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The cofounder and CEO of semiconductor and software maker Nvidia saw the future of computing more than a decade ago, and began developing products that could power the artificial intelligence era. Thanks to that vision, and relentless execution, his chipmaker today is perhaps the hottest company in Silicon Valley. And it may just be getting started.

Halfway through dinner at Evvia, a bustling Greek restaurant in downtown Palo Alto that Apple cofounder Steve Jobs used to frequent, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang rolls up his shirtsleeve to show his tattoo

Huang’s two adult children, speakeasy proprietor Spencer and hospitality professional Madison, also have tattoos. But at 54, their father, cofounder and CEO of the red-hot Silicon Valley semiconductor and software company Nvidia (nvda), so far has only this one, an abstract version of the company’s logo. He got it about a decade ago.

“Every six months we have an off-site,” Huang says, leaning back in his chair to tell the story. “And at one, someone said, ‘What are we gonna do when the stock price hits $100?’ That was two splits ago. One person said they’d shave their head, or paint their hair blue, or get a mohawk, or something. And another said they’d get a nipple ring. And then by the time they come around to me, it was already at tattoo level. So I said, ‘Yeah all right, I’ll get a tattoo.’ Huang, who was born in Taiwan, isn’t most Fortune 500 CEOs. For starters, he’s the rare cofounder still running his company 24 years later. He is both a trained electrical engineer (Oregon State; Stanford), and a formidable executive who leads employees with encouragement, inquiry, and often flurries of vacation emails. (Sent during his, not theirs.) And he is, according to many people in the industry, a visionary who foresaw a blossoming market for a new kind of computing early enough to reposition his company years in advance.

That vision and his company’s incredible financial performance make Huang the clear choice as Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year for 2017.

“Jensen is one of those rare individuals who combines incredible vision with ruthless focus on execution,” says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. “Now with Nvidia’s focus on artificial intelligence, the opportunities for leadership are endless.”

“Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—I put Jensen in that group,” says Todd Mostak, CEO of MapD, a San Francisco database company in which Nvidia has thrice invested.

Nvidia is developing artificial intelligence systems that can take advantage of the more than 1 billion video cameras in cities to help manage everything from traffic congestion to parking.

Courtesy of Nvidia

If you haven’t heard of Nvidia, you can be forgiven. It doesn’t make a chat app or a search service or another kind of technology meant to appeal to the average smartphone-toting consumer. No, Nvidia makes the muscular mystery stuff that powers all of it. Its GPUs, or “graphics processing units,” crunch the complex calculations necessary for cryptocurrency markets, so-called deep neural networks, and the visual fireworks you see on the big screen. The same technology that makes brutally realistic shooter games come alive helps self-driving cars take an “S” curve without assistance—enabling computers to see, hear, understand, and learn.

Booming demand for its products has supercharged growth at Nvidia. Over the past three full fiscal years, it has increased sales by an average of 19% and profits by an astonishing 56% annually. In early November the company reported results that once again blew past Wall Street’s estimates, with earnings per share 24% higher than expected. In its past four quarters, it has generated total sales of $9 billion and profits of $2.6 billion.

Such results have made Huang’s company a darling of investors. Nvidia’s share price, just two years ago hovering around $30, was recently over $200. Its market capitalization, at about $130 billion, is approaching that of IBM and McDonald’

Nvidia meanwhile has so far managed to retain its roughly 70% market share in GPUs despite competition from formidable rivals—among them Intel and AMD ()—who want their share of the billions in chip sales to come from this new tech revolution. “IBM dominated in the 1950s with the mainframe computer, Digital Equipment Corp. in the mid-1960s with the transition to mini-computers, Microsoft and Intel as PCs ramped, and finally Apple and Google as cellphones became ubiquitous,” wrote Jefferies equity analyst Mark Lipacis in a July note to clients. “We believe the next tectonic shift is happening now and Nvidia stands to benefit.”

Or as Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, put it on air in November: “Nvidia is one of the great companies of our time.”

Battling with the world’s biggest tech companies for A.I. supremacy was far from Jensen Huang’s mind when he cofounded Nvidia with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. At the time, Malachowsky and Priem were engineers at Sun Microsystems, and Huang was a director at San Jose chipmaker LSI Logic. Malachowsky and Priem had lost a political battle within Sun over the direction of its technological development and were itching to leave. Huang, just 29 years old, was on firmer ground. The three men met at a Denny’s restaurant near Huang’s home to discuss what they believed was the proper direction for the next wave of computing: accelerated, or graphics-based, computing. Huang walked away from the meal with enough conviction to leave his position at LSI.

“We believed this model of computing could solve problems that general-purpose computing fundamentally couldn’t,” Huang says. “We also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games was our killer app—a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.”

With $40,000 in the bank, Nvidia was born. The company initially had no name. “We couldn’t think of one, so we named all of our files NV, as in ‘next version,’ ” Huang says. A need to incorporate the company prompted the cofounders to review all words with those two letters, leading them to “invidia,” the Latin word for “envy.” It stuck.

Nvidia’s early employees moved into an office in Sunnyvale, Calif., by the Lawrence Expressway. “It was a small office. We had lunch around a Ping-Pong table. We shared a bathroom with another company,” recalls Jeff Fisher, the company’s first salesman and currently an executive vice president. “The Wells Fargo bank that shared our parking lot got robbed two or three times.”

Nvidia’s first product, a multimedia card for personal computers called NV1, arrived in 1995 at a time when three-dimensional games began to gain traction. The card didn’t sell well, but the company kept tinkering with its technology over four more releases, gaining sales—and traction vs. rivals 3dfx, ATi, and S3—each time.

“We knew that in order for us to scale as a company, we had to provide more value than just a replaceable component in a PC,” says Fisher. “We had so much more value to add than just a commodity.”

A successful IPO on the Nasdaq in 1999 set in motion a flurry of milestones for Nvidia. That year it released the GeForce 256, billed as the world’s first GPU. In 2006 it introduced CUDA, a parallel computing architecture that allowed researchers to run extremely complex exercises on thousands of GPUs, taking the chips out of the sole realm of video games and making them accessible for all types of computing. In 2014, the company revived a failing bid for the smartphone business by repositioning those chips, called Tegra, for automotive use. Over time, these moves proved prescient, unlocking new revenue streams for Nvidia in industries such as defense, energy, finance, health care, manufacturing, and security.

“There were some rough years there,” says Rev Lebaredian, a Hollywood veteran who serves as vice president of Nvidia’s GameWorks and LightSpeed Studios units. “Look at our stock price, say, 10 years ago. The world didn’t quite realize what we were building. What we’re doing is foundational to humanity. This form of computing is too important for it not to be valuable.”

Key to Nvidia’s ability to endure years of market doubt, Lebaredian adds, is Huang—a leader with deep conviction in the potential of graphics technology and an ability to think in 10-year time horizons.

While Huang says he didn’t anticipate how self-driving cars would evolve or when A.I. would arrive, he had utter conviction in the superiority of graphical computing. So he invested to make sure his company was ready to capitalize on the opportunities created by a major shift in tech. “I’ve been talking about the same story for 15 years,” Huang tells me. “I’ve barely had to change my slides.”

Dozens of people patiently stand outside awaiting the grand opening of Endeavor, Nvidia’s massive new headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. The 500,000-square-foot structure is nothing less than imposing. A triangular foil to Apple’s circular new headquarters six miles away—its shape is drawn from the building block of computer graphics, the triangle—Endeavor’s glassy facade rises up over the San Tomas Expressway like the bow of a starship coming into port.

Unofficially, Endeavor has been open for a month, allowing more than 2,000 employees to acclimate to its tree-house-like structure. (Staffers enter from an underground parking garage and ascend at its center.) Today some 8,000 people are expected to stream through the doors for an open house for employees and their families. There are stations prepped with lines of finger food and beverages. Face painters await an inevitable onslaught of children. The smell of sawdust and paint lingers in the halls.

Inside, triangles abound. Floor tiles, privacy screens, lobby couches, window decals, skylights, cafeteria counters, even cross braces for the structure itself—all in shapes with three points. In a continuation of the theme set by Endeavor’s name, the building is bursting with rooms nodding to science fiction: Altair IV, Skaro, Skynet, Vogsphere, Hoth, Mordor.

Huang doesn’t keep an office, preferring to move around the building nomad-like, setting up shop in a variety of conference rooms. When Fortune visits, he’s taken up temporary residence in one called Metropolis, after the 1927 silent film—but the CEO is not present. A container stuffed with Clif Bars rests at the center of the table. Rolls of blueprints lie across a chair to the side.

Nvidia demonstrated its A.I. for self-driving cars at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2017.

When I finally locate Huang, he is wearing his signature leather moto jacket and nibbling on breaded chicken strips from a cup as he strides across the sprawling cafeteria with at least two dozen employees and their families in tow. At Huang’s side are his wife, Lori, as well as his son and daughter, who flew in from Taipei and Paris, respectively, to surprise their father. The CEO is apparently in a bind. He is trying, but failing, to complete a design review of Endeavor that was scheduled before the doors opened. But he’s already inundated with guests seeking handshakes and selfies, and he can’t resist a single one.

Daughter Madison plays photographer as Huang moves to take a photo with a family of four. He takes one knee to get on the same level as their two kids. “You built this,” he says to the parents after the photo is taken, gesturing to the space around them. “Have a good time today.”

Huang will repeat a version of this exchange hundreds of times during the open house, sometimes with handshakes, sometimes with hugs. Indeed, over the course of four hours, the CEO sits only once, for a photo with a young girl who resists her mother’s calls for a smile. (In a fatherly feat, Huang manages to wring one out of her.) The line to greet him never subsides.

The spectacle is a vivid example of what many former and current Nvidia employees say is the company’s secret sauce: its culture. For a publicly traded technology company with more than 11,000 employees, Nvidia is surprisingly tight-knit. It’s a credit to the many long-serving staffers who remain at the company (badge numbers are issued in serial; the lower the number, the longer the tenure) and the business battles they’ve endured together. It’s also the product of a founder CEO who embraces community, strategic alignment, and a core value system that promotes the pursuit of excellence through intellectual honesty.

