A LEADING team of literary and theatrical agents who sold their company for £12m are now being accused of a conspiracy to harm the firm while carrying on working for it.

The new chairman of their parent company has launched an investigation into apparent inconsistencies in the payment of commissions and bonuses totalling £2m in recent months.

David Buchler, a corporate turnaround king and former vice-chairman of Spurs football club, claims the agents soaked up profits so they could buy back the firm, PFD, for just £4m in an attempted management buy-out.

Agents representing Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, and Ewan McGregor, the Star Wars actor, have been issued with letters informing them they have been sacked.

The agents for Keira Knightley, the Pride and Prejudice star and Robert Harris, author of such books as Fatherland, Enigma and Pompeii, have both resigned from the company.

By last week, 23 of the firm’s 36 agents had departed, many of them to set up a new company, United Agents, which will start operations in the new year.

Supporters of the rebel agents include Harris, who has complained that he would not be “a commodity to be bought by some other company”.

When Buchler took over as chairman of the parent company, CSS Stellar, this summer he rejected any idea of a sale and parachuted in Caroline Michel, the alluring publisher wife of Lord Evans, the former boss of Faber and Faber, as chief executive of PFD to try to stop the rot.

Buchler has now called in accountants, claiming the agents were paid excess commissions and bonuses.

He said yesterday: “When I arrived at the company in August there had already been two offers for the business in the region of £8m. The agents having sold their business to CSS Stellar for £12m were offering in the region of £4m and taking whatever persuasive measures they could, including mass resignations, to ensure that CSS had no alternative other than to accept their offer. To me it appeared almost akin to corporate robbery and therefore I made it clear that no sale would take place.” But Caroline Dawnay, who represents Hornby and resigned before receiving the letter of dismissal, said: “We rebut the allegations with our heads held high.”

One agent, who did not want to be named, said: “The decision to pay out bonuses was taken from very proper business practice. Some of the agents were bringing in commissions totalling £1m a year and being paid salaries very much lower than Caroline Michel’s salary, which we are told is somewhere between £250,000 and £400,000. One needs to make adjustments.”

Millions of pounds are at stake. Harris’s book Pompeii, about the last days of the Roman city, is due to be made into a £50m film next summer.

One of the “sacked” agents, Robert Kirby, who looks after McGregor and Ricky Gervais, co-writer and star of The Office and Extras, said that Buchler and his investors are at risk of “being the proud owners of 25 empty offices, a dozen filing cabinets and the rump of a once fine agency”.

The roots of the row go back to 2001 when CSS Stellar bought PFD from its agents in a £12m deal. About £8m was to be in cash and the rest in shares in CSS, which were then worth £4 each.

The agents claim CSS was badly managed and failed to invest in its new acquisition. Shares in CSS fell to just 40p by July (by the end of last week they were down to 20p). In the summer the agents proposed buying back the company for £4m plus an interest in future profits.

Buchler’s statement to the stock exchange about the investigation says: “Over the last few weeks, the company has been investigating apparent inconsistencies in the payment of commissions and bonuses to certain employees in recent months.”

A source close to United Agents said: “The letters of dismissal accuse the agents of conspiring to do harm to the company. But they are totally spurious allegations. The people making them do not understand the agents’ world. They are trying to cobble excuses for their share price performance.”

PFD, which last week announced it had appointed two new agents, has little chance of holding onto the talent attached to its former agents.

Harris, whose latest book The Ghost is also likely to be made into a film, said: “Everybody I know intends to go with their agents, so I do not see where PFD’s cash flow is going to come from.”

Hornby, whose books include About a Boy, the film version of which was filmed with Hugh Grant, said: “My relationship is with Caroline Dawnay, not a company, and I am staying loyal to her.

“You don’t expect this sort of thing to happen in the literary world. There are very few areas of stability in a writer’s life but the relationship with one’s agent is supposed to be one of them. It’s all very interesting. It will make a book for somebody.”

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