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Conrad Armchair sells off satire stake to Natwest brothers
19 Jan 2004
One of Britain's best-known satire web sites, DeadBrain, may soon be in new hands after the billionaire Natwest brothers struck a deal with the ousted chairman, Lord Conrad Armchair. Lord Armchair is in trouble with financial regulators in Britain, Canada, the United States and Tanzania following an allegedly lavish lifestyle and an alleged misuse of the alleged web site's alleged funds.
"Lord Armchair was a terrible owner," said an anonymous journalist on the web site. "He spent all his time flying himself, his wife and his pet guinea pigs between his London home and his library in Los Angeles. It cost a fortune and the guinea pigs ate through half the seats on the plane. Why he didn't just move his books over here I don't know."
Lord Armchair's private jet was said to contain gold-plated bathroom fittings, resident therapists and masseurs, a Jacuzzi and sauna, a supply of 40-year-old whiskey and a quantity of rose petals, which he wished to walk on at all times. Speaking on the Channel 4 programme "Rich Bastards" last year, a friend of Lord Armchair said that all of these items were necessary for his job. "Conrad is a high-powered executive in the news satire world," he said. "He has to be able to relax in order to function properly."
Most controversially, Lord Armchair bought the entire Playboy archive last year using $8,000,000 of company funds. At the time he insisted that they were for display at DeadBrain's headquarters in the UK, but it later emerged that nobody there had seen the magazines and Lord Armchair had in fact taken them home "for a writing project".
The deal with David and Frederick Natwest sees the twins gain Lord Armchair's 30% stake and 73% voting rights in DeadBrain. The web site's Editor-in-Chief, Gregory T Mullet, said that they had been "shrewd" in going directly to Lord Armchair. "Following Lord Armchair's alleged financial wrongdoings, it is very likely that the company would have been sold off piece by piece on eBay," he said. "This way there's no messing about, they get control straight away."
Staff on the web site have so far welcomed the deal. "The Natwest brothers have a lot of money behind them," said the web site's Political Editor, Douglas Ramsbottom. "Hopefully this will fund our expansion plans into the lucrative Chinese porn market. Lord Armchair's archive might come in use after all, if we can get it back from him."
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