The News Agents: Lost at sea - why are we obsessed with the sunken sub?

This is a Global Player original podcast.

We start with that breaking news and Sky News understands a commercial submersible has gone missing near the site of the wreck of the Titanic.

We are tracking the search and rescue operation for that tourist sub headed to the wreckage of the Titanic.

If the sub is intact underwater it may have only a day and a half worth of air left.

Le pilote et 4 passagers qui dans 40 heures n'auront plus d'oxygène.

La Dominica Scorsa est ce qu'on parle sur le submersible que portavaient les touristes à visiter à la relite du Titanic.

Apocryphally Titan searching for the Titanic somewhere anywhere in the ocean up to 4000 feet below the surface.

And we've thought long and hard about how and why we are all obsessing about this story when we know that every day so many people die at sea.

But we wanted to try and get inside the mindset of what makes you get into a cabin the size of a small minibus and risk your life.

And what makes other people come to your rescue.

Here's one man Spencer Matthews who understands how it feels.

Prior to this events you know offered a trip on that submarine to see the Titanic I wouldn't think twice about doing it.

Same as kind of going into space you know you do it.

Love to love to.

Spencer Matthews older brother died on Mount Everest and Spencer filmed a documentary about trying to go to recover his brother's body.

So he knows what it sort of feels like.

But this search combines all the elements of extraordinary drama and probably our darkest fears as well about how we would cope in a situation like that when it is a race against time and your oxygen supply is running out.

Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents.

It's John.

It's Emily.

And later in the podcast we're going to be talking to one of the investigative journalists from the Financial Times who was responsible for an astonishing investigation into possibly Britain's most powerful hedge fund owner Crispin Odie.

Riche, powerful, extraordinarily well connected but who faced allegations of serious sexual assault against a number of women and who finally has been brought down by those allegations as a result of the investigation.

But we start at the bottom of the ocean or maybe on the surface of the ocean.

The truth is we don't know where this vessel is.

What we have in many newsrooms now is a ticking clock and a very uncomfortable feeling that we are all becoming quite obsessed with five people in this vessel who may no longer be with us, who may be recovered, who we may simply never find again.

It's partly, I think, to do with the extraordinary power of the sea.

It's partly to do with this sense, as you said, of our greatest fear.

It is the claustrophobia.

But it's also, may he ask questions about why you would adventure and what the responsibility is to others when you have that need to put yourself in positions of extreme danger.

When you look at the kind of resources going into this now, it's the Canadian Coast Guard, the American Coast Guard, the Hercules Plains, the Bahamian Pipelines.

So many places from around the world are trying to come to the rescue of this capsule, the submersed capsule, which they may never find.

And I'm cautious about what about it, and that's not what we do generally.

But it is a contrast with what we know happens every day in our oceans, with migrant boats, with the capsizing of tiny dinghies, with people drowning, whose names will never be known, whose photos will never be known and who will never simply hear of at all.

One of the laws of the sea is that if a vessel is in trouble, you go to its aid and its rescue.

And that has been the case for decades, hundreds of years.

Mariners have always understood that duty and responsibility that they have towards their fellow human beings on the high seas.

But the point you make is a good one, and it's kind of hard to ignore, particularly after the capsize of that vessel carrying six or seven hundred people off the coast of Greece and the question marks that remain over how much the Greek Coast Guard did or didn't do.

So, I mean, that kind of frames it in stark terms.

But we've also got that whole question of the exploration, the kind of desire to go to beyond normal limits, which I think that most people can't understand, like whether it's going up in one of Elon Musk's rockets to go into space and find weightlessness for a few seconds or whether it is to go to the bottom of the ocean and sail alongside the Titanic.

And part of it as well, you know, to be crude, is about money. Oh, they were billionaires.

But actually, I think it is the fact of the sea and being underwater and being in an environment where time is limited.

And there was the same fascination, I should say, in fairness, when the Kursk, the Russian submarine sank, and you knew that those lives were going to be lost.

We should just remind people this was a Russian submarine, and it was in Putin's Russia, and it had a political element to that, because we didn't know whether there was enough will from the Russian government to go to their rescue to do what they needed to do.

