Studzinski was embarrassed when news of the extravaganza broke and worried to friends he thought with hindsight it was over the top.

He’s an American, the son of Catholic Polish immigrants. “My mother and father put themselves through school and devoted most of their lives to hard work, good values and education. There was a lot of focus in my early life on music, education, reading, travel. Sleep was not much encouraged. We went to bed at 10 and were up at five to practise the piano for an hour or to read a book.” He went to one of the country’s best-known boarding schools, St Paul’s, and then to Bowdoin, a liberal arts college.

He started at Morgan Stanley in New York in 1980. Studzinski has always had a view of investment bankers as not just being there to take commissions but “to add value”. Their role, he says, is to be “constructive allocators of resources”. He applies the same philosophy to his giving, convinced we can’t take it with us when we go and our duty when we’re alive is to “reallocate resources in society”.

In 1984, he was sent to London by Morgan Stanley and he’s stayed here ever since, acquiring a British passport. “London is psychologically my home. I love New York. I suppose I’ve got the dream situation — I can live in London and work in New York.”

Three years after he came here, he was being driven to dinner in Germany with the finance director of Hertz. His car became involved in a pile-up and six people died, including his driver. Studzinski lost a lung. It was, he says, a “near-death experience... I felt myself looking down on the scene of the crash below me... the next moment I was down in the back of the car, bruised and broken and in pain. Someone had decided that I wasn’t about to die”. His life changed — he became more religious and his philanthropy took off in earnest. Though Catholic, he’s also a Buddhist. His donating, he says, is based on the Buddhist belief in selfawareness. “Everything I get involved in tends to revolve around that. Homelessness, human rights, giving young artists a chance - they’re all about raising self-esteem and giving people their dignity.”

After 23 years at Morgan Stanley, where he rose to head European investment banking, he left for HSBC. It was not the happiest of marriages. Studzinski had grown used to the Wall Street bulge-bracket style of investment banking; HSBC was much more conservative and structured in its approach. His brief was to build a department. He lured executives from other banks - provoking fury and jealousy. Externally, rivals lined up to criticise him while internally there were those who questioned the wisdom of what the bank was doing.

In the end, he left, although he remains on good terms with his former senior colleagues and is an adviser to the HSBC board. There’s no disguising, though, that he’s better suited to the more freewheeling Blackstone. “I’m as happy at Blackstone as I was at Morgan Stanley. Blackstone’s people really are the brightest and the best - they’re some of the most innovative people I’ve ever met.”

He’s got to go - he’s got a plane to catch. He’s smiling and clearly enjoying himself - and that can only be to the benefit of Blackstone, of Studzinski and of British arts and charities.

LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN STUDZINSKI
BORN: 1956
EDUCATION: Bowdoin College, Maine, USA; University of Chicago (MBA)
FIRST JOB: graduate trainee, Morgan Stanley
KEY CAREER MOVES: head of European investment banking division, Morgan Stanley; deputy chairman, Morgan Stanley International; co-head, investment banking, HSBC; global head of corporate advisory services group, Blackstone, based in New York and London
INTERESTS: theatre, opera, arts, dogs, trees, running