Bunhill: Maher brings his critics to book

TERRY MAHER was in perky mood last week when I called to ask how his book was coming along. Maher, you may recall, was thrown out of Pentos last November when horrors started to appear in the balance sheet of his Dillons, Ryman and Athena retail group.

Maher recoils when I ask about the 'memoirs', to be published by Sinclair Stephenson in September; much too pompous a description, he says. His, he insists, will be 'a readable book and not an academic treatise of any sort'. But it will contain 'reflections on City regulation and corporate governance', so I shouldn't expect an unputdownable sex'n'shopping blockbuster.

Pentos last week announced colossal losses and stock write-downs and an emergency cash-raising exercise. It also revealed that it gave Maher a pounds 400,000 pay-off.

Between skiing holidays in Switzerland, Maher, 58, has already churned out 45,000 words, with another 20,000 to go. He plans to reveal the inside story of his ousting. 'I will be attempting to set the record straight,' he says ominously.

'I'm concerned about the damage that's been done to my reputation, but that's not the purpose of the book. The book is not a whinge,' he adds hastily. 'It's not being done to get even. It's being written to set things in a proper context.'

More than 20 years ago Maher co-authored two books extolling the Liberal Party, and he remains a trustee of the Liberal Democrats. He also used to write a column for the Accrington Observer.

Maher, who built Pentos into a pounds 100m turnover business over 22 years, says he won't get involved with any new business proposition for at least six months. 'But I'm not sitting here an embittered man.'

He's just been appointed trustee of the Photographers' Gallery in London, and he's also busying himself on the organising committee of a Shakespeare festival at the Barbican this autumn.

Any Shakespearian epigrams he feels appropriate to his situation? 'He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.'

(Photograph omitted)