Contractor was felled by reputational impact of 2002 Potters Bar train crash before going bust eight years later
Paris Moayedi, the businessman who transformed Jarvis from a sleepy, near 150-year-old contractor, into a support services and City darling, has died. He was 84.
Moayedi, an Iranian-born engineer who came to the UK in the 1950s, studied at Bradford university before later joining Fairclough, the Lancashire contractor and housebuilder which became the forerunner of Amec.
He joined Jarvis in 1994 from a contractor he helped set up six years earlier called Team, which specialised in design and build work as well as the emerging construction management market.
He left Team following a disagreement and was asked to take on the top role at Jarvis, then a London-based building and civils business, with roots going back to the 1840s, by its principal shareholder, developer Harvey Bard.
Over the next few years, he transformed Jarvis into a rail maintenance and PFI specialist with the acquisition of the former British Rail’s northern infrastructure maintenance business in 1996 and the following year track renewal specialist Fastline, a former British Rail company which had been bought out by its management in the wake of the state-owned operator’s break-up in the mid-1990s.
Other deals Jarvis struck towards the end of the 1990s included buying Glasgow-based railway engineer Relayfast, another former part of British Rail bought out by its management, and snapping up road maintenance specialist Streamline which it bought from Shell.
Towards the end of the 1990s, the firm’s share price nudged £7 with turnover topping £1bn buoyed by a series of PFI contracts – the firm carried out 39 in total including the Whittington hospital in north London and the Army Foundation College at Harrogate in North Yorkshire – and increasing amounts of rail work, including the track upgrade of the West Coast Main Line.
It also set up a student accommodation business called UPP which at one stage managed closed to 50,000 rooms.
>> See also: Jarvis: At last it’s all over
>> See also: The fall of Paris
>> See also: Paris Moayedi
But the firm’s demise began in May 2002 when a train travelling from London to Norfolk derailed at Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, killing seven people. A report from the Health and Safety Executive found maintenance, for which Jarvis was responsible, to blame. The incident was a PR disaster, largely because Jarvis insisted the crash was the result of sabotage.
Jarvis eventually admitted joint liability for the accident with Network Rail in April 2004 but the damage had been done, with the firm unable to recover its reputation.
Moayedi, who former colleagues remember loved curries and champagne, was replaced as chairman in 2003 by Conservative transport minister Steven Norris, famed for his failed London mayoral bid and colourful private life.
After Jarvis, Moayedi set up a company called Advanced Plasma Power to commercialise a process he said would transform the renewable energy industry and end the need to incinerate or bury household waste. He also took a role with Tetronics International, a Swindon-based waste management company, acquired by a group of investors Moayedi had put together.
Jarvis was restructured under the stewardship of Alan Lovell in 2005, which saw 95% of the business, weighed down by debts of £380m after getting into difficulties over the Potters Bar crash and bidding for too many PFI contracts in the eight years up to 2003, handed over to its creditors.
Jarvis, which also signed a deal to look after several lines of the London Underground tube network under a PPP contract as part of the Tube Lines consortium, that also included Bechtel and Amey, collapsed into administration in 2010 after its main client, Network Rail, dramatically cut back its track renewal spending.
Moayedi, who passed away last month, is survived by his wife Jenny and children Paul and Zara.
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