Rene Haas, a senior executive at British semiconductor design company ARM, recalls six-hour meetings where Nvidia’s general managers would offer the CEO status updates for their lines of business. If Huang didn’t like what he heard—a roadblock, a missed goal—he would move to solve the problem then and there. “A head of software, a mid-level engineer, it didn’t matter—he would call those people and bring them to the conference room and determine the root cause of the issue,” Haas says. “If something had to be reprioritized and rescheduled to get it back on track, he would do it in real time, and the rest of the meeting was aborted. It was incredibly liberating. And he would never do it in a way that was diminishing. It might feel like that at the beginning, but then you’d realize that he’s trying to expedite the process by getting the right people in the room.”

The scientific pursuit of truth resonates at all levels of the company, employees say, helping tamp down on the organizational politics that obstruct other companies’ progress.

Or as Huang explains it: “Nobody is the boss. The project is the boss.”

Nvidia’s CEO takes off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubs his bloodshot eyes, fatigued after hours of slapping backs and pumping palms. He plops down at a wooden table where his wife and two kids are seated as the last of the open house attendees exit the building. Staffers working the event begin to sweep up the area around him, picking up plastic cups, wiping surfaces, arranging chairs. His security guards stand alert.

Huang leans toward me and asks me to pose the questions I had intended to get to earlier, when he was still busy working the rope line. I ask him what he believes is the next major application of artificial intelligence technology—the next billion-dollar opportunity for Nvidia, category competitors like Intel and Qualcomm (qcom), and players like Google (googl), Facebook (fb), and Baidu.

“Nobody is the boss,” says Huang, explaining his egalitarian approach to problem-solving. “The project is the boss.”

“The thing that I believe is going to be really incredible that’s going to happen next is the ability for artificial intelligence to write artificial intelligence by itself,” he replies.

My eyes widen at the prospect as Huang continues. “In the future, companies will have an A.I. that is watching every single transaction—every business process—that is happening, all day long,” he says. “Certain transactions or patterns that are being repeated. The process could be very complicated. It could go through sales to engineering, supply chain, logistics, business operations, finance, customer service. And it could be observed that this pattern is happening all the time. As a result of this observation, the artificial intelligence software writes an artificial intelligence software to automate that business process. Because we won’t be able to do it. It’s too complicated.”

By now my head is spinning, lost in a bizarre vision that somehow combines the films Office Space, The Matrix, and Inception.

But Huang is still rolling. “We’re seeing early indications of it now,” he adds. “Generative adversarial networks, or GAN. I think over the next several years we’re going to see a lot of neural networks that develop neural networks. For the next couple of decades, the greatest contribution of A.I. is writing software that humans simply can’t write. Solving the unsolvable problems.”

Suddenly, a massive thud rips through the room, followed by the clatter of plastic cups. The space falls to a hush and Huang pauses, losing his train of thought. In one corner, two employees with overfilled arms had been precariously juggling the remnants of the wine and beer station. Gravity won.

“Lots and lots of perfectly good beer,” Huang says, breaking the silence. If only the humans in the room had detected the pattern; if only we were intelligent enough. “I felt that he was in an awkward position,” Huang says, hamming it up to giggles from the rest of his family. “My intelligence … I saw it coming. That’s why I was watching him. My eyes were getting bigger. It happened, exactly as I thought.”

It’s merely more evidence of Huang’s ability to see into the future.

A version of this article appears in the Dec. 1, 2017 issue of Fortune.

Tesla’s design aesthetic, which has been led by Franz von Holzhausen, has helped it amass a committed fan base as well as some equally passionate detractors. Regardless of whether a person loves or loathes them, a Tesla is unmistakable.

The Tesla Semi, the all-electric heavy-duty truck CEO Elon Musk unveiled Nov. 16, is no different. And not just because it shares a number of parts with its new mass-market passenger vehicle the Model 3, including the same motor, handles, and display screen.

Fortune had a chance to get inside the Tesla Semi before the reveal. Here are the details that stood out.

Approaching the cab, you immediately notice the angled windshield wipers—which look a lot like the one on the new Roadster prototype unveiled at the same event—and the shiny chrome door handles that are also on the new Model 3 passenger vehicle.

There are no exterior steps like you might find on a traditional truck. Instead, the door is long and low. Once the door is opened a set black steps are inside.

Walking up the short, steep steps, a long handle ready for support if needed, you arrive at the landing. This area is essentially divided into two areas. The big takeaway here is there is quite a bit of space, and the ceiling height is high enough to allow a person to stand upright. Towards the front of the cab is a central captain’s chair that is flanked by two display screens, one on each side. The screens are the same as the one inside the Model 3.

The captain’s chair has air suspension, giving it a bouncy feel. Sitting the chair you immediately become aware of how forward you’re sitting. Designers were able to push the seating area forward in this cab because there is no engine, transmission, and other traditional diesel truck bits to get in the way. The result is similar to what it feels like to drive a VW bus.

In the cockpit area, there are a number of cup holders. Many, many cup holders. There are also several areas to stow items, including in the door.

The photo below isn’t the best representation of the actual size of the interior, which in person seems bigger.

Behind the captain’s chair, and to the right, is a secondary seat that is stiffer and without the bounciness of the main one.

In the back there are two overhead compartments that are similar to what you might find in an airplane.

Keep in mind, that the Tesla Semi revealed last week is a testing prototype. Which means it will likely go through a series of small changes as the company prepares to produce it. It’s also possible that production of the Tesla Semi will be delayed, or fail altogether. The company is already facing enormous challenges as it tries to work through production issues with its mass-marketing passenger vehicle, the Model 3, and the growing list of other projects the company is pursuing.

Tesla will go up against other companies trying to develop electric semi-trucks and smaller delivery vehicles. Other potential rivals include Bosch, Cummins, and Daimler. A number of companies such as Siemens have pilot programs already in place to test the viability of electrifying commercial trucks. And there are a few startups also pursuing the some variant of that electric trucking or delivery van goal, including Chanje, Nikola, and Wrightspeed.

It was in the early hours of a Saturday morning that I admitted 83-year-old Mrs J, who was brought in feeling unwell and drowsy with a chesty cough.

After carrying out investigations, we treated her for a chest infection with antibiotics and fluids. I was called back an hour later. Mrs J was not well. Her blood pressure was dropping, her lips swelling and she had started to develop a rash. It became evident she was allergic to the antibiotic we had given her.

Mrs J suffered. She suffered because we did not have the right information at the right time. We did not know she was allergic to this particular antibiotic. In our day and age, where so much information is available at our fingertips, this is unacceptable.

This experience made me reflect on the incomplete information and avoidable inconsistencies we clinicians deal with on a daily basis when making critical decisions.

In other areas of life, access to information is often more straightforward. I felt frustrated that while I could see an opportunity to improve clinical practice by making more patient information more readily available, I lacked the skills to make this happen.

Around the same time, as part of my national policy role, I was assisting Prof Robert Wachter with his review of how technology is used in NHS hospitals.

Commissioned by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, Wachter’s review focused on how well the NHS workforce, in particular, clinicians, used digital technology and information. While accompanying Wachter on visits to NHS sites across the country, sitting in on interviews with doctors and nurses and listening to similar experiences from other clinical colleagues, I realised that I was not alone in wanting to do more.

Many frontline staff reported feeling frustrated by the current state of play but also that they felt out of their depth in trying out new ways of delivering care digitally. This led to one of the review’s key recommendations: that the NHS in England needs to grow and strengthen its field of health technology leaders to help guide people in greater use of technology to improve patient care.

Healthcare is an information rich industry. As clinicians, the more information we have, the more able we are to make the best decisions for our patients. What we need is a cadre of digitally skilled healthcare professionals who can make the right information available to the right people at the right time. If we do this, we can deliver huge benefits to patient care. For example, electronic prescribing, which supports doctors and nurse practitioners to prescribe medications accurately by making information – including patient allergies – available wherever they go, have been shown to reduce sometimes fatal medication errors by up to 50%.

A 2016 Chief Clinical Information Officers Networksurvey of its members revealed that 76% of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that the NHS has enough clinicians trained in health information technology and informatics. There are pockets of excellence across the NHS but the landscape as a whole is disjointed.

Many NHS chief clinical information officers and chief information officers have developed careers in a piecemeal fashion. If the NHS is serious about digital transformation then we need to raise our game and strive for excellence in training. Investing in technology is important but equally important is investing in the people tasked with making it work for clinicians and patients.

A report published by a House of Lords select committee (pdf) in April, following a year-long inquiry into the long-term sustainability of the health service, concluded that the biggest internal threat to its future is the lack of strategy to secure an appropriately skilled, well trained and committed workforce.

Which is why we launched the NHS Digital Academy – in partnership with Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Medical School – at the Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester.

The academy will offer – for the first time – a national, fully funded and world-class programme of education that will upskill NHS managers and clinicians to drive through the transformation the health service needs. They will learn about leadership and change management, health informatics and data analytics, health systems and user-centred design and citizen informatics, to name a few. Applications for the programme will open later this year and it will kick off early next year.

The NHS is investing £6m to produce 300 highly skilled technology leaders who will ensure that everyone in the health service benefits from the opportunities technology and informatics offer to healthcare and that no one is left behind. The academy will contribute significantly to the growing digital health and informatics industry in the UK and help nurture and shape the workforce the NHS needs to survive.

Dr Harpreet Sood is associate chief clinical information officer at NHS England and a practising NHS doctor

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In his wonderful book The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt traces the origins of the Renaissance back to the rediscovery of a 2,000-year-old poem by Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). The book is a riveting explanation of how a huge cultural shift can ultimately spring from faint stirrings in the undergrowth.

Professor Greenblatt is probably not interested in the giant corporations that now dominate our world, but I am, and in the spirit of The Swerve I’ve been looking for signs that big changes might be on the way. You don’t have to dig very deep to find them.

Some are pretty obvious. In 2014, for example, the European Court of Justice decided that EU citizens had the so-called “right to be forgotten” and that Google would have to comply if it wanted to continue to do business in Europe. In May this year, the European commission fined Facebook €110m for “providing misleading information” about its takeover of WhatsApp. And in June the commission levied a whopping €2.4bn fine on Google for abusing its monopoly in search.

