Agency's Carcass Carted Off for a Few Million Pounds
by Zoe Strimpel
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 at 4:49 PM
I blogged in March about the final nail in the coffin of the once-great literary and entertainment agency PFD (Peters Fraser & Dunlop). The poach heard round the arts world was Andrew Wylie's fly-by-night snatch of the Evelyn Waugh estate, considered to be the last vestige of the house's former stature. London sneered and marveled as PFD suddenly imploded last fall in a mass exodus of clients from Tom Stoppard to Keira Knightley.
Now a new twist, as the former editor of the Sunday Times and broadcaster Andrew Neil is to pay a laughably little £4 million ($7.89 million, all the same a princely sum given the circumstances) for the carcass of the company. This is a third of what the sports marketing firm CSS Stellar paid for PFD in 2001 and the same amount the agency was reported to have asked of CSS for a buyout last year. For now, everybody is confused as to just what Mr. Neil's motivations are.
"Everyone's wondering what in heaven's name he thinks he has bought and whether there is anything left in it," one senior publishing insider was reported to have told the Times.
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