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Banking on Africa
The cartoon showed two explorers pushing through the jungle: ‘If there isn’t a Barclays,’ says one, ‘then we’re probably lost.’ That was in the heyday of Barclays Dominion Colonial and Overseas, the banking empire set up to the undisguised fury of Montagu Norman, who as Governor of the Bank of England thought that High Street banks should mind their own businesses. Then the empire shrank, as empires do, and Barclays retreated from South Africa under pressure from its customers at home. Now it is back, with the biggest overseas deal that it has ever made, which carries control of the South African banking group, Absa. Former DCO banks in a dozen African countries, from Ghana across the continent to Kenya, will be rolled into it. This is where its ambitions begin, says Barclays’ David Roberts: ‘We want to make Absa the leading bank in Africa.’ His must be a different Africa from the basket-case presented to us by Bob Geldof, fit only to have its debts forgiven. Absa will want to lend. There is nothing charitable about this investment, as John Varley, Barclays’ chief executive, confirms. It is based on the belief that Africa and its dedicated bank can grow and prosper: a post-imperial vision.
Economies, emerge
This week Stephen Green, Mr Varley’s opposite number at HSBC, was crystal-gazing on his own account. Where, he was asked, should the world and its local bank look for growth? America and its Nafta partners, he said. China. If he had hopes for this country or the Eurozone, he kept them to himself. Instead his money, over the next two or three decades, would be on the emerging economies in general. Certainly, if more of them emerge, that would make for a more prosperous and better-balanced world, and if some of them are African, that would be better still.
King sized up
After King Fahd, King Sturge. The London house agents received the news of his death with an eye to the main chance, as usual. It will be a signal, they say, for a wall of money to flood out of Saudi Arabia and into the property market in London. Walls, of course, do not usually flood, but, in unstable times, you never know. Perhaps King Sturge have some penthouse flats on their hands and just hope that the wall rises high enough. I would have thought that the long-foreseen transition from a stricken king to his brother, the elderly regent, did not make the world’s biggest oil exporter more inherently unstable than it was already. For the moment, the price of oil, like the prices of flats, will have more to do with supply and demand.
A wharf too far
I regret the hollowing out of the City. Quite soon the Governor and the Lord Mayor will have the place to themselves. A few months ago the last bank — this was Barclays — left Lombard Street for Canary Wharf, and now it has been followed by the last of the daily papers’ City offices, those traditional eyries of their City editors and observation posts for their City pages. This was the Daily Telegraph’s. In its new home, a plaque commemorates Michael von Clemm, who first set the example. Prospecting among dockside warehouses for somewhere to relocate his bank’s back office, he thought that the front office and its dealing rooms should go there, too. His own office, though, always seemed to move in the other direction. I once caught up with him in a Mayfair town-house, where French windows opened on to the garden and a glass of champagne was at hand. He gave me a punchy presentation on the merits of Canary Wharf, and then added, ‘Of course, being here is much more convenient for one’s club, one’s wine-merchant, one’s tailor, one’s house and one’s airport.’ One certainly sees what he meant.
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