And actually, those men had not chosen to, they were kind of sent down.

And so I think there was an extra complexity, but you're right. What I remember, and I covered that story, I think I was at Sky News at the time, actually, was the days of tapping and then how the tapping stopped.

And it's that solar plexus moment where you think I've just been told that that's the expiration, basically, of 12 lives or whatever.

And I think we had it with the Chilean miners and that sense of complete joy when every single one of them was rescued, the Thai boys in the cave, complete joy.

It's almost like we are desperate universally for a happy ending that somehow suggests that we have overcome the adversity of this extraordinarily dangerous planet that we live on.

And yet, what we're talking about now is a vessel that is 21 foot long, and the search area is 10,000 square miles.

So, I mean, in metaphor terms, you're talking about the needle in the haystack proverbially.

But I think that this is something that is so terrifying, and you would have to say, being realistic about the odds of finding them alive is probably unbelievably slim.

Why did the communications go down? What has happened to it?

Why have they not been able to make any contact with the surface, even though there are meant to be all these sophisticated communications devices?

Well, let's hear now from Stockton Rush.

He is the CEO of Ocean Gate, who built the vessel.

I got these from Camperworld. We run the whole thing with this game controller.

So, he's describing what looks like the sort of the BNQ submersible, which probably was a sort of funnier clip before the events of this week.

I was listening to David Pogue, who does the Unsung Science podcast, and he'd been in one of these trips himself.

He saw the red flags, the interior workings, and he'd actually flagged up problems, the fact that they went unregulated and the fact that they don't really have sign off.

There isn't a regulatory body that oversees submersibles, because, let's be frank, there aren't that many of them.

But what was interesting was listening to him endorse, I guess, what we were just hearing about the simplicity of this thing.

He was asked if you go through a process of being shown what to do in the case of emergency.

He said, there's not many things you can do when things go wrong.

If it gets trapped, if it develops a leak, all you can do is try and get to the surface.

They have a lot of ways of getting to the surface, they throw off sandbags, they have lead pipes, they even have air balloons.

They have a dead man switch, that means even if everyone in the cabin has passed out, the thing itself can get to the surface.

But apart from that, if you're inside it, there's no sort of make sure you know where the emergency exits are and take off your heels and blow your whistle.

That doesn't work, so you are kind of powerless and on the inside, unlocked.

Well, you have to sign a waiver before you get strapped yourself into this 21 foot vessel.

And three times in the waiver document it says, there is the risk of death.

An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.

Where do I sign?

There's no kind of sugarcoating what you are letting yourself in for.

But of course, if you feel you want to go to the limits and beyond, that's what you do.

Let's speak now to Daniel Livas, he is a retired NASA astronaut.

I had two training events that were part of the Aquarius habitat off the coast of Kilaro.

We were at an atmosphere of about two atmospheres below sea level and it was saturation diving.

So basically, we could not surface for the duration of our mission there.

One was about nine days, the other one was about two days.

And we were doing some evaluations on the use of that habitat for future space training.

I can tell you that it's about as isolating as space because even though you, at that level, you're going to have fish that you can see and there's a lot of ambient line coming in.

You also know that you can't go off, you can't surface and you're really confined to the habitat that you're living in.

I will tell you that the crew quarters that we stayed in is much larger by scale than what the submersible that the current crew is trapped in.

So just talk us through what will be going on then, Danny, inside the cabin.

Let's make an assumption at this stage of the game that the crew is still alive and the vessel is intact.

In which case, they may be completely out of power for whatever reason.

The same power systems are those that provide the thermal conditioning to the internal environment.

You can imagine that the depths that they're at without the ability to gain heat from the sun, it gets cold very, very quickly on the verge of basically freezing temperatures.

It's a small confined area and even though they have their own internal warmth to keep them going, eventually the surrounding air and surrounding environment is going to start to soak up that cold or the heat is going to be lost to the ocean because it's a huge thermal sink.

It's going to be a very stressful situation.

It's going to be very hard for them to regulate their consumables like oxygen, especially if they're not trained for that kind of environment.

Things like increased pace of breath will increase the oxygen consumption and also increase the CO2 production.

