| Eadie: keen to get things off his chest | ||||||
If people thought the out-of-court settlement between Unilever and Merrill Lynch had laid the whole affair to rest, they were wrong.
A gathering of the great and good of UK fund management assembled in the Chartered Accountants Hall in the City last month to pore over the implications for their industry of the pension fund's negligence suit against its asset manager. The star speakers were two men thwarted in their attempts to influence the trial by its early conclusion: expert witnesses Dugald Eadie and Tony Dye.
Although strictly speaking expert witnesses are supposed to act for the court, Eadie, the former head of Henderson Investors, was effectively due to give evidence on behalf of Unilever and Dye, the ex-investment chief of Phillips&Drew, would have been Merrill Lynch's witness.
Neither got the chance to run the gauntlet of QCs Jonathan Sumption and Ian Glick as the case ground to a halt with Merrill Lynch handing over an undisclosed sum in damages.