Soros fund manager in bid for Plantation

George Soros, Rupert Pennant-Rea and the Rwandan civil war were bizarrely thrown together yesterday by a boardroom coup at an obscure London-quoted plantation company.

Nick Roditi, the secretive and highly paid manager of a pounds 900m fund for Mr Soros, yesterday requisitioned an extraordinary meeting at Plantation & General in a bid to unseat its chairman Konrad Legg and replace him with Mr Pennant-Rea, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England.

Plantation & General, an otherwise unremarkable tea and coffee grower, hit the headlines briefly at the end of last year when it emerged that a large number of machetes manufactured by a subsidiary of the company in Kigali had ended up in the hands of members of the Hutu militia during Rwanda's violent civil war.

There was no immediate explanation of why Mr Roditi, who owns 29 per cent of Plantation & General, wanted to install Mr Pennant-Rea on the board. Neither Mr Roditi nor Mr Pennant-Rea was available for comment yesterday.

Mr Roditi, the publicity shy investment manager who operates from an unremarkable office above the Body Shop on Hampstead High Street, is estimated to have earned pounds 50m last year from his management of George Soros's Quantum Quota fund. He delivered a return of 160 per cent to investors, increasing the value of the fund from pounds 350m to pounds 900m.

The apparent bid to take control of Plantation & General marks a change of strategy for Mr Roditi, who usually buys minority holdings in small companies on behalf of Mr Soros, the financier who became almost a household name after reputedly making pounds 650m from sterling's ejection from the exchange rate mechanism.

Mr Roditi has already tried and failed once to pull off a recommended bid for Plantation & General, a London-based holding company with interests in tea estates in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Malawi, together with coffee, sisal and rubber plantations. It also owns several small agricultural hand tool companies.

Mr Legg, who has run the company for 20 years, said yesterday: "The communication received from Mr Roditi does not contain any reason or indication why the appointment of two individuals with no apparent previous experience managing a plantations group is a better course of action for the company."

Last week, the company announced a collapse in profits from pounds 5.4m to pounds 900,000 and a reorganisation that will focus the group on its African activities.