Sir Bob Jones

"Commercial property investor Sir Bob Jones is scathing about Rainbow Properties and says the company had no idea what it was doing. He says people are inclined to think that the commercial property field is simply a matter of bricks and mortar, but to invest successfully involves an understanding of intangible things including history and context. His company has worked out its own formulas, he says. ‘We’ve found it terribly easy to make vast sums of money. Some years after Rainbow Properties had gone, Craig said to me, “You know, I never really understood commercial property. I just don’t get it.” It’s a very revealing remark. Craig is sort of black and white. He’s a puritan. It’s hard to imagine him running rampant in any sense. He’s always under control. And I don’t think it’s because he is concerned about what people think, he’s just highly self-controlled and is probably quite content with life. He’s low on ego count.’"

"‘Rainbow would have completely crashed and gone like the others because it was a bubble company and the share price was totally in bubble territory and he’d paid big prices for all those stakes in the companies he had,’ Alan Gibbs says. ‘The clever thing he did was to sell out to Brierley before the crash so he must have had some presentiment of it. If he’d stayed five more minutes, he’d have been on his belly. He was lucky.’ Sir Bob Jones recalls Ken Wikeley saying to him, ‘You know, Craig has an almost animal intuition to know when to jump out of something.’"