Since the European commission is the only regulator in the world that seems to have the muscle and inclination to take on the internet giants, these developments were relatively predictable. What’s more interesting are various straws in the wind that show how digital behemoths are losing their shine. Many of these relate to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and to the dawning of a realisation that Google and Facebook in particular may have played some role in these political earthquakes.

This was not because the leadership of the two companies actively sought these outcomes, but because people began to realise that the infrastructure they had built for their core business of extracting users’ data and selling it to companies for ad-targeting purposes could be – and was – “weaponised” by political actors in order to achieve political goals.

Public concern about these discoveries was not exactly mollified by the responses of the companies’ bosses – which were variously dismissive, evasive (“it’s just the algorithms – nothing to do with us”), disingenuous, inept and politically naive. They had to be like that, because a franker response would reveal that taking responsibility for what happens on their platforms would vaporise the business model that has made them so rich and powerful.

The tech industry, wrote Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, in a perceptive recent essay, “has had a remarkable run. The companies at its centre are beloved by consumers, truly global, dominant in the markets. They have also been able to coast on their popularity and their amazing products while largely getting a pass on politics at its higher levels.”

Suddenly, though, the wind is changing. The companies, says Smith, have “never had to fight for their identity against political tides that have defined other major American industries. It’s easy to forget that oil prospectors and junk bond traders had their moments of glory too; now Wall Street and the oil industries are resigned to a defensive crouch.”

What we’ve come to understand over the last two years is that, to coin a slogan, the technical is political. When Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, famously exhorted his software engineers to “move fast and break things” he didn’t realise that one of the things that might get broken was democracy. And when Google’s search team added autocomplete as a way of helping users formulate search queries, they didn’t realise that the resulting algorithms could be gamed by Holocaust deniers.

The tech giants may not have set out to acquire political power, but it turns out that they have inadvertently acquired the ability to shape our politics. This is akin to, but also different from, the power that Rupert Murdoch has. And with it come responsibilities that the tech moguls are as desperate as Murdoch to avoid shouldering.

At the moment they shelter behind a clause in the 1996 Communications Decency Act that absolves them from responsibility for what passes through their servers. For two decades, that was the end of the matter. But suddenly that bulwark is beginning to look fragile as US lawmakers unite to chip away at it. In 2014, Ben Smith wrote a piece entitled The Facebook Election, in which he predicted that the social network would “replace television advertising as the place where American elections are fought and won”. Looks like he was right: the technical has indeed become political.

Qualcomm is in the vortex of a high stakes technology battle.

The giant semiconductor company is fighting off a $130 billion hostile takeover offer from rival Broadcom. It’s battling a big lawsuit from Apple over licensing fees and royalties. And it’s also waiting for regulators to okay Qualcomm’s $47 billion deal to buy NXP Semiconductor.

At the center of all this is Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf. A 20-year veteran of the company with two engineering degrees, he is committed to leading the development of 5G which promises to power the next wave of tech innovations.

Speaking with Fortune ahead of the Broadcom news, Mollenkopf talks about his leadership style and why he’s optimistic about integrating NXP Semiconductor with Qualcomm.

“Well, you know it’s interesting, the chemistry between the two teams is actually quite good,” he says. “I have a very good sense of how these teams are going to work together because we’ve spent about the last year planning a lot of activities and I think we feel pretty good at about how that’s going to come together.”

Above all, Mollenkopf wants the Qualcomm and NXP combination to focus on developing new technology and products “in a disciplined way.” As the son of schoolteachers, Mollenkopf was taught early on about the importance of discipline and diligence.

“I think a lot of the job of the CEO is to make sure that you’re positioned well a number of years out in time,” Mollenkopf says, explaining that sometimes he’s making bets for eight years into the future. “That’s what you have to make sure that people understand. That it’s unacceptable for people to be late to these things and we want to make sure that we do it.”

Watch the video above for more on our conversation with Mollenkopf.

Bitcoin is continuing its good performance of the last few days. After its value briefly cleared the $8,000 mark on one exchange on Friday, it surpassed $8,110 on Sunday and is $8,048 at the time of writing.

This has been a highly volatile month for bitcoin—though the same can be said for most months. A couple of weeks ago, bitcoin hit a $7,888 high before falling as low as $6,800, then climbing back up again.

At the start of the year, one bitcoin was only worth around $1,000. Back in August, with the price at $3,500, analysts were being bullish by claiming bitcoin might clear $5,000 next year. Goldman Sachs analysts forecast the $8,000 barrier’s breakage earlier this month, suggesting there may be further surges in store.

The latest positivity comes as institutional investors start to push harder into the cryptocurrency world, with CME having recently announced plans to trade bitcoin futures and Coinbase offering a custodian service for hedge funds. Last week, Square also started testing bitcoin payments on its Cash app.

The “Segwit2x” fork, which would have split bitcoin into two factions, was also recently cancelled, at least formally. Some bitcoin-mining nodes still tried running the Segwit2x code, although reports emerged at the weekend suggesting that a bug in the code stopped it from working.

Last Wednesday, 11 months into Donald Trump’s new world order, in the first year of normalisation, a sudden unblurring of lines took place. A shift. A door of perception swung open.

Because that was the day that the dramatis personae of two separate Trump-Russia scandals smashed headlong into one another. A high-speed news car crash between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks, the two organisations that arguably had the most impact on 2016, coming together last week in one head-spinning scoop.

That day, we learned that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that helped Trump to power, had contacted Julian Assange to ask him if he wanted “help” with WikiLeaks’s stash of stolen emails.

That’s the stash of stolen emails that had such a devastating impact on Hillary Clinton in the last months of the campaign. And this story brought WikiLeaks, which the head of the CIA describes as a “hostile intelligence service”, directly together with the Trump campaign for which Cambridge Analytica worked. This is an amazing plot twist for the company owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, which is already the subject of investigations by the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI and, it was announced late on Friday night, the Senate judiciary committee.

So far, so American. These are US scandals involving US politics and the news made the headlines in US bulletins across US networks.

But it’s also Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company that has its headquarters in central London and which, following a series of articles about its role in Brexit in the Guardian and the Observer, is also being investigated, by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company that was spun out of a British military contractor, is headed by an old Etonian and that responded to our stories earlier this year by threatening to sue us. It’s our Cambridge it’s named after, not the American one, and it was here that it processed the voter files of 240 million US citizens.

It’s also here that this “hostile intelligence service” – WikiLeaks – is based. The Ecuadorian embassy is just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Cambridge Analytica’s head office. Because this is not just about America. It’s about Britain, too. This is transatlantic. It’s not possible to separate Britain and the US in this whole sorry mess – and I say this as someone who has spent months trying. Where we see this most clearly is in that other weird WikiLeaks connection: Nigel Farage. Because that moment in March when Farage was caught tripping down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy was the last moment the lines suddenly became visible. That the ideological overlaps between WikiLeaks and Trump and Brexit were revealed to be not just lines, but a channel of communication.

‘Nigel Farage, who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange.’ Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Because if there’s one person who’s in the middle of all of this, but who has escaped any proper scrutiny, it’s Nigel Farage. That’s Nigel Farage, who led the Leave.EU campaign, which is being investigated by the Electoral Commission alongside Cambridge Analytica, about whether the latter made an “impermissible donation” of services to the leave campaign. Nigel Farage who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange. Who is friends with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Who headed an organisation – Ukip – which has multiple, public, visible but almost entirely unreported Russian connections. Who is paid by the Russian state via the broadcaster RT, advertising from which was banned last week from Twitter. And who appears like clockwork on British television without any word of this.

This is a power network that involves WikiLeaks and Farage, and Cambridge Analytica and Farage, and Robert Mercer and Farage. Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Farage. It’s Nigel Farage and Brexit and Trump and Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks… and, if the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee and the FBI are on to anything at all, somewhere in the middle of all that, Russia.

Try to follow this on a daily basis and it’s one long headspin: a spider’s web of relationships and networks of power and patronage and alliances that spans the Atlantic and embraces data firms, thinktanks and media outlets. It is about complicated corporate structures in obscure jurisdictions, involving offshore funds funnelled through the black-box algorithms of the platform tech monopolists. That it’s eye-wateringly complicated and geographically diffuse is not a coincidence. Confusion is the charlatan’s friend, noise its accessory. The babble on Twitter is a convenient cloak of darkness.

Yet it’s also quite simple. In a well-functioning democracy, a well-functioning press and a well-functioning parliament would help a well-functioning judiciary do its job. Britain is not that country. There is a vacuum where questions should be, the committees, the inquiries, the headlines on the TV bulletins. What was Nigel Farage doing in the Ecuadorian embassy? More to the point: why has no public official asked him? Why is he giving speeches – for money – in the US? Who’s paying him? I know this because my weirdest new hobby of 2017 is to harry Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who was Ukip and Leave.EU’s main funder, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms man and Belize’s trade attache to the US, across the internet late at night. Wigmore told me about this new US venture – an offshore-based political consultancy working on Steve Bannon-related projects – in a series of tweets. Is it true? Who knows? Leave.EU has learned from its Trumpian friends that black is white and white is black and these half-facts are a convenient way of diffusing scandal and obscuring truth.

What on earth was Farage doing advancing Calexit – Californian Brexit? And why did I find a photo of him hanging out with Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian known in the US press as “Putin’s favourite congressman”? The same Dana Rohrabacher who’s met with Don Trump Jr’s Russian lawyer and – wait for it – also visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. And who is now interceding on his behalf to obtain a pardon from Don Trump Junior’s dad.

(You got this? Farage visited Trump, then Assange, then Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher met Don Trump’s Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Then Assange. And is now trying to close the circle with Trump.)

In these post-truth times, journalists are fighting the equivalent of a firestorm with a bottle of water and a wet hankie. We desperately need help. We need public pressure. We need parliament to step up and start asking proper questions. There may be innocent answers to all these questions. Let’s please just ask them.

The Harvey Weinstein sexual assault saga is a scandal for the ages. But the grave accusations of harassment and, in some cases, rape from over 100 women have helped shed an important if disheartening light on the widespread misconduct of many rich and powerful figures in Hollywood, the media, government and elsewhere.

The story has been so big that it has let another scandal disappear: a corporate backstory about how a group of billionaire board members from the worlds of Wall Street and entertainment let Harvey Weinstein stay in power. It features an all-star cast that included James Dolan and Dirk Ziff—and later, in cameo appearances, Paul Tudor Jones and Marc Lasry—who oversaw an almost unimaginably toxic corporate culture built and led by their friend, according to two directors who long opposed Harvey Weinstein.

