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CHARLES VINCENT does not register his main business telephone number with directory inquiries. And that's the way he likes it. But then, with an income of at least pounds 15-million-a-year, the 35-year-old tycoon has long been used to getting exactly what he wants - in both his personal life and his commercial dealings.
The man they call "Copperfingers" is very probably Britain's highest paid director. From a four-storey office in Winchester, this fitness fanatic deals in hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of speculative deals; exotic and hugely complicated transactions involving everything from the currency markets to the price of gold. And in so doing, the reclusive Vincent, whose lifestyle could have been lifted from the plot of a thriller, pays himself more than many international stars, including Sting and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. His flamboyant management style has made him a legend in the commodity trading business. One former employee tells of the time he gave four traders pounds 25,000 apiece and dispatched them to Monte Carlo with instructions not to return until they had won pounds 500,000 on the gaming tables.
A workaholic who claims that his working day stretches from 5.30am to 8.30pm, he sweats away his remaining waking hours with a gruelling training programme - in April he is planning to raise $1 million for charity by running 250 kilometres across the Sahara desert.
Yet virtually nothing is known about him in the outside world. Charlie - as he calls himself - remains a closed book to his neighbours in the Wiltshire village of West Tytherley. Many have seen him on cross-country runs, accompanied by his full-time personal trainer, Chris Cozens, but he clearly prefers his privacy, living in isolated splendour with his wife, Melissa, in a huge country spread protected by electric gates and electronic security alarms.
But the story behind Winchester Commodities needs telling because Vincent represents the dawning of a new age of financial entrepreneur, a wired-up community of dealers who - quite legitimately - can amass fabulous wealth by playing the international financial markets almost completely outside the public eye. For Vincent and the other 48 staff of the Winchester Commodities Group - who between them last year took home salaries and bonuses worth pounds 55...