And then if the air is still, it's not going to be a comfortable situation down there and it's very, very dire.

If that vessel is right at the bottom of the seabed, presumably you have to be able to send something down of that nature of that weight of that size to get to it.

And then what happens? You can't just tow up a vessel like that to the top, right?

Right. First, you have to understand what the configuration is of the vessel.

So, for example, when Spatial Columbia broke up over North Texas back in 2003, it took us months before we recovered as much as we could of the ship and crew.

And yet we're only able to recover about 40% by weight and that's on land.

This is quite a bit different. This is a vast ocean, which we have very little knowledge of.

What you understand from listening to Danny there is that it's not just, I mean, I say it's not just about the oxygen, the oxygen is everything,

but the conditions of the cold, of the dark, of food and water, none of these would be something that you would have prepared for

because you think you're going to do it all by tea time, you think you're going to be up in time for supper

and suddenly this is turning into a three or four day potential catastrophe.

And we talk about the oxygen supplies on board and obviously you can conserve oxygen if you're very relaxed and it's all very easy.

It's not going to feel very relaxed or very easy being down there.

So, it's a terrifying situation.

I think there are those in life who, when they were small kids, were always getting graze knees

because they were explorers and adventurers and like climbing trees.

And there are those people who think, oh, it's quite nice on the ground.

I'm physically terrified.

I feel like I'm verbally brave, sometimes a little bit too much, but physically I'm very nervous.

My son's first word as a toddler was careful because that was what I said the whole time.

And we're going to hear in a second from Spencer Matthews, an extraordinarily adventurous spirit,

a man who is always physically pushing himself on expositions and voyages and marathons and ultras,

but who has recently made a film about his elder brother Michael, who died on Mount Everest

and Spencer has been involved in trying to find and bring home Michael's body.

And Spencer does a podcast as well for Global, Big Fish.

Spencer, thanks so much.

I guess for Maitlis and me who are cowards who think that crossing the road is quite a dangerous thing to do,

trying to understand what makes somebody get into a submersible and go to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

In a vessel you cannot get out of because it's locked from the outside.

Spencer, do you understand that mindset?

I mean, needless to say, I've not been in the position that they're in

and it's deeply unfortunate where they find themselves.

But I think, you know, just from a broader perspective, exploring the unknown can be very exciting to people

and, you know, pushing your boundaries and your limits, you can learn quite a lot

through not only succeeding to break down those barriers, but also through failure.

And I just think the world is a very kind of interesting place.

There's so much to see, there's so much to explore.

I'm guilty of not doing lots of things that would be interesting and exciting.

I think in this case, seeing the Titanic is a really rare sight, of course.

And so I'm not sure that at the time of embarking on the trip, they may have understood that there was danger involved.

Of all the people, you know what it feels like to go through the grief of an expedition that's, you know, it's gone wrong,

it's gone too far, and yet it feels like you totally understand the mindset that your brother had.

Yeah, I think Michael was an adventurer, an explorer, he was very young.

He was the youngest Brit to climb Mount Everest, or to summit Mount Everest, I should say, in 1999.

Having been there myself, not to climb the mountain, but to shoot finding Michael.

It's an extraordinary place, and you can understand why people are fascinated by it.

This is Everest, I mean, and pushing yourself through limits and achieving things that might be perceived to be dangerous and difficult by many.

I think it certainly runs in my blood to want to do things like that, and Michael was no exception.

It's a great shame, of course, what happened to him, but I certainly learnt a lot about his mindset during the filming process.

We were at base camp for four and a half weeks, which is quite a long time to be at base camp.

Anyone who's been to base camp will let you know that there's not infinite things to do.

And that is quite a good thing that we were filming, and for me, as an adult, particularly an adult who never really processed the grief as a child,

it was interesting to almost become closer to the loss and to spend an elongated period of time thinking about Michael and being so close to his body.

It felt quite cathartic.

I've done a limited amount of reporting from war zones, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, places like that.

And whenever I left, I thought, thank God for that, I've gone out in one piece.

But there were those who became adrenaline junkies, they needed to feel this sense of excitement.