In an extraordinary case of governance-gone-awry, these distinguished figures—brilliant in managing their own ventures—allowed themselves to be deceived by a charismatic mogul, whose blatant business abuses, including allegedly spending millions of dollars of TWC funds on his own personal projects, mirror his serial alleged abuse of women.

Weinstein was fired by the board of Weinstein Co. (TWC) on Oct. 8, just three days after the New York Times published a report detailing extensive allegations of abuse and harassment by the Hollywood legend; on Oct. 17, Weinstein resigned from the company’s board. (He still retains an ownership stake in the company.)

Here, Fortune reports for the first time the extent of the dysfunction of this dysfunctional corporate board—one that an insider calls “the ultimate shit show.” The board’s inaction helped Harvey Weinstein remain all-powerful for more than a decade, as directors from the vanguard of the business elite enabled him to stay atop the company.

Weinstein has admitted to some of the inappropriate behavior and has denied other allegations. He has categorically denied taking part in nonconsensual sex. He has not made public statements regarding allegations that he mismanaged the company or used its funds inappropriately.

Weinstein declined Fortune’s request to respond to critics of his management. Holly Baird, a spokesperson for Harvey Weinstein, sent Fortune an email stating that, “We are not commenting [on issues involving the board] and Mr. Weinstein is not available for interviews.” Messages requesting a response from TWC, and others seeking comment from Harvey’s brother and co-founder Bob Weinstein, were not returned.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein at the 52nd Annual ICG Publicists Awards in February 2015. The bylaws and ownership structure of The Weinstein Co. made it nearly impossible for independent board members to influence the brothers’ behavior.

Mathew Imaging 2015

Weinstein’s attorney David Boies did address the issue in a letter to director Lance Maerov in August of 2015. In the letter, reviewed by Fortune, Boies states that “Harvey has dedicated himself to making TWC a success.” Boies did not question Maerov’s assertion that TWC was losing money on an operating basis—according to Maerov, it had a deficit of $65 million in 2014—but argued that Maerov’s assertion that “TWC ‘never generated a profit’ ignores the hundreds of millions of dollars in asset values created by the film and television business.”

PART ONE: Buddies on the Board

None of the celebrated names that once served on its board are now engaged in salvaging the battered Weinstein Co. Hedge fund manager Jones, publishing heir and mega-investor Dirk Ziff, and Lasry, chief of distressed debt colossus Avenue Capital and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, quit the board over the weekend of October 6, following the publication of the damning New York Times investigation that set the scandal in motion.

A fourth director, Tim Sarnoff, grandson of the founder of NBC and RCA, and president of production at film processing company Technicolor—described by anti-Weinstein directors as a Harvey loyalist—departed along with them. (Dolan, executive chairman of MSG, owner of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, had left in mid-2016.) For Sarnoff, Ziff and Lasry the last official act was participating in the stormy conference call that Thursday evening, Oct. 5, when all but Jones voted to effectively fire the Hollywood titan they’d long supported.

That exodus leaves just three of the nine pre-scandal directors to rescue a once-fabled filmmaker. That cleanup crew consists of Harvey’s brother, co-founder, and longtime co-chairman Bob Weinstein, who’s running the studio, and the two directors who, they maintain, had long wanted to dump Harvey Weinstein.

The anti-Harvey survivors are Tarak Ben Ammar, a Franco-Tunisian financier who’s a leading adviser to a number of global media chiefs, including Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, and Vincent Bollore; and Maerov, EVP of corporate development at ad giant WPP, and a top lieutenant of its CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell.

Tarak Ben Ammar and Harvey Weinstein attend the “Miral” premiere at the 67th Venice Film Festival in 2010. Ben Ammar, along with fellow TWC board member Lance Maerov, says he tried to keep The Weinstein Co. from renewing Weinstein’s contract in 2015.

Pascal Le Segretain Getty Images

Ben Ammar and Maerov, who’ve served on the board since TWC’s launch in 2005, assert that Weinstein for years bullied and insulted employees, directors, and his brother, squandered outside investors’ money, and ran TWC not to earn profits for its outside investors, but as a personal fiefdom that bestowed celebrity and power.

“If Harvey Weinstein had run TWC honestly and responsibly, and shown respect for the people around him and investors’ money, Tarak and I would have supported him,” Maerov tells Fortune. “But he wasn’t interested in running the studio honestly and responsibly. He was running it for his own self-aggrandizement.”

Adds Ben Ammar, “Harvey was so powerful in all circles, social, political, fashion, charity, entertainment, that he used all those tools to get what he wanted. He traded on his social currency like no one else. He began to think that he was untouchable, and that was his downfall.” (In this story, all references to a person as “Weinstein” are to Harvey Weinstein.)

Ben Ammar and Maerov have discussed their concerns about Weinstein in other recent interviews, including with Fortune. But they’ve revealed little about the boardroom infighting, until now. Neither Weinstein nor the company has made any previous comment on boardroom issues during Harvey Weinstein’s tenure as co-chairman.

A missed opportunity

The critical standoff came in 2015. Weinstein’s offenses, say Ben Ammar and Maerov, had escalated into misdeeds so damaging that the board and investors had ample cause to terminate the film mogul.

Early that year, the board suspected that Weinstein had been misusing company funds, according to Ben Ammar and Maerov. Weinstein hasn’t commented on this allegation. But through his attorney in 2015, Weinstein agreed to repay more than $7 million in company funds that, as his lawyer acknowledged in documents Fortune has reviewed, he had used for personal projects. And in April, news that an Italian model had accused him of groping her in his Tribeca office made headlines worldwide. “At that point, Lance and I pushed to refuse him a new contract,” says Ben Ammar. “But we were blocked by his allies, who held the swing votes, and who were really acting more like his buddies than representing the best interests of TWC.”

The two long-time dissidents insist that TWC wouldn’t be verging on collapse if the group they describe as Weinstein’s loyalists—Dolan, Ziff, Sarnoff, as well as prominent investors—had joined in their effort to dump him two years ago. (Lasry and Jones joined the board after Weinstein won a new contract.) None of the recently departed directors have spoken out on this issue, either to Fortune or elsewhere. “The tragedy is that if we’d removed Harvey two years ago, we’d still have issues, but the talent would have stayed, because Harvey would have been long gone as CEO. We’d look a lot cleaner and less damaged than we do today,” says Ben Ammar.

Fortune reached out to seven former directors who served since 2015, as well as to the Weinsteins. Technicolor, where Sarnoff serves as deputy CEO, did not respond to emails requesting comment. Ziff did not respond to messages left at his office. A source provided a statement from Jones explaining why he declined to sign a press release calling for Harvey’s departure, but Jones made no further comment. Dolan offered the following statement via a spokesperson: “We’re not interested in discussing these matters at this time. Information discussed in a boardroom should remain in the boardroom.”

TWC is now seeking to either sell itself in its entirety, or shed individual assets such as its TV unit and film library. A potential deal with the private equity arm of real estate investor Colony NorthStar failed to materialize. Still, say the two directors, TWC is already benefiting from sales of its movie assets. In mid-November, Warner Bros. agreed to pay around $32 million for the distribution rights to TWC’s Paddington 2, a sequel to a box office smash starring an endearing toy bear.

It’s especially galling to Ben Ammar and Maerov that the directors they consider Weinstein loyalists bolted from the board when the scandal broke, and that Ziff, Jones and Sarnoff didn’t sign the press release issued on Oct. 6 that condemned Weinstein’s alleged sexual abuse and effectively fired him. “I’m disappointed that his friends didn’t stay on the board at that critical time, so we could make a united statement,” says Ben Ammar. “Bob [Weinstein] deserves a lot of credit for standing with us. But the others split, and gave us no help in navigating today’s tough waters.” When the press release was issued, Ziff and Sarnoff had already left the board. A source provided Fortune with an email that Jones sent to Maerov explaining that he was not signing the release because of possible legal issues in effectively firing Weinstein.

Most of all, Ben Ammar says, the departed directors missed a crucial opportunity to take a stand at a turning point in cultural history. “This became the biggest scandal in the world,” says Ben Ammar. “There was a sexual harassment regime before the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and a sexual harassment regime in the post-Harvey Weinstein world. They should have stayed to do their duty and denounce him. Instead, they ran for the hills.” Ziff, Jones, and Sarnoff have not provided comment on why the left the board, either to Fortune or in public statements.

Partying with the board

According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, the ex-directors were overly swayed by their personal friendships with Weinstein. They assert that Dolan, Ziff and Jones all had close social ties to the famous producer. “Weinstein traded on those friendships, on his social currency,” says Maerov. “He spun a kind of spiderweb,” says Ben Ammar. “He had three tables at the Oscars, he had Emmy parties, he hosted bankers, investors and politicians at glamorous events. He could be so charming. He was Mr. Charming and Mr. Bully all in one. Lots of prominent people, including TWC directors, got caught in the spiderweb.”

Maerov is somewhat sympathetic to the bygone directors. “These are people who were used by Harvey,” he says. “Lasry and Jones weren’t even there for the vote on his contract. They didn’t have the benefit of the historical facts. Directors who supported Harvey were betrayed just as we were.” Ben Ammar is more adamant. “Sure, Harvey is a great salesman. I was friendly with Harvey. But you have a special duty to tell a friend when he’s wrong, and they didn’t. These are highly successful, sophisticated people. What comes first isn’t friendship, but your duty as a director.”

By going public, Ben Ammar and Maerov are taking a highly unusual step: Exposing the anatomy of a boardroom brawl. And Fortune‘s reporting, along with other press accounts over the years, support their assertion that half-a-dozen key directors, most of them billionaires, were close friends of Weinstein’s, and in one case did business with TWC.

Ziff and Weinstein were renowned in show biz circles for partying together. In a 2012 interview on CNN, Weinstein boasted that he and Ziff had had a blast when years earlier they’d chaperoned a young Chelsea Clinton to a rock club on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvey publicly praised Dolan as “one of my and Bob’s best friends” when Dolan left the board in June of 2016. Lasry and Weinstein were neighbors in Westport, Conn., and according to a source familiar with the situation, they and their families regularly socialized together. They also shared a bond as major fundraisers for the Democratic Party.

