Not a bad little earner

This was going to be a court case that promised everything. Money, high society, glamour and a smattering of sex. It also promised to blow the lid off how the City of London's funds management business worked.

Alas, all these tit-bits were denied when John Duffield, the founder of Jupiter Asset Management, dropped his case against Commerzbank.

The Hun bankers had bought 75 per cent of Duffield's operation for £679 million five years ago and offered £425 million for the rest earlier this year. Seems like a reasonable deal, but Duffield reckoned they had underpaid by a mere £80 million.

The long-term staff at Jupiter, including the secretaries, took Commerzbank's offer, but Duffield hung out and eventually the Huns paid, but gave the City whiz-kid the flick.

Which is why they were in court, because Duffield claimed £15 million for wrongful dismissal.

That figure would have an Australian fund manger in apoplexy.

Duffield ran Jupiter with an investment style described as "more artistic than scientific". Creativity and adventurousness was favoured; failure was not tolerated.

The court case was going to be lively, with 15 Jupiter staff ready to testify against Duffield, a man who regularly called his German bosses "Nazis" and "the Gestapo".

It would seem that Duffield had very few friends in the City. One member of the square mile said of the case: "It is one of the few times I wanted the Germans to win".

Another said of the £175 million windfall that it left him with "only £1 million a year for every year that a man of his stature can expect to live".

The case would have revealed Duffield's love of money. It would seem this desire was nurtured 31 years ago when as a young stockbroker, he married the only daughter of Sir Charles Clore, the founder of the Sears retail empire.

It would be fair to say the daughter was loaded and Duffield wasn't. It took the sale of Jupiter to put him on an equal footing with his now ex-wife.

"Money is how you keep the score," Duffield said. "I am very competitive. At the time I married her I think her father thought I married her for her money. Actually, I loved her.

"What I have always wanted to prove to myself and to her father, if he was still alive, is that I did marry her for love and not for money. I thought that if I had more money than her, that would prove it. I needed to prove it to myself, mainly to myself."

This boy doesn't beat about the bush. Mind you, Dame Vivien Duffield doesn't care much for her former husband either. She once described him as: "a lousy husband but an excellent fund manager".

There a few Australian wives who would agree with that sentiment. The settlement on the court case between Duffield and Commerzbank was achieved with two minutes to spare. The Huns are to pay £2.5m to Duffield and another £2.5m to a charitable trust. Each side will pay its own legal costs of around £1m.

Duffield's new funds management operation New Star Asset Management will take over the management of three funds from Jupiter, with assets of £300m. It's not a bad start for a new fund manager. There are a few Australian operations that would like a kick-start of that nature.

And Duffield has to have the last word on his former German bosses.

"I don't believe the Germans can allow entrepreneurs to flourish underneath them," he says. "The discipline they want to impose is incompatible with being a successful entrepreneur.

"There is a cycle to these things. An entrepreneur starts a business; he builds it up then he sells it to a big institution who will, over a period of time, kill it. In the meantime the entrepreneur, if it's me, will start again."

You can't keep a good man down. Just ask his ex-wife.