Staveley banks a £40m bonanza for brokering Barclays' Abu Dhabi deal

Amanda Staveley is set to bag almost £40m in commission paid to her boutique advisory firm, PCP Capital Partners, for brokering last week's £3.5bn capital injection into Barclays by Middle East investors.

About 13 per cent was wiped off the value of Barclays' shares on Friday – as the City gave the thumbs down to its decision to take Middle Eastern cash, instead of the more generous lending terms of the UK Government's bailout – but Ms Staveley, the former girlfriend of Prince Andrew, was celebrating the biggest deal of her life in Annabel's, the exclusive Mayfair nightclub.

In a breakneck 10 days of deal brokering, Ms Staveley managed to secure the multi-billion capital investment that sent shockwaves through the UK's financial sector and angered Barclays investors and politicians.

PCP Capital Partners, which Ms Staveley founded in 2005, acted for Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nah-yan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, to deliver his £3.5bn personal investment into Barclays in return for a 16 per cent shareholding of the bank.

As part of the overall £7.3bn investment Barclays unveiled on Friday, the bank is also raising up to £2bn from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and £300m from a member of Qatar's royal family.

PCP's total commission will be £110m, but after other advisers are paid Ms Staveley's firm will earn a £40m profit. While PCP also has a handful of other partners including David Mellor, the former Tory MP, Ms Staveley is expected to pocket the majority of the £40m. This weekend, Ms Staveley, who is a multimillionaire, spoke of her role in brokering the deal with the Middle East investors.

She is reported to have said: "Of course, we negotiated hard – these are incredibly tough times to be making such an investment decision. But we are happy with the outcome and hope shareholders will see this as a good deal, both now and in the long term. In this environment, any deal was going to be dilutive to other shareholders. We are long-term investors and hope to help Barclays where we can with its international expansion."

However, existing shareholders in the bank still need to approve the proposal on 24 November and it may yet be scuppered if a large protest vote emerges. Certainly, this is a possibility if the reaction of investors, who sent its shares down 13 per cent to 178.9p on Friday, is anything to go by.

The Barclays deal heralds the meteoric rise of Ms Staveley, the 35-year old from Doncaster who has been building relationships with the Arabian Gulf's ruling sheikhs for well over a decade.

Ms Staveley also brokered the takeover of Manchester City football club in August by the same sheikh, Mr Mansour, who is investing in Barclays. The deal had an explosive impact on the transfer market at the end of August, as Manchester City snapped up the Brazilian star Robinho for around £33m and allegedly inquired about the possibility of buying some the Premier League's biggest talents, such as Liverpool's Fernando Torres.

PCP netted a commission of about £10m for masterminding the deal with Manchester City. Ms Staveley has also been involved over the summer in separate negotiations between Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum and his Dubai International Capital (DIC) investment vehicle, the American owners of the club, to buy a minority 49 per cent stake in Liverpool football club.

PCP is also working on behalf of a Qatar investment vehicle to acquire Trillium, the outsourcing arm of the property giant Land Securities, for £1bn in the protracted negotiations, al-though there is no indication of if, or when, this will happen.

Ms Staveley first started to make her mark with the sheikhs and the Arabian Gulf's kingpins when she set up a restaurant in Cambridge-shire after persuading her bank manager to lend her £180,000. Crucially, she set up her Stocks eatery close to the British horseracing hub of Newmarket.

The patrons of the restaurant, where Ms Staveley would work while also dabbling in her alternative career of dealing in shares worth thousands of pounds, included senior staff from the Godolphin stables owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the most powerful racehorse owner on the planet.

While this is where the seeds of her association with the Middle East's wealthiest figures were sown, few, perhaps not even Ms Staveley herself, could have imagined that it would culminate in a deal of Friday's scale.