Harvey Weinstein (second from right) and Dirk Ziff (far right) attend the ASP – The World Surf League cocktail party on July 24, 2014 in New York City.

Ilya S. Savenok Getty Images

TWC was also, as are many studios, a customer of Technicolor, where director Sarnoff is an executive, for its 3D projection system, and post-production services. In 2011, Technicolor chose TWC’s The King’s Speech to launch its new “MediaEcho,” an app for viewing movies on tablet devices. (A Dow Jones story on October 11 reported that Technicolor had stopped extending credit on services it’s providing to the Weinstein Co., and that CEO Frederic Rose, a former TWC director, had sent an email to executives weighing whether to end all business with the studio.)

Richard Koenigsberg, a partner in an accounting firm with a prominent entertainment practice—one that did not do business with the Weinstein Co—stayed to sign the Oct. 6 press release condemning Weinstein’s alleged harassment but left the board in mid-October. He did not respond to a message from Fortune. Marc Lasry and Jeff Sackman, a Canadian movie producer who resigned as a director in late 2015, also declined to comment.

Fortune was able to obtain some not-for-attribution observations from people familiar with the thinking of former directors whom Ben Ammar and Maerov viewed as Harvey Weinstein’s allies. Weinstein’s backers had what they considered sound reasons to take his side. According to people familiar with their viewpoints, Weinstein’s allies reckoned that Harvey epitomized the Weinstein brand, and that without him there would be no Weinstein Co. He’d also recently launched a highly successful television franchise that attracted lucrative bids, and they believed that losing Harvey might jeopardize a future sale. Former directors, according to people familiar with their point of view, also strongly object to the perception that Weinstein controlled the board.

Both the dissidents, and the Weinsteins in previous public statements, credit former directors with substantial contributions to the business. Bob and Harvey Weinstein praised Dolan for helping TWC develop a lucrative TV franchise. Ziff brought valuable expertise in distressed debt. And Ben Ammar and Maerov praise Sarnoff for joining an unsuccessful attempt to obtain Weinstein’s personnel file, in 2015.

It’s important to note that when the face-off occurred in 2015, according to both Weinstein’s loyalists and opponents, evidence of alleged sexual abuse was still too sketchy to clearly merit firing him. Though both camps were deeply troubled by the groping scandal and other revelations, Ben Ammar, Maerov maintain that they and his other opponents wanted to dump him for business reasons rather than sexual abuses. “Tarak and I never bought the Harvey Weinstein myth like a lot of other directors,” says Maerov. “We watched the guy for 10 years, and he totally mismanaged the company.”

PART TWO: A Contract Showdown

To fathom how Harvey Weinstein survived so long, it’s important to examine the board structure that granted immense power to The Weinstein Co.’s co-founders, Harvey and his brother Bob.

In 2005, TWC debuted with $950 billion in capitalization, consisting of $500 million in equity and $450 million in debt. The equity holders fell into two categories. Bob and Harvey Weinstein initially held 50% of the shares in a class called the “W series.”

The balance was owned by a large syndicate. Goldman Sachs was the lead investment banker in the financing of TWC, an equity investor, and provided debt financing as well. To this day, the roster of “A series” investors encompasses many marquee names in finance, media, and fashion: Goldman, Japan’s SoftBank, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management Group, Eton Park, French luxury conglomerate LVMH and TV network TF1, and WPP, the global advertising firm.

The “W” and “A” shares had equal voting rights. It was the rules governing the board, and an ironclad “operating agreement,” that favored the Weinsteins. The board consisted of nine members; the Weinsteins had two seats, and the charter granted them the rights to name a third director to represent the W shares. Koenigsberg occupied that seat from the launch in 2005 until his departure in mid-October.

In addition, the operating agreement granted the W shareholders, meaning the Weinsteins, full control over all decisions involved in running the studio.

The A shares were also allocated three seats, representing the outside investors. Ben Ammar and Maerov filled two of them. The third seat remained vacant for several years until Ziff—a Harvey supporter, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar—was installed over their objections in the fall of 2015. That, as we’ll see, was a turning point in the war over whether to grant Weinstein a new contract.

The three additional directors were in the “independent” group. The rub is that the bylaws granted the Weinsteins authority to recommend the “independents.” “Goldman Sachs had the right to approve the choice, but under the bylaws, their approval couldn’t be ‘unreasonably withheld,’” says Maerov. (Goldman declined to comment.) And according to Ben Ammar and Maerov, it was Harvey who, in most cases, handpicked the three supposedly non-affiliated directors. When the scandal erupted in early October, the independent directors were Lasry, Sarnoff and Jones, all seen by Ben Ammar and Maerov as Weinstein loyalists. “That’s how he controlled at least six out of nine seats,” says Maerov. “It was a structure that was incredibly investor-unfriendly.”

Two directors grow anxious

So why did Ben Ammar and Maerov keep serving on a dysfunctional board that by its very design severely curtailed their influence, and augmented Harvey Weinstein’s power? Maerov explains that although he held a seat from 2005 to 2013, he was a non-voting observer in that period. “Then in 2013, I was appointed to the former Goldman ‘A’ seat, and I had more potential influence as a voting member. My marching orders were to protect the investors and get as much of their money back as possible.” Ben Ammar tells Fortune that he also remained to protect the interests of the outside investors.

The rules contained another provision that thwarted the board’s efforts to control costs, according to Ben Ammar and Maerov. Each Weinstein brother had the right to veto expenditures for the other sibling’s projects, but no other board member had that power. According to Maerov, what seemed like a clever design to protect shareholders in theory turned out to be counterproductive in practice.

“Each brother was supposed to be a check on each other’s expenditures. That’s how they were tied together,” says Ben Ammar. “But even though they each claimed the other’s movies would always lose money, Harvey also said yes to Bob’s spending, and vice versa. If Harvey blocked Bob’s new project or expenditure, Bob would block Harvey’s next project or expenditure. So nothing got blocked, and the spending was excessive.”

Maerov adds that although the board approved the annual budgets, that authority was almost meaningless. “We’d approve and they’d never adhere to it,” he recalls. “The approval process was almost a joke. If they missed the budget, there was no recourse.”

The company consistently lost money, according to Maerov, Ben Ammar and other former directors. In his August 2015, letter to Maerov, Boies, Harvey Weinstein’s attorney does not dispute that TWC was taking losses, but insisted that the studio had created substantial wealth via its library and TV businesses. A couple of years after the launch, say Maerov and Ben Ammar, Ziff extended TWC a lifeline in the form of a loan worth tens of millions of dollars. (Ziff has not publicly confirmed doing so.) In 2009, TWC underwent a major restructuring in which the lenders exchanged debt for a large portion of the equity. Ziff’s loan was partly turned into equity, which enhanced his candidacy for an “A” series board seat. The Weinsteins’ holdings were diluted, but they kept tight control through their effective hold over six of the nine board seats.

Harvey’s contract: An impregnable fortress

According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, Harvey’s first five-year contract, granted in 2005, mandated that all subsequent employment agreements incorporate at least “equal or better terms.” Hence, when the initial agreement expired in 2010, it was essentially renewed through 2015 containing the same remarkably favorable safeguards.

Like its predecessors, the 2010 contract stipulated that Weinstein could be terminated only for two types of offenses, according to Maerov. The first was a conviction for a felony involving “moral turpitude,” a category that would obviously encompass sexual assault. “But being accused with convincing evidence wasn’t enough,” says Maerov. “He had to be convicted of a felony, and not just any felony, only one involving moral turpitude. If we’d had documentary evidence of sexual harassment, the absurdity of his old contract still would have prevented us from terminating him.”

Second, he could be terminated for a major misuse of TWC funds. But that condition contained a major loophole. Here’s the escape hatch: If Weinstein were caught misappropriating funds, he would be granted a “cure period” in which to refund the money. In other words, misusing company cash wasn’t sufficient to terminate him. As long as Weinstein paid TWC back, he’d remain employed under the same highly advantageous contract as if he’d done nothing wrong. “He had the right to put the genie back in the bottle,” says Maerov.

In late 2014, Maerov says, a TWC executive secretly reported to him that Harvey was allegedly misusing company funds. “He was appalled by what Harvey was doing,” declares Maerov. According to Maerov and Ben Ammar, Weinstein had tapped the company’s credit facility to advance himself funds against future receipts from movies he owned personally, and paid Marchesa, his wife Georgina Chapman’s fashion brand, $75,000 for dresses that he’d given to a business acquaintance in Qatar. “We were shocked he was making gifts with company money,” says Ben Ammar.

The board put Weinstein on notice that he needed to return the money, or risked being terminated, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar. He complied: In a letter reviewed by Fortune from February of 2015, a lawyer for Weinstein did not state that Weinstein had misappropriated funds. The letter, however, lists over $7 million in TWC funds that Weinstein was pledging to refund to TWC––and did refund as promised. A later letter from Boies, who was also representing Weinstein, to Maerov in late July of 2015, also alludes to the issue, referring to “instances in which Weinstein assertedly used company funds for personal purposes without compensating the company.” Boies goes on to write, that Weinstein wants to resolve the issue “in a cooperative manner.”

Other documents state that in February of 2015, Weinstein refunded $6.86 million for use of TWC’s credit facility, and go on to affirm that he repaid the $75,000 for the dresses. They also address a third issue: Weinstein’s use of TWC personnel for his personal projects. The documents state that Weinstein agreed to provide a $700,000 payment to TWC as compensation for time and services that TWC employees spent on ventures that he owned exclusively, independently of the company.

A fight over files

Weinstein’s existing five-year contract was expiring at the end of 2015. The main role in the negotiations fell to Maerov, who was one of two directors serving on the compensation committee. The other director, Jeff Sackman, resigned in the midst of the acrimonious talks, leaving Maerov as the comp committee’s sole member.

“It was about the shortest straw you could ever draw at TWC,” he says. “You’re opposing Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s 800-pound gorilla, and his famous lawyer, David Boies.” The board was under no requirement to renew Weinstein; Maerov and Ben Ammar favored pushing him out, principally for what they regarded as the misuse of funds and all around poor management.