And it's true, you know, it was sort of weirdly exciting.

When you say it's the world, it's a fascinating place, I want to go and explore it.

Is it that, or is it the need for something that pushes on beyond what is normal, the risk, the adrenaline, the danger?

I mean, you could talk to a number of people who've been more experienced than me.

But from my own personal experience, I quite like the discomfort, because you know that it's temporary.

And some of the endurance events that I've done in the last few years are pretty humbling, you know, and you come home, of course.

Hot bath.

Yeah, hot bath, running water, a working toilet, you know, a coffee machine, just things that you might take for granted.

So it's almost that it makes you love normality again, is it?

There's that, but also the feeling of pain and understanding where your limits can be.

I find that it's quite easy sometimes in life to fall into a regime and a pattern and, you know, work and life at home,

both of which can be great, but often it's nice to set yourself a goal or an ambition

that you know is going to be incredibly difficult and challenging.

I think our thoughts are very much with those five submersed in the vessel right now.

But it's a different thing to extreme physical exertion or climbing or running or diving, whatever,

kind of getting into a capsule and going to see something.

Would you get the same thrill from that?

I don't understand fully the mindset, but, you know, where I, prior to this event, you know,

offered a trip on that submarine to see the Titanic, I wouldn't think twice about doing it.

You'd do it.

Same as kind of going into space, you know.

You'd do it.

Love to.

Love to.

You know, I just think it would be...

So you could have been somebody who just said, of course, I'll go.

Absolutely.

You know, the desire to see something like that would be quite rife for me.

I'm not sure, again, just to touch on that they would have seen it as dangerous in some of these endurance events.

People die, you know, in the marathon de Sabre, as an example, a gentleman died.

And things can, of course, go wrong.

I think the risk reward is something that you have to consider when you're undertaking any of these events.

Can I ask you, I know this comes from a position where I can't help.

I'm thinking about the mother and the family and the guy taking his kid down.

Would your wife have a problem if you took your kid with you on one of these adventures?

Or, I mean, would you do that?

I think we should bring Vogue into the studio and ask her directly.

She is next door.

No, I think so.

I think you need to, you know, these endurance events that I do are no place for children,

whether the space thing or the Titanic thing is appropriate for children.

Again, it's not my call.

Different people see things differently.

There is a natural worry for close family members and friends when you embark on these journeys.

I know my mum hates it, you know, like when I did the marathon.

I just imagined her.

She wasn't keen at all, you know, when I did the jump off.

And did she mind you going back to film, Michael's film?

Well, that was less dangerous for you.

Well, less dangerous for me.

And, you know, we put safety absolutely first.

You know, the family was taking the least amount of risk possible by employing the best climbers in the world.

Everest, by no means, is a safe place.

You know, accidents happen.

Natural disasters happen every year.

Seven people roughly die on Everest.

And often those are very experienced Sherpa.

We were working with a team led by Nims Persia, who's a force of nature.

And he was very quietly confident that his team would be safe and be able to execute this mission without any unnecessary risk to he and his team.

So, you know, that gave us some comfort to film the show.

And I think, you know, deep down, my mother and father would love to have Michael's body recovered.

I think, you know, as a father myself now, the thought of losing one of my children to Everest at that age and leaving them there is kind of unfathomable.

In their defence in 1999, there were, there was no such thing as a body recovery.

Helicopters could not fly into camp 2.

Just as they've been technological advances so that they can now.

So would you say whatever happens, it is really important for the vessel to be recovered?

Again, it's hard to offer an opinion.

I mean, if I, if one of my family members was on that vessel, I'd be, I'm not religious, but I would be, I would be praying for them to be recovered.

I mean, as I understand it, you know, there's, there's a cut off at 10 a.m. tomorrow for the oxygen.

You know, that is a horrendous position to be in, but, you know, were, were that to be unsuccessful.

I would very much hope that the vessel was recovered for the, for the families of the people involved.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, spent a great day for me. Thank you.

Thank you.

Coming up next, the rise and eventual fall of Britain's most powerful hedge fund millionaire, Crispin Odie,

brought down by a series of allegations of sexual abuse that was investigated and reported on by the Financial Times.

