John Fingleton has a confession to make. The scourge of British business, the man who, as chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), issued £237 million of fines last year, has raided supermarket head offices and gone toe-to-toe with the banks on overdraft fees is, well, a bit of a softie.

On a recent trip to a restaurant, the cartel breaker and self-styled consumer champion fell apart. “They hadn't got the tables quite right. There were ten of us but they'd sat us at two tables of five,” he says.

“I was quite timid, I was trying to be nice and was wondering whether I just hadn't made it clear when I made the booking.

“The American I was with just said to the waiter: ‘Look, we are not going anywhere else, we have booked here, we are putting the tables together'.”

Mr Fingleton's critics in the City will have a hard time believing it. They give the distinct impression they would not want to be in the same room as the Irishman, let alone discussing which bottle of claret to share.

Mr Fingleton admits this anecdote may be misleading - he is far from timid in the workplace and is known for putting in long hours. Since taking over as chief executive at the OFT three years ago, Mr Fingleton has embraced the new powers granted by the Government's Enterprise Act of 2003 - which include the threat of criminal sanctions - and focused the OFT's resources in a way that has put more than a few businessmen's noses out of joint.

British Airways has been hit with a £121 million fine for colluding with Virgin, the rival airline, over fuel surcharges. Drugs companies have been accused of ripping off the NHS by up to £500 million a year. More than 100 construction companies have been accused of price-rigging public sector contracts.

Executives claim Mr Fingleton is pursuing a populist agenda and chasing headlines. Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive, last year railed against the manner in which the OFT released the provisional findings of its inquiry into price-fixing of milk by supermarkets and dairies, noting that a verdict normally comes once all the evidence has been considered.

His argument carried some weight. The OFT was forced to pay £100,000 to Wm Morrison and apologise for forgetting to put the word “alleged” before claims in the press release about the supermarket chain's involvement in any of the illegal activity.

The day after the apology, the chastened OFT took a leaf out of the Kremlin's book, and marched into each supermarket head office to collect reams of pricing data on more than 100 consumer goods.

There is a logic to its pursuit of high-profile names - he argues that by focusing on the bigger fish such as the supermarkets, drug companies or airlines, the OFT is simply using its limited resources in the best way possible. This way, it can protect consumers and send out a signal to other businesses. When questioned about the knock-on benefits to his own career from the resulting press coverage, the amiable Irishman shrugs his shoulders, smiles and remarks that he is hardly that well known - he still gets asked at functions in the City if the OFT is a body that safeguards fairly traded coffee.

“It was the same when I was in Ireland at the Competition Authority,” he says. “We had schools writing in asking what competitions we were organising. I'm frankly uninterested in my own profile. This is much more about me getting the OFT firing on all cylinders, making sure we are using our powers in the right way and running efficiently.”

He adds: “We have to make a judgment call, like the police. We have limited resources and have to decide where might it have the greatest effect, where it might send a message to industry about the integrity of doing the right thing.”

The fact that one of the OFT's most significant cases to date was in the unglamorous world of marine hoses tends to support his point that the competition authority is not just chasing headlines. Three British executives who worked for Dunlop Oil and Marine were last month jailed for a total of eight-and-a-half years for running a cartel that defrauded the Ministry of Defence and the United States Government out of up to £75million a year.

Mr Fingleton says: “A lot of the stuff we do is very pro-business, while most of the headlines are not terribly representative of what we do.

“The guidance we issue that business really likes on things such as unfair commercial practice is pretty unsexy for the media, I'm sure you'll agree.”

Three years into his job at the OFT and Mr Fingleton says his biggest achievement is the prioritisation programme. This has enabled the OFT to achieve far greater results and speed up the delivery of price-fixing investigations such as those into milk and cigarettes, which have been on its to-do list for years.

Of the OFT's annual budget of £70million, half goes on a helpline for consumers and training trading standards officers, leaving the rest to cover administrative costs, merger approvals and enforcement work.

Under Mr Fingleton, the regulator has become far more brutal in deciding which cases to follow and which ones to drop - which cases represent the best use of limited resources.

Two cases brought by competitors against the London Metals Exchange and Walkers Crisps were shelved last year - the OFT judged that the cost of pursuing them was too high given the likely scant benefits to consumers.

Mr Fingleton points out that the OFT also initially turned down the call for an investigation into Britain's grocery sector. The Association of Convenience Stores appealed against this decision. The OFT then referred it to the Competition Commission, whose subsequent inquiry was then criticised for wasting taxpayers' money.

“Five years ago too much of our work was being determined by people who had more interest in stopping competition than supporting it,” he says. “Very often it was competitors bringing complaints about their more efficient rivals.

“We now look at prioritisation across all the work we do.

“We did a market study on online shopping, which is an important issue. People have rights to return an item within seven days, and the right to an electronic contact with the company.

“We found that not all businesses had complied with this so we used an education programme to tell companies what was expected. We thought ‘what's the most effective tool here?' A big high-profile court case against an online retailer probably wasn't the thing.”

Mr Fingleton first rose to prominence more than a decade ago at Trinity College, Dublin, in his native Ireland. Far beyond his mismatched eyes (one blue, one brown) and first class degree, he is remembered most for a book about taxis.

In a sign of what was to come, he wrote a tome about how consumers were being let down by the regulation of the taxi market, which restricted the number of cabs in circulation.

“I used to watch or stand in a queue, and see all these people waiting for up to an hour for a taxi so I wrote a book about it and proposed a solution to the Government,” he says.

He eventually pushed through his proposals as chairman of the Irish Competition Authority, a role he was awarded in 2000, three years after his book was published.

Fortunately, he is now more able to switch off in his spare time, insisting that he does not even raise an eyebrow at the price of a pint of milk in his local grocery store.

“When I book rental cars back in Dublin they have this airport pick-up charge, and you only get told about it at the end of the booking process.

“I get thinking like everybody else ‘you know, someone should do something about this' but no, when I'm not working, I have this amazing ability to switch off.”

Mr Fingleton's hope is that the OFT's success will ultimately persuade consumers to be far more demanding in terms of the customer service they receive.

Once more quoting the example of America, he remarks how the high service standards expected on the other side of the Atlantic forces companies to up their game.

“It's a cultural difference. In the US when something goes wrong people blame businesses. Here we're more likely to blame the Government. What we are trying to do is build consumer confidence in the market process.

“If one individual complains it isn't going to make a huge difference.

“People sometimes think ‘oh things are better than they were', but what they don't have is a vision of how good things can be.”

CV

Born
September 21, 1965, in Portlaoise, Ireland

Education
BA, Economics at Trinity College, Dublin, then PhD, Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford

Career
1991 Joined London School of Economics as a research officer in its Financial Markets Group
1991 Joined Trinity College, Dublin as a lecturer in economics
1995 Visiting lecturer at the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics, Université Libre de Bruxelles
1998 Visiting scholar to the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago
2000 Chairman Irish Competition Authority
2005 Chief executive, Office of Fair Trading

Q&A

If you could change one thing in the financial and commercial environment, what would it be?
Businesses who want to catch up with their rivals should focus more on winning their customers in the market, and less on trying to get the Government, regulators, or the OFT to limit competition.

Who is or was your mentor?
I've never really had a mentor.

Does money motivate you?
Not so much as doing interesting and challenging things.

What is the most important event to happen in your working life?
Getting this job.

What gadget must you have?
The latest connected electronic toy - currently an iPhone.

What does leadership mean to you?
It is about having a vision for how things could be, and the ability to articulate how to get there.

Which business person do you most admire?
Warren Buffet.

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