Foreign billionaires in London have proved good sport for Brits devising plans to relieve them of their cash. And here's a cracker -- a group of City financiers plans to open a private school designed specifically to cater for the offspring of the capital's new super-rich. William Russell, a former Merrill Lynch executive, Dimitri Goulandris of Cycladic Capital, and Hugh Warrender of Williams Trading, an American hedge-fund support company, have recently snapped up the Hellenic College in Chelsea.

The plan is to relaunch it as a school for rich little darlings -- local residents include Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, who has four children. There will be a core national curriculum with European languages plus Russian, Mandarin and Arabic.

So far, the investors have put in £5m and recruited Magoo Giles, head of the local Garden House Boys' School. He is going to have his hands full -- especially with the parents.

From:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-2230494,00.html (Times Buisness section, June 18th).

The school's web site has changed, but is still crap, and there are some older draft versions of various pages still online, such as:
http://www.knightsbridgeplaceschool.com/staff1.htm
which still has the Knightsbridge Place School name, rather than the new improved "Knightsbridge School".

No doubt the compulsive auto-googler Franciska Bayliss will be reading this tomorrow morning and having the necessary corrections made. (The term "auto-googler" is not defamatory: don't bother ringing Veale Wasborough about it: you've got a school to run ...)