Beleaguered, once-proud UK agency PFD has been sold again, this time to agent Michael Foster, who will merge it with his three-person company MF Management and rename it The Rights House. (Foster’s founding investor, and the largest non-executive shareholder of the newly merged agency, is UK PR maven and son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, Matthew Freud.) As a result, ten of the agency’s 32 staffers are reportedly going to lose their jobs.
Caroline Michel, who was hired as chief executive of PFD in 2007 after previous management rebuffed efforts by core longtime agents to buy back the agency, remains as a senior partner at the new entity. The UK press credulously passes along a statement from the company that they expect “a number of premier UK agents” to join them–which they have been saying in various forms since PFD first fell apart in 2007.
Foster’s representation strength has been in film and TV, with clients including Chris Evans, Sam Neill, Julie Christie, Billie Piper and Alan Davies. He started MF Management in 2008
Guardian