This is The Newsagents.

Welcome back.

The name Crispin Odie might mean something to you, it might not.

If you read The Financial Times, it will certainly mean something to you.

He's a hugely wealthy hedge fund owner with very swanky premises in Mayfair.

But he has been the subject of allegations of sexual assault on staff who have worked for him.

Allegations that until now have just bounced off him and done no real damage.

He was even charged, he was not convicted.

But the allegations kept on coming.

And what's changed is an unbelievable, brilliant Financial Times investigation.

And that's the work of three extraordinary journalists, Paul Caruana-Galicia.

If you recognise the name, it will be because he is the son of the politician, the multi-ease politician,

who was assassinated under very, very murky circumstances.

Antonio Cundi, who works at the FT and Madison Marriage, who is with us now.

And it was quite a piece of work, that Madison, to bring to light this man who was so powerful, so rich.

So connected.

So connected, and like Teflon, when it came to the accusations levelled at him.

Over years, he was in essence, and I've sort of been sort of pondering this.

And I don't think I'm pushing it when I say he was kind of the Weinstein of the city.

He lured people in by sort of making them feel that he could do them favours,

that they needed to be connected, that he would be their salvation.

And he abused that position horrifically.

Completely.

One of our sources describes him as the hedge fund Harvey Weinstein.

So he has, according to our reporting, sexually assaulted or harassed 13 women over 25 years.

These are allegations that he strenuously denies.

But our reporting is beyond robust, I've got complete conviction in our sources.

And effectively, he got away with it, because people are terrified of him,

of his wealth, of his connections, of his ability to destroy their own careers.

One of our sources actually genuinely feared that he could try to kill her, effectively.

That's why she didn't come forward.

For many, for a decade.

But he did go to court.

I mean, somebody did take him to court, and yet there was no conviction.

Which I know is not an unusual statistic,

but it's galling to know that somebody actually tried to put him through a legal process.

And that didn't work.

Your investigation has brought him down.

Yes, I mean, thankfully, there has been at last consequences for his actions.

I think the shocking thing about our reporting is,

even though it featured the voices of 13 women,

9 of whom had never spoken to the press before,

I've done the tally of how many women had previously gone to either the police or other journalists.

And there were 8 other women who had already made allegations against him publicly.

And those allegations just bounced off him.

So why?

What has made the difference this time round?

Because it was in the FT?

I think it appearing in the FT helps.

Personally, I really lobbied for a big word count.

8000 words to tell the kind of full technical story of how this man has operated for 30 plus years.

Not just as a sexual predator, but also as a man, a businessman, a financier, a conservative party donor.

Emily made the point, and you said it's the Weinstein of the hedge fund world.

Weinstein strenuously tried to stop publication and used every means possible.

Did he?

No.

He responded through his lawyers that he strenuously denied the allegations.

I thought he used the word strenuously disputes.

When I read the story, maybe I've misread it, but I thought he said strenuously disputes,

which I thought that's not the same as strenuously denying.

Yes, I mean, I think you're probably right, he did say disputed.

I don't know what is in his head.

I think perhaps that could be indicative of the fact that he accepts maybe some of these situations happened,

but he doesn't accept the nature of the situation, but I don't know that.

Madison, I'm not going to make you go through 8,000 words,

but give us a sense of how he operated and who he was targeting

and why he was in a position to be able to do that.

And then one of the striking things about our reporting is he was targeting women in several age groups,

so 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s,

and they either tended to be business acquaintances who were hoping for his kind of patronage,

social acquaintances,

and that's been quite an interesting tandem to our reporting,

because I think in an odd way that's helped to protect him over the years,

so the kind of upper class landed gentry,

they don't want to do down one of their own publicly.

So he's been protected by the upper classes

because they're protecting one of their own,

despite the very serious nature of these allegations.

Or he's gone for the very bottom of the tier,

kind of the internal hierarchy at his own firm,

which would be the receptionist.

He had the least money, the least power,

the least ability to hold him to account.

And you tell in your piece the story of a young woman

who was lunched by him,

then invited, she was trying to start her own business,

she was broke, she was really on her last panties,

and she thought she was a business woman in the making,

she thought that he could give her the kind of loan

that would really help her get started

and he invited her to his house, said his wife would be there.