For Ben Ammar and Maerov, the contract’s expiration offered a big opening. “It was clear that this opening was the only opportunity we would ever have of changing the governance of the company and creating protection against Harvey,” says Maerov. They recognized, however, that denying him a renewed employment agreement could still leave him with enormous influence over TWC. “Because of the operating agreement, Harvey’s “W” shares gave him the right to keep running the company even if he wasn’t an official employee,” says Maerov. As a result, he says, he and Ben Ammar needed to press the shareholders to amend the bylaws so that at the same time Weinstein was denied a new contract, he would also lose the operating control that went with the “W” shares.

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez speaks to Italian media in 2013. In 2015, Battalina, a model, reported to New York City police that Harvey Weinstein had groped her at a meeting in his office. The case did not result in charges.

Pier Marco Tacca Getty Images

A new threat was shadowing the negotiations. Shortly after Weinstein repaid TWC, tabloid headlines trumpeted the first public accusations of sexual abuse leveled at Harvey Weinstein. On March 26, 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an 22-year old Italian model, reported to New York City police that Weinstein had groped her at a meeting in his office. “It appeared he was going to be arrested,” says Ben Ammar.” As it turned out, Batillana’s complaint did not result in criminal charges. “Tarak and I were still highly disturbed,” adds Maerov. “We pushed to get the facts.”

According to Ben Ammar and Maerov, Weinstein told the board that the whole incident “was a setup by a shakedown artist.” The proof, he said, was that he wasn’t arrested, and that Gutierrez had signed an affidavit swearing that the alleged groping never occurred. Weinstein told the board that the reason Gutierrez had signed the affidavit was that he’d threatened a defamation suit, showing that her whole story was a sham, say the two directors. “The truth was that he’d paid a settlement to make her go away,” says Ben Ammar. “But neither he nor his lawyers told us.” (Weinstein’s settlement with Battilana has been reported elsewhere, including in the New York Times.)

Maerov says that the Gutierrez bombshell aside, he’d been hearing anonymously from employees about complaints from both male and female employees. As part of due diligence in the contract negotiations, Maerov asked Weinstein to see his personnel file. “We requested the files from all the senior executives,” says Maerov. In Weinstein’s case, he wanted to ascertain if Harvey showed a pattern of sexual harassment of women, or had paid settlements to make harassment charges disappear. He was also concerned, he says, about possible settlements or workplace complaints from male or female employees who’d been threatened or bullied by Weinstein.

Enter the lawyers

It’s highly unusual for a board to have to ask permission to see an executive’s personnel file in the first place. But Weinstein refused to allow his company’s directors to see the file, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar, and he engaged Boies to support his position. (Some elements of the following account have previously been reported by the Financial Times [subscription required].)

Maerov says that he specifically asked Boies if Weinstein had paid any settlements. Boies, Maerov recalls, said something along the lines of “Settlements may have been paid.” “But I wanted the specific information,” continues Maerov, “I believed it was crucial to see the file, but also asked Boies for specifics whether they were in the file or not. Through counsel, we asked Boies for full disclosure on the nature of the settlements.” He was able to ascertain from the finance people at TWC that no company funds had been spent on settlements for Weinstein.

Maerov says he demanded detailed accounts on the number of settlements, the identities of the women or men who filed complaints, the amounts paid, and abuses alleged against TWC’s co-chairman. According to Maerov, Boies declined to provide any specifics. “We were fighting to get documentary evidence of his rumored misconduct, and Boies was fighting very hard to keep documentary evidence out of our hands,” Maerov asserts. “He just said no. He just kept hiding the ball, and creating chaos.”

In a seven-page letter to Maerov reviewed by Fortune, Boies argued that Weinstein wanted to keep the file confidential because its contents could be leaked if made available to the directors, and especially Maerov. “Sensitive information provided to you has been repeatedly leaked, and I know you understand the undesirability of providing confidential personnel information to individuals who have proven themselves unable to maintain confidentiality,” wrote Boies. “That, of course, is particularly true where someone bears an obvious personal animus towards the person whose personal information is being requested.” Boies also condemns what he regards as a Maerov vendetta, stating Maerov’s “clear intention” was to “force Harvey Weinstein from the company.”

In another letter, also seen by Fortune, Boies had recommended a compromise. An independent party, Rodgin Cohen, senior chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, would exclusively review the file to determine if TWC faced any liability for Weinstein’s past conduct. “If Mr. Cohen advises the board that the company does not face any such liability, there will be no further requests by the board or its representatives for Mr. Weinstein’s personnel file [and] any issues relating to Mr. Weinstein’s past conduct will be deemed resolved,” Boies wrote in the July 28 letter.

Maerov bridled at the proposal. “Our counsel reviewed the files of all the other senior managers,” he says. “Having Cohen review his file amounted to special treatment for Harvey. And then once he reviewed it, we were blocked from asking any more questions!” But Maerov concluded that he had no choice but to accept Boies’ recommendation. “It was my job as head of the comp committee demand the file, but the effort failed,” he says. “My only option, after consulting with other board members, was to sue the company to for access to the file, which could have been very damaging to the company.”

On September 4, Cohen issued a four-sentence letter. The entirety of the portion dealing with his review of the personnel file is the following: “Based on our review, there are no unresolved claims that could result in liability to TWC or its directors. Moreover, the file reveals no pending or threatened litigation. Furthermore, it is my understanding that Mr. Weinstein has agreed to hold TWC and its directors harmless from any claim, liability, loss, or expense resulting from any incident, resolved or unresolved, disclosed in his personnel file.”

The Cohen letter didn’t satisfy Maerov and Ben Ammar. “I wanted to see if there was a pattern of misconduct, but the letter only addressed potential liability,” says Maerov. “Boies and Cohen obstructed our seeing what was in that personnel file, when we had a total right to see it.” Ben Ammar and Maerov insist that Boies and Weinstein denied them sensational information that could have influenced crucial shareholder decisions that in turn could have transformed TWC’s governance.

For his part, Boies provided the following statement to Fortune: “The Board controlled the company and had access to whatever company records it chose to require. The Board did not review the file in 2015, deciding instead to have it reviewed by Mr. Cohen; that was the Board’s decision after listening to my articulation of Mr. Weinstein’s position and the advice of the Board’s own large law firm. The Board now has the file and has not identified anything in it of which the Board was not aware in 2015.”

In a letter to the Financial Times on Oct. 24, Boies stated that “[The assertion] that Messrs. Maerov and Ben Ammar did not know about Mr. Weinstein’s settlements with women when they approved his 2015 contract…is simply false.”

Says Ben Ammar, “David Boies quite clearly lost perspective in his dealings with Harvey Weinstein and TWC, and that the consequences of that are obvious.”

Part Three: The Weinstein Co. Endgame

Even after their defeat in the battle over the personnel file, Maerov and Ben Ammar kept pushing to remove Harvey Weinstein. They had growing ranks of allies among the company’s investors.

Martin Sorrell, Maerov’s boss at WPP and a fierce opponent of squandering shareholder money, was especially incensed by Weinstein’s behavior. One person interviewed by Fortune recalls that Sorrell expressed disapproval and disbelief while attending Weinstein’s sumptuous annual pre-Oscars party, this one in February 2016. “Martin gets up from the dinner table and says, ‘What the hell is going on here! This is a joke! He shouldn’t be spending company money this way!” A second source familiar with the incident confirms the essentials of the account.

In late 2014, the third “A” share seat was vacant, and the dissidents sought to fill it with an ally in an effort to shift the board’s balance in their favor. Maerov and Ben Ammar wanted to recruit Eugene I. Davis, head of Pirinate Consulting Group, a turnaround-specialist firm that had rescued the likes of Atlas Iron and U.S. Concrete. “Davis had been through many bruising proxy battles,” says Maerov. “If we’d gotten him onboard it would have changed the dynamics, and maybe the outcome. At best he would have been a constructive influence, at worst he would have been another witness to the madness.”

In late September, Maerov and Ben Ammar launched the equivalent of a proxy contest. They arranged a meeting, via conference call, assembling TWC outside shareholders. Their goal: First, naming Davis to the open seat. And second, persuading the shareholders to both deny Weinstein a new contract, and also amend the bylaws so that his authority to continue running the company, granted under the “W” shares, would be terminated. “I argued, ‘Given the performance, to proceed under the old bylaws and expect a different result defied logic. We need to change this company’s governance,’” says Maerov. His campaign won support from Fidelity Investments, which had recommended Davis to the dissidents, as well as from other dissatisfied shareholders. (In an email, a Fidelity spokesperson wrote, “As a practice, we do not comment on individual companies.”)

Weinstein adamantly opposed naming Davis. He lobbied investors to appoint his close friend Ziff instead—a choice that would bolster his position in the contract negotiations, according to the dissidents. “Because Harvey was endorsing him,” says Maerov, “clearly certain shareholders felt that they should appoint Ziff.” The dissidents’ campaign failed; when the investors voted, instead of Davis, it was Ziff who won the third “A” share seat. Around the same time, Weinstein named James Dolan to the chair vacated by Sackman.

After that loss, it was clear to Ben Ammar and Maerov that they couldn’t rally the votes to deny Weinstein a new contract. He had the backing of his brother, of “W” shares director Koenigsberg, and Sarnoff and Dolan, plus support from the newly-appointed Ziff. That gave Weinstein an unbreakable majority.

Maerov did succeed in rebuffing Weinstein’s demands for even richer terms. The mogul wanted to be paid a percentage of the company’s profits, from dollar one, before the payment of any dividends to the outside shareholders—who had never received any return on their investments over TWC’s history, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar, who occupied two of the three seats representing outside investors. “His demands were unconnected from reality,” says Maerov. “He even wanted TWC to repay his legal expenses for his own misuse of funds, legal fees for his defense when he got caught! That didn’t come close to flying even with his supporters.”

The dissidents had a higher goal: Effectively foiling the new contract—which under the charter, had to be just as ironclad as the old one—by imposing new restrictions on Weinstein. Those conditions could get him fired in the future for things he’d done in the past. Although they’d lost their campaign to appoint Davis and change the bylaws, the dissidents now had newfound power on the board, because the controversies of 2015 had substantially weakened Weinstein’s standing. And his problems didn’t end with the alleged financial misdeeds and the groping scandal. The dissidents suspected that his behavior may have cost TWC an extremely lucrative deal.

A deal falls through, and Weinstein stumbles

In early 2014, Weinstein steered TWC into a successful new venture: television production. “He apologized to the board, saying that he recognized that he’d run the company poorly, that he didn’t deliver on his promises, and that the investors were disappointed,” says Ben Ammar. “Then he said that he was starting a venture that could get all our money back.”

From the start, the new venture was so successful that it promised to revive TWC’s sagging fortunes. Late in 2014, the British network ITV was reportedly bidding to buy Weinstein’s TV unit for as much as $950 million, including an upfront payment of $300 million to $400 million. “The attitude of most of the directors was, ‘We need Harvey, he’s about to do this big fat deal with ITV,’” says Ben Ammar.

But in 2015, just when Weinstein appeared close to clinching the deal, the Gutierrez headlines erupted. Shortly thereafter, ITV walked. It’s impossible to know for sure, but Maerov, Ben Ammar and other directors suspected that the scandal killed the sale. “A serious public company in the U.K. that’s facing a scandal in America that’s heavily in the press was not going to pursue conversations,” says Ben Ammar. (In an email to Fortune, an ITV spokesperson said, “We never comment on speculation relating to M&A.”)

In late 2015, Maerov and Ben Ammar exploited Weinstein’s bungling as leverage to rein him in. Their brainchild was a “Code of Conduct and Ethics” that would apply to all senior officers and board members. Fortune has seen the five-page document, dated September 2, 2015. It lists a number of seemingly standard violations, including “sexual harassment,” “intimidating or threatening behavior,” and receiving “a personal benefit as a result of the employee’s position with TWC.” Neither Weinstein nor the company made public statements about the ITV negotiations at the time, though the talks were reported in the press.

Weinstein hated the proposed code. “He wanted an exception created only for himself, stating that an accusation wasn’t enough, and that he could only be fired for a conviction, as under his old contract,” says Maerov. But Maerov prevailed. “Given what happened in 2015, none of the directors objected to the code, nor did anyone support giving Harvey special privileges,” he says.

On October 21, the board voted to give Weinstein a new contract. “We didn’t win our Hail Mary pass to get a turnaround specialist on the board, and change the governance, but it was a big deal to get the code of conduct,” says Ben Ammar. Denying him a new deal was essentially meaningless, since they’d lost their campaign to change TWC’s bylaws. So, the dissidents say, the best remaining option was to attach the code to the new contract.

TWC begins to implode

After Weinstein secured his new contract, long-simmering tension between the co-founders escalated into a brother-to-brother war so ferocious that it threatened to destroy TWC, say Maerov and Ben Ammar.

The Weinsteins specialized in different genres: Harvey made highbrow Oscar contenders and winners, while Bob focused on horror and action films through his Dimension division. “Bob and Harvey hated each other,” says a former director. “Bob would simply say, ‘Harvey is trying to screw me.’ Harvey was better at it, he would say, ‘Bob is trying to screw the company.’ Whenever we talked about financing a new movie, Bob would claim that Harvey’s project would lose tons of money, and Harvey would claim that Bob’s movie was a loser.” The board meetings, recall Ben Ammar and Maerov, frequently resembled combative therapy sessions. “Harvey and Bob would be screaming at each other,” says Ben Ammar. “It was like sitting through a dysfunctional family dinner.”

Bob wasn’t the only director whom Harvey treated harshly. According to Maerov, Harvey Weinstein pelted the director with abusive language. “He’d say in front of his own lawyers, ‘I’m going to destroy you,’” recalls Maerov. “He’d make crazy statements about what famous people I’d never met were saying about me, all negative.” Maerov recounts that Weinstein would harangue him in the morning, and send him flowers in the afternoon, attached with notes declaring something like, “I went to my therapist and he says I need to get over my anger issues.” Ben Ammar and another company insider told Fortune that Maerov told them about the threats at the time.

The infighting was so destructive that in the months before the sexual assault scandal went public, the board weighed splitting TWC into two separate, independent studios, one run by Bob and the other by Harvey. “We wanted to do anything that meant they couldn’t interfere anymore with each others’ movies,” says Ben Ammar. He and Maerov thought it also made sense to sell off its two best assets, the 700-film library and the TV division that was forecast to earn $40 million a year, so that the shareholders could recoup some of their investment. Adds Ben Ammar, “Splitting into two studios would ALSO mean that we didn’t have to be Harvey’s head shrink.”

It was the deluge following The New York Times story that drove one brother from the company, and left the other running an imperiled studio.

A speedy collapse

Since the 2015 contract vote, the roster of directors witnessing these battles had changed significantly. Two more billionaire friends of Harvey’s had joined the board. In December 2015, Harvey chose Paul Tudor Jones, like him a director of the Robin Hood Foundation, to fill an empty seat; he named Marc Lasry to replace Dolan in mid-2016.

For Harvey, the end came during an emergency call on the evening of October 5, hours after the Times story appeared. All nine directors were on the line, including a combative Weinstein. According to several current and former directors, Harvey insisted that the charges in the Times piece weren’t true, and that the scandal would blow over. He stated that he’d send the directors friendly photos of himself with his accusers at awards events, taken long after they’d claimed he’d harassed them. Those festive shots, he maintained, would prove his innocence. He did, however, agree to temporary leave of absence.

Most of all, he declared that the call didn’t qualify as an official board meeting under the company’s charter and that the directors therefore had no right to effectively sideline him. His brother, Harvey charged, was using the uproar as an excuse to mount a coup and take over TWC, a goal Harvey accused Bob of long harboring. According to Harvey, the board had no legal authority to remove him.

Jones also expressed doubts on whether the board could legally act to remove Harvey at that juncture. According to a source familiar with his thinking, Jones told the other directors on the call that effectively firing Harvey, and handing control of the company to Bob, could be viewed by lenders as a “material event,” and trigger a crippling default on TWC’s debt.

Paul Tudor Jones, who joined the Weinstein Company board after the 2015 contract battle. Jones condemned Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, but expressed doubts that he and other directors had the authority to fire him.

Patrick McMullan 2017 Patrick McMullan

By the following day, Ziff, Lasry and Sarnoff had resigned from the board. That left just five directors, excluding Harvey. That evening, the board issued a scalding press release stating that Harvey Weinstein was taking “an indefinite leave of absence,” adding that “It’s important for him to get the professional help for the problems he has acknowledged.” The board announced an independent investigation headed by a team including two former prosecutors, one of whom had specialized in sex crimes.

Jones was the only remaining director not to sign the release. According to the source familiar with his thinking, he supported the release’s condemnation of Weinstein’s alleged behavior, and advocated denouncing sexual misconduct in the strongest possible terms. But his misgivings on the legality of firing Weinstein put him at odds with his fellow directors.

A source provided Fortune with this email, sent by Jones on Oct. 6 to Lance Maerov: “At this time I would prefer NOT to sign it as the last paragraph about Bob taking control implies levels of legality and board authority that I don’t fully comprehend or understand. Respectfully, Paul.”

The official firing came at a board meeting that Sunday, Oct. 8. By then, Jones had also quit, leaving the four directors who’d signed the email condemning Harvey’s alleged behavior on Friday. Surprisingly, it was the code of conduct, not anything allowed under his contract, that provided the authority to terminate the mogul, according to Maerov and Ben Ammar. “Under the old contract, we couldn’t fire him until he was convicted of sexual assault,” says Ben Ammar.

Film producer Harvey Weinstein boards a taxi boat during the 71st Venice Film Festival in 2014.

GABRIEL BOUYS AFP/Getty Images

Ben Ammar and Maerov both swear that if it hadn’t been for the code, Harvey Weinstein would still be running TWC today. “He was that crazy,” says Maerov. “Once he was out, the women he’d abused knew there was no way he could harm them professionally. Firing him was crucial to opening the floodgates. If the floodgates hadn’t opened, who knows how long this maniac would be scrambling to stay in power?”

Still, it seems unlikely that Weinstein would have survived long given the sensational and horrifying allegations already crowding the headlines. It’s a measure of Harvey Weinstein’s immense power that it took one of the worst sexual-assault scandals in Hollywood or business history to repel his loyalists and end his reign. It was that scandal—not the alleged business abuses that could have skewered him long ago—that ultimately handed his opponents a sword.

BBC. news:

Kezia Dugdale was not given permission to join the cast of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, according to the new leader of the Scottish Labour party

Richard Leonard said his predecessor sought authorisation from party chiefs to appear on the reality TV show but it was not granted.

However, he told BBC Radio Scotland he was “not persuaded” that she should be suspended from the Labour group.

Ms Dugdale is expected to join the ITV programme later this week.

News of her controversial appearance in the show broke on Saturday – the same day Mr Leonard was named as the new leader of Scottish Labour.

It provoked a strong reaction from party colleagues and Mr Leonard said the parliamentary group would consider suspending their former leader.

Asked about the row on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland, he spoke of his “own personal disappointment” at her decision to join the programme.

He said: “There are issues not just around the fact that she’s there and the kind of programme that it is and people’s view of that.

“There’s also the question about whether she got permission to do that.”

He added: “My understanding is that she sought permission and wasn’t given permission.”

It’s claimed Ms Dugdale asked both leadership candidates if she could take a break – without saying it was for a TV show

Kezia Dugdale is on her way to Australia and is expected to make her first appearance in the jungle over the next couple of days.

Although, as if to add to the intrigue, ITV won’t officially confirm that she’s joining the line-up for this year’s show. A spokeswoman said “any reports around Kezia are pure speculation and we are not commenting on them”.

There’s not likely to be any comment from Ms Dugdale herself for the time being, as she is now under contract with “I’m A Celebrity”.

She’s expected to be paid tens of thousands of pounds, part of which she’ll donate to charity along with her MSP salary for the three weeks she’s away.

A close friend of the former Labour leader said the party’s business manager, James Kelly, had told her he could not give her permission to take leave.

The friend said both candidates to succeed her – Richard Leonard and Anas Sarwar – had agreed she could take a break to work on a project that would raise money for charity.

They were not told the project was a reality TV show.

And why is she doing it? The friend said it was a chance to speak about Labour values to an audience of many millions.

