Martin Vