On Thursday we had dinner with photographer Kevin Phillips who was in Dubai to do some work for Mott MacDonald. During the course of discussing his mostly industrial photographs, I asked if he'd ever been tempted to be a paparazzo and snap celebrities. "No" was the reply, "but I was famous for supplying the world with the only official photograph of Nick Leeson a few years ago." Apparently whilst working for companies on other pictures, he does get asked to do staff portraits on occasion. Whilst in Singapore in the 1990's he had been asked to photograph some of the personel at Barings bank, including Nick Leeson.

When the bank went belly up, the only available picture of Leeson was Kevin's. He was on holiday at the time, and rushed to get the picture to his agent. Then he spent the following year chasing up his royalty fees and suing companies who'd just printed it without permission. He was then the subject of an article in a financial magazine himself along the lines of "Every cloud has a silver lining - the one man to make money out of Baring's collapse"!