Mr Leonard said he had not spoken to Ms Dugdale over the weekend.

But he said the Labour group at Holyrood needed to have a “proper discussion” about and whether to take action.

“I’m not persuaded that the immediate step that the Labour party needs to take is to suspend Kezia from membership of the Labour group but I do think we need to have a discussion about it,” said.

During the interview, he was also asked about a tweet by SNP MSP Jenny Gilruth, in which she suggested that Ms Dugdale had been the victim of bullying.

Ms Gilruth – who is in a relationship with the Labour MSP – said: “I see @scottishlabour have developed their own unique take on the final day of #AntiBullyingWeek. Huge props, comrades! #TeamKez.”

Mr Leonard said he had not seen the tweet but he added: “There was certainly a strong reaction on social media when the news broke on Saturday morning and feelings are running high about it.

“There’s no question about that.”

The new series of the reality TV show, which is filmed in Australia, began on Sunday night with celebrities including boxer Amir Khan, Hollyoaks actor Jamie Lomas, and Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, among the contestants.

Ms Dugdale’s father, Jeff Dugdale, said on Twitter that he expected his daughter to make her first appearance on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon used social media to give her backing to her former rival, declaring she was “#teamkez” – despite telling reporters that it was “not something I would want to see an SNP MSP do”.

And Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who was suspended from her party when she took part in the same programme, also posted support for Ms Dugdale.

Ms Dorries tweeted that it was “time for party leaders to grow up” and said Ms Dugdale was a “smart lady” – despite the Labour politician having previously criticised her own appearance on the programme as “daft”.

Mr Leonard was also questioned about the status of the Labour group on Aberdeen City Council, who are currently all suspended from the party for going into coalition with Conservative councillors against the instructions of the central party.

The group’s leader, Jenny Laing, subsequently won the local politician award at the Herald newspaper’s Scottish Politician of the Year Awards for the council’s efforts to raise money from the capital markets via bonds.

Mr Leonard said the group were “seeking direction” from the party’s Scottish executive, which he was now a member of, and said a report had been sent to the UK executive.

He said: “I don’t like to see a situation where members of the Labour Party are put outside it.

“But neither can we allow for a situation where a group of labour councillors defy an instruction which was issued by the Labour Party.”

Later in the day on BBC 5 Live, Yorkshire-born Mr Leonard said that he would support England against Scotland in a football or rugby match, saying: “If it’s England versus Scotland, I do support England.

“Every other game I’ll support either Scotland or England. I’m not going to try and make up something, that’s the honest truth.”

In the late 1940s, a man in late middle age – military bearing, neat moustache, hair balding under his bowler hat – would walk down Whitehall in London to number 22.

Back then it was a bank: a discreet, exclusive establishment for members of the military. The bank’s name, Holt’s, is still carved in stone above the door, although the building now houses part of the Cabinet Office. The man would give his name as Captain Theo Spencer and withdraw money from one of his accounts.

He would then walk back down Whitehall and head to his office at 54 Broadway. The destination is a clue that his name was not really Captain Theo Spencer.

His office was the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, best known as MI6. The man was Sir Stewart Menzies, the service’s chief, often known simply by a single letter: C.

And the newly revealed story of his bank account throws new light on how MI6 worked and also Britain’s role in the Middle East.

In a meeting in 1952 with the two most senior officials from the Treasury and the Foreign Office, Menzies offered a confession.

The record of this meeting lies in a remarkable document unearthed in the National Archives by Dr Rory Cormac of the University of Nottingham, and forms the basis for an investigation by BBC Radio 4’s investigative history programme, Document.

MI6 archives are closed but the document appears in a file that was declassified as part of a recent release from the cabinet secretary’s secret and personal archive.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption MI6’s then chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, revealed the existence of the secret account in 1952

“He drops a bombshell of an inheritance,” Dr Cormac says of the meeting. Since Sir Stewart was about to hand over the reins of MI6 to his successor, there was something he thought officials should know.

For close to a decade he had an account that would become known as the “unofficial reserve”, in practice his own, secret slush fund.

Even by the standards of a secret service, the account was remarkably clandestine. No-one knew about it. “Not the Treasury or the Foreign Office. Certainly not ministers. And not even MI6’s own finance director,” explains Dr Cormac.

At the meeting, the permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Edward Bridges, asked Sir Stewart how much money he had in the account and across his reserves, explaining that if it was a substantial sum, that might raise questions of accountability.

MI6 was supposed to be funded by a secret vote of Parliament and under the political control of the foreign secretary.

“The use of such unofficial reserves by ‘C’ without the prior consent of the Foreign Office, could enable him to carry out policies other than those approved by the Foreign Office and without their knowledge. Clearly this was unlikely to happen, but it would be wrong not to preserve against it,” the document records.

Menzies explains that the “unofficial reserve ran to £800,000 but it later emerges this was an underestimate. The actual sum was nearly double, £1.4m, more than £39m in today’s money by one estimate.

What was it for? C’s answer in 1952 is revealing. “He thought it right to have a large sum to meet such contingencies as (a) a very large inducement to some person in an absolutely key position, or (b) the Vote for the Service being drastically cut in some political emergency in a way which would make it impossible to carry on the Service in the way it was necessary.”

Option (a) means an incredibly large bribe for some foreign official, and Option (b) seems to refer to the possibility that politicians might cut MI6’s budget, as they did at the end of World War .

“MI6 were pretty worried lest they might lose their money,” explains Gill Bennett, former chief historian at the Foreign Office. “So if they had money from whatever source, in one pocket or another, they really wanted to hang on to it.”

The fund seems to be largely the result of an influx of money at the end of World War Two (although the account may date back to MI6’s first chief, Sir Mansfield Cumming). The mystery though is where the money came from.

The document records that it was the result of donations from what are called “well-wishers” of the service “including a particularly large sum from an American”.

Given the emergence of the Cold War and the fact that the future of America’s own intelligence community looked uncertain in 1945, Dr Cormac believes it’s possible a well-connected individual could have looked to Britain.

“Maybe this could come from an American who was concerned about future threats and wanted to make sure MI6 were adequately funded in case of emergency.”

The revelations from the document do not end there. The files show that in the six years after the civil servants found out about the “unofficial reserve” only a few thousand pounds was being withdrawn each year and it was eventually combined with (smaller) “official” reserves.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Could some of the money for the secret fund have come from the United States?

But the papers also say these reserves were vital in allowing MI6 to carry out a number of operations: it gave the service the latitude to do certain things knowing that it would not run out of money because it knew they had this extra cash in its back pocket.

One of the files contains a list of secret operations by codename. Scant, Scream, Sawdust, and Straggle are just four of them, all covert actions in the Middle East. Alongside is the amount spent on each in one year, for instance £200,000 on Sawdust (thought to be operations against President Nasser in Egypt).

Some of these codenames were known about in the past but others are unknown to historians who had studied this period. Helpfully, in some cases someone has actually written in pencil what these codenames refer to.

The operations range across the region, from Sudan to Oman to Lebanon. In some cases, these were propaganda operations but in others, such as Syria, there were plans (never implemented) to assassinate senior officials to bring about regime change.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption The documents show that MI6 continued to target Egypt’s President Nasser after the 1956 Suez crisis

What is most striking is that many of these operations were running in 1957, a year after Britain’s botched invasion of Egypt to try to capture the Suez Canal after it had been nationalised by President Nasser.

“If you add all these up, what you discover is a big increase in the number of special operations post-Suez,” says Stephen Dorril, author of MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, who reviewed the files. “There had been an idea that Suez dealt a major blow to Britain and MI6 but actually they came back.”

“We see operations to subvert Nasser before and after Suez,” concurs Dr Cormac.

So do these files show a rogue agency finally being brought to heel by Whitehall? Not quite: they do show MI6 owning up to the secret money and putting it under Treasury supervision.

But they also reveal that, for a few more years after that, the appetite for aggressive covert action was if anything increasing, and with the blessing of officials and very senior ministers.

Today, MI6 says it operates under the law and under careful political and financial controls. But if you are ever in a bank and hear someone ask to make a large withdrawal in the name of a Captain Theo Spencer, then let us know.

Gordon Corera’s report, MI6’s Secret Slush Fund, is on Document on BBC Radio 4 on at 20:00 GMT on 20 November, and available later via BBC iPlayer.

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Big and tech data news

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Inside Tesla’s New Electric Semi-Truck

The NHS needs a digitally savvy workforce to ensure its survival | Harpreet Sood

The tide is starting to turn against the world’s digital giants | John Naughton

Qualcomm and CEO Steve Mollenkopf Face An Acquisition, Lawsuits, and a Big Takeover Bid

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Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage… bound together in an unholy alliance | Carole Cadwalladr

How a Handful of Billionaires Kept Their Friend Harvey Weinstein in Power

PART ONE: Buddies on the Board

A missed opportunity

Partying with the board

PART TWO: A Contract Showdown

Two directors grow anxious

Harvey’s contract: An impregnable fortress

A fight over files

Enter the lawyers

Part Three: The Weinstein Co. Endgame

A deal falls through, and Weinstein stumbles

TWC begins to implode

A speedy collapse

Published by proflapin

2 thoughts on “Big and tech data news”

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This Man Is Leading an AI Revolution in Silicon Valley—And He’s Just Getting Started

Inside Tesla’s New Electric Semi-Truck

The NHS needs a digitally savvy workforce to ensure its survival | Harpreet Sood

The tide is starting to turn against the world’s digital giants | John Naughton

Qualcomm and CEO Steve Mollenkopf Face An Acquisition, Lawsuits, and a Big Takeover Bid

Bitcoin Is Sticking to Its $8,000 High. Here’s What’s Keeping It Afloat

Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage… bound together in an unholy alliance | Carole Cadwalladr

How a Handful of Billionaires Kept Their Friend Harvey Weinstein in Power

PART ONE: Buddies on the Board

A missed opportunity

Partying with the board

PART TWO: A Contract Showdown

Two directors grow anxious

Harvey’s contract: An impregnable fortress

A fight over files

Enter the lawyers

Part Three: The Weinstein Co. Endgame

A deal falls through, and Weinstein stumbles

TWC begins to implode

A speedy collapse

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Published by proflapin

2 thoughts on “Big and tech data news”

Leave a comment Cancel reply