Sir Patrick Sergeant, giant of financial journalism who founded the Euromoney magazine empire

Sir Patrick Sergeant, who has died aged 100, was the stylish doyen of British financial journalism as the long-serving City editor of the Daily Mail and founder of the Euromoney magazine empire.

Patrick Sergeant was once credited with “reinventing financial journalism as entertainment”, but besides being a highly amusing writer, he was also a shrewd market commentator whose opinions were essential reading for City professionals.

“Shares slumbered in the spring sunshine…” began one of his Market Reports, but to be named as his Share of the Year could have a significant impact on a company’s market valuation. Not afraid to dish out stinging criticism of underperforming managements, and no stranger to the libel courts, he once quipped: “Our sins may be scarlet, but at least we’re read.”

The personality and the prose style were all of a piece: once a year he would write his column from Ascot, and would have his byline picture changed to show him wearing a topper. To one wide-eyed female trainee on the City desk he remarked: “My dear, Private Eye has described me as an aging matinée idol. Is this good or is it not?”

He also claimed that his doctor had recommended him not to drink anything other than champagne or the very best red wine. He would lunch with City grandees at the Connaught, the Ritz or Wilton’s, and arrive back at three, wreathed in cigar smoke, to strike a mixture of adulation and terror into his waiting team. Declaring himself “a great believer in power teas”, he liked to have Earl Grey and fruitcake served in his office at four.

Many young journalists flourished (though some wilted) under Sergeant’s mentorship. One who started as a teenage office-boy was told that he had the most important task in the City desk’s daily routine – sharpening the great man’s pencils. “No pencils,” Sergeant boomed at him, “No column.”

When the Mail’s proprietor, the second Viscount Rothermere, complained in 1966 that the City desk looked overstaffed, Sergeant came up with a new source of advertising revenues by introducing Money Mail, a “family finance” page. And in 1969 he proposed an even bolder money-spinner in Euromoney, a subscription-only magazine aimed at the practitioners of the rapidly growing international capital markets.

With Rothermere’s backing, just £6,200 of seed capital, and Christopher Fildes (later a distinguished Daily Telegraph columnist) as its first editor, Euromoney began life in a corner of the Mail’s City office.

By judicious flattery of the leading players of the Eurobond market, by making itself a journal of record for their deals, and by attracting acres of “tombstone” (bond-issue announcement) advertising, it grew into a spectacular financial success.

In due course it spawned a number of subsidiary titles and information services, as well as an international conference arm, and won two Queen’s Awards for export achievement.

The invention of Euromoney awards such as Finance Minister of the Year and Central Bank Governor of the Year maximised both the cachet of the title and Sergeant’s reputation as a global networker par excellence. He attended no fewer than 34 consecutive annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the ultimate bankers’ jamboree (or “boondoggle”, in the vocabulary of Fildes’s columns).

When he encountered the Chinese premier unexpectedly at a Euromoney conference in Beijing, Sergeant pumped the puzzled statesman by the hand and announced for all to hear: “Prime minister, I bring you fraternal greetings from Margaret Thatcher,” muttering as an aside: “I hope she never finds out.”

In matters of finance, Euromoney Publications was no less sophisticated than the bankers its magazines wrote about. Sergeant’s own fortune derived from his holding of “management shares”, which entitled him to a slice of the profits as bonus, and when the company listed on the Luxembourg stock exchange in 1986, Sergeant’s residual stake was valued at around £5 million.

Patrick John Rushton Sergeant was born on March 17 1924, the son of a coal merchant who later worked for Littlewoods, and was educated at Beaumont College, the Jesuit school at Windsor. He did National Service as a lieutenant in the RNVR, an experience which he did not greatly enjoy but which provided him with at least one famous headline for his City column, “Two black balls over Cunard”. When challenged, he explained that this was a reference to the international code of nautical signals, two black balls at the masthead meaning “I am proceeding in circles, out of control.”

On leaving the Navy he found a job in the City with the gilt brokers Mullens, but was soon bored. In 1948 he joined the City desk of the News Chronicle and found his niche writing diary stories – which, he said, “introduced me to the great world of newspaper expenses”, a sphere in which he was indeed to become a legend. He moved to the Daily Mail as deputy City editor, doubling his salary as he did so, on April Fool’s Day 1953.

Sergeant was knighted on his retirement from the Mail in 1984, and his departure was marked by a dinner at the Ritz attended by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England and a galaxy of business titans. After retiring as chairman of Euromoney (later Euromoney Institutional Investor and recently rebranded as Delinian) in 1992, he became its president but remained on the board, thus becoming one of Britain’s oldest public-company non-executive directors.

When he stood for re-election at the age of 81, the recommendation to the AGM noted that he still had “extensive contacts which are of value to the Company”.

He was also a director of Associated Newspapers and Daily Mail & General Trust, the holding company of the Rothermere empire. His Euromoney bonuses made him the highest-paid journalist in London: he collected the then-startling figure of £112,850 in 1979 – the same year in which he received the Wincott Award as financial journalist of the year – rising to £852,000 a decade later, and dwarfing the salary paid to the third Lord Rothermere as chairman of the parent group.

He was no hypocrite on issues of executive pay, however. “The men and women who run our leading companies are not paid enough,” he wrote – and as for himself, “Money has made very little difference to my lifestyle.”

But his secretary once gave a glimpse of what that meant, in a profile in Harpers & Queen magazine: “He’ll decide he wants to travel on a certain flight – first class, of course, and it’s no good telling him it’s full up, with a waiting list of VIPs as long as your arm… and when you do get the impossible seat or hotel room, he says, ‘Why hasn’t it got a pink bath?’ ”

He was the author of Another Road to Samarkand (1955), an account of a three-month journey round the Soviet Union, and Money Matters (1968), a guide to personal finance which included the advice that “buying shares is a mug’s game unless you are prepared to work hard at caring for your investments. Otherwise you will be one of that army of small investors who the professionals regard as being sent from heaven to buy the shares the big men want to get rid of.”

In 1976 he published The Inflation Fighter’s Handbook.

Sergeant’s home was a magnificent 17th-century house in Highgate village, next door to the rock star Sting. Among his lifelong enthusiasms was tennis, at which his proficiency was undiminished by his enthusiasm for lunch. He was a member of the All England club at Wimbledon, and on New Year’s Day 1990, aged 65, he won a four-and-a-half-hour mixed-doubles final at the Vanderbilt Club.

Well into his eighties, he announced proudly that he had just won a needle match against Eton; when asked whether his doubles partner might have helped, he revealed that it was the former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash. He also listed “talking” as a recreation.

He married, in 1952, Gillian Wilks, who came from Cape Town; she died earlier this year. He is survived by their two daughters, the war artist and portraitist Emma Sergeant, and the writer Harriet Sergeant.

Sir Patrick Sergeant, born March 17 1924, died September 18 2024