She wasn't.

And there was this description of a horrendous evening, really,

that involved him sort of plying her with drink

and then telling her to stay the night

because she couldn't have ordered a cab home

and all the rest of it.

I mean, do you understand what was going on there?

Was she thinking, if he approves of me,

this will change my life from a business perspective?

I mean, did you get inside their heads?

Yes, completely.

I spent hours speaking to this woman.

We called her Bianca in our reporting.

It's been a hugely traumatic event for her

which has changed the course of her life.

She was desperately hopeful

that he would make the investments

and it wouldn't have been unusual for him.

He had backed the businesses of lots of friends

and acquaintances over the years,

£10,000 here, £100,000 there, £1 million here.

He's known, actually, for being very generous

and she'd been told by mutual acquaintance

that, yeah, if she played her cards right,

he would invest.

I think that was a direct quote from the acquaintance.

So she was very hopeful that her pitch would come off.

The evening in question,

she had red flag straight away.

As soon as she realised that his wife wasn't there,

as he had promised,

she started to feel nervous.

Early on in the evening,

she said that he exposed himself to her

which, understandably, completely panicked her.

She ran to the toilets and started crying.

And you didn't wonder why she hadn't just fled the house

at that point?

I did wonder,

as I asked her about that

and her explanation made complete sense to me.

She came back and he pretended like nothing had happened

and paved completely normally,

which is something we've heard from multiple other women

that he has done this to,

which is actually quite disorientating

to the point where you always imagine,

hang on, did I imagine that?

But not only that,

she was also absolutely petrified of offending him.

He is, I think,

the best known character

in London's hedge fund scene

and her fear was that if she disappointed him

or upset him or humiliated him

in any way that he would crush

her nascent business.

Madison,

but now what we've seen since the publication

of your article

is like a house of cards collapsing

with all sorts of banks

withdrawing funding and facilities

to them and a fire sale almost

of it's not just Crispin Odie

that's being brought down,

it's the whole company that he ran.

The company hasn't been brought down yet,

so it still exists,

they're still running client money,

but yes, they are trying to sell off

bits of the business

and I think a lot of people think the writing's on the wall.

They must have known.

I mean, there are big questions, I think,

for our age now,

I mean, our era,

which is about complicity,

not a first-tier crime,

not a sexual abuse crime,

but of those who allow somebody else

to flourish in that environment.

He must have been surrounded

by colleagues and by partners

and by people who knew exactly

what was going on when his door was shut.

I think that's irrefutable.

You know, one of our sources

who went on the record,

Jay Ann Mayer,

she's based overseas now

and she's incredibly brave.

She ended up signing a NDA

with the firm,

so she had the strict confidentiality clause

and she broke it

to go on the record with us,

so I've been incredibly impressed by her.

And she said that on one occasion

she was in the office sorting out some post

and Crispin asked her to come

and sit next to him

and she didn't want to,

so she made up an excuse

and there was a fund manager in the room

who basically said to her,

no, no, you must comply with this request,

picked up her chair,

put it next to Crispin

and told her to sit down.

So she felt she didn't have a choice,

she went and sat down next to him

and then onto the table

and started caressing her leg.

So effectively you had a fund manager

knowingly facilitating a sexual assault.

And that's not the only example.

There was another woman

who was grabbed by him in a meeting room

and to free herself of his clutches

she grabbed onto the architrave of the door

and she pulled so hard to get away from him

that she said her fingernails

left marks in the architrave

and she shouted no Crispin

as he did it.

As she came out of the room

there was another,

I think it was either a partner

or a fund manager

who walked past and didn't say a word.

Incredible.

What do you make of her?

I was very keen

when the firm confirmed

that they had effectively ejected Crispin Odie.

The partners had removed him as a member

and he was no longer a part of it.

I think there was probably an internal hope

that they could now just cut out the tumour.

The cancer was gone

and they could carry on as normal.

So I spoke to a number of women

after that announcement came out

and said,

what do you make of the news

that Crispin's now gone?

They had reservations.

They just said it's not enough.

Too many people knew

at that firm what was going on

and they didn't do enough to stop it.

We're six years on

from I think the start

of the Me Too movement

started in the US,

Harvey Weinstein

and other events since then.

Do you think much has changed

or is this

London's first serious brush

with it, as it were?

I think there have been

some really promising changes

and you can see that just from the reporting

that I've been lucky enough to do

over the past five years.

People are pissing their head

above the parapet

and coming to speak to journalists

when they feel like

other avenues have failed them.

But there are definitely

still big problems

under the surface

I've never been dealt with

and I think those problems

are particularly...

I mean, you know,

not just in hedge funds but in...

But actually in the city

is a massive, you know,

since your report came out

I was speaking to friends

who said, you know,

and they don't use this word

lightly, properly triggered.

It started off life,

working in the city,

read that report

and kind of went,

it all came flooding back

because nobody's touched that.

I think we've had lots of emails

from people saying exactly that,

that, you know,

this was not unique to ODS

and management,

that there's a broader cultural

problem in financial services

and I've done loads of reporting

on these kind of issues

affecting the big four accounting firms,

looking into something involving

a private equity firm.

But obviously...

Because it's just easier with money.

I mean,

what I'm trying to get

to the bottom of is

I'm sure there is sexual abuse

and sexual assault

in all professions

and all walks of life.

But when there's a lot of money

involved, somehow

it just becomes a bit

more quiet.

Money buys you

the best legal advice

on the planet

and that is what is terrifying

for people,

is that that is the scariest thing

when we're speaking to sources

for these kind of stories

is they worried,

can I get sued for libel?

You know,

not the newspaper,

not you guys, the FT,

but can this guy come after me

personally?

And the truth is,

technically,

that is possible.

So that's the,

you know, the dreadful process

you have to go through

for people.

Will he get tried again?

I mean,

will there be a criminal case

?

I think it's possible

and I know that

some of our sources

are thinking about it.

The difficult thing

is when he was acquitted

in 2021,

the judge who acquitted him

made some really

controversial comments.

So he told Crispin

that he could leave the court

with his good character intact

and without a stain

on his character.

He described the woman

who had brought

the complaints against him

as having a vivid imagination

among other things.

It was quite devastating

comments both for the complainants

and for many of our sources,

some of whom I think

would have a really good case

and tried.

And it's been a deterrence

to other women coming forward

and just, yeah,

like a real kind of judicial failing.

Amazing.

I'll adjust this system.

What a,

what's what a story?

What a thing to have said

at the end of the case?

Thank God for the FT

and thank you for coming in.

Well done.

Thank you.

Really well done for your reporting.

Brilliant.

Thank you both.

Welcome back.

And today,

at Westminster,

obviously all the talk

has been about the latest

inflation figures.

They're bad.

Underlying figures.

They're bad.

It's all been a bit of a shock.

And tomorrow,

the Bank of England

Monetary Policy Committee

meets and will decide

what to do about interest rates.

They're almost certainly

going to go up.

And that means

even bigger financial nightmares

for people who've got mortgages

because the cost of repaying

the loan on your house

is going to go through the roof.

And particularly if you're about

to come off a fixed rate deal.

Yeah.

The debate really now

is about whether the government

needs to step in

and support people

who are going to see

these astronomical increases

to their mortgage payments.

And today,

we heard from the Chancellor,

Jeremy Hunt,

who said he would not bow

to calls to change course.

He said that even though

you've got these bad inflation figures,

he won't step in

to underwrite or uphold

mortgage holders

because actually,

in the end,

that would just push inflation higher.

We'd love to hear from you

if you think that's a good idea,

if you think that's a bad idea,

if you are one of those people

who is just facing

massive increases

to your bills

in your repayments right now.

And what choice is it making you make?

Yeah.

So if you're coming off a fixed rate deal

of two years

or five years

or whatever it happens to be

and you're looking at

what the rates are going to be

when you sign on a new dotted line,

we'd love to hear from you.

Do get in touch

at the newsagents on Twitter

and you can find us

on all our social media handles

or email us

at newsagents at global.com.

Bye for now.

See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.