Jim Slater (accountant)

By 2009, Slater was chairman of BioProjects International PLC, deputy chairman and finance director of Galahad Gold, and investment director of Agrifirma.

Whilst working for AEC as a director, Slater fell ill and during his recovery became interested in investing, and developed a system for picking stocks which would much later form the basis of his book The Zulu Principle (1992). He then approached his friend Nigel Lawson, at that time the City Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and was hired to write an investment column under the pseudonym 'Capitalist'. Over the following two years, Capitalist's ghost portfolio appreciated by 68.9%, against the London Stock Market's average of 3.6%.

The acquisition and disposal of company assets in this manner became known as "asset stripping", a phrase term that carries with it connotations of hardship and distress associated with the human costs of unemployment. Some years later, Slater acknowledged the drawbacks that were inherent in the practices he adopted, towards the end of an interview with Hunter Davies in The Independent published on 15 December 1992.

Slater then acted as mentor to business partner Ian Watson, through which Watson founded Centennial Minerals in 1982. It owned a major share in the Montana Tunnels gold mine, and was sold to Pegasus Gold at a substantial profit three years later. The pair formed Galahad Gold in 2002, successfully timing the commodities boom to make annualised 66% profits from gold exploration before winding the company down in 2007 and starting a new joint-venture, Agrifirma, this time investing in Brazilian agricultural farmland.

In 1976, Slater had formed a 50:50 venture with Tiny Rowland's Lonrho Group, to buy-up undervalued blocks of flats in London. At its peak, the company owned and managed over 1,500 flats. This business model led Slater to form Salar Properties, which through time share leasing of salmon fishing rights on seven of Scotland's rivers, including the Lower Redgorton beat on the River Tay, by the 1980s had become the largest Scottish fishing venture.

During the secondary banking crisis in 1975, Slater Walker faced financial difficulties and received support from the Bank of England. Slater resigned as chairman in October 1975, because the government of Singapore began to try to extradite him from the UK for alleged offences by the company in Singapore referring to the alleged misuse of more than £4 million of company funds in share deals. The Singapore government's attempt to extradite Slater (in which it was represented by Derry Irvine, assisted by Tony Blair and Cherie Booth) was dismissed by the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate at Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court in 1977. In separate proceedings, following the takeover of the company by the Bank of England, a prosecution was brought against Slater by the Department of Trade alleging 15 counts of offences under the Companies Act. Slater was found guilty of the Companies Act offences and fined £15 per count. However, the court accepted that the offences were purely technical, that Slater had not acted dishonestly and that there was no question of him having made any personal gain through committing them.

Slater's hobby was chess. Amongst other sponsorships, he donated $125,000 to help fund the 1972 World Chess Championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, Iceland, doubling the total prize fund.

Slater married his wife Helen in 1965. They lived in Surrey and had four children and ten grandchildren.

In 1964, Slater acquired control of H Lotery & Co Ltd, a £1.5m public company; he and his business partner Peter Walker – a Conservative MP – renamed it Slater Walker Securities. The company performed what became known as corporate raids on public, mainly industrial, companies, in which Slater would sell off under-performing assets to improve efficiency. Slater commented, "we are money makers, not thing makers".

James Derrick Slater (13 March 1929 – 18 November 2015) was a British accountant, investor and business writer. Slater rose to prominence in the 1970s as a businessman and financier, who was the founding Chairman of Slater Walker, an investment bank and conglomerate which collapsed in the secondary banking crisis of 1973–75.

Born in 1929 in Heswall – at that time in Cheshire – Slater qualified as a chartered accountant aged 24, and joined the Dohm Group. Quickly promoted, he became a general manager, reorganising all the company's small industrial holdings into one company within the group. After leaving Dohm, he was appointed secretary and chief accountant of Park Royal Vehicles, a wholly owned subsidiary of ACV Group. He was then made commercial director of its subsidiary AEC. After Leyland Motors took over ACV, Slater was later promoted to deputy sales director under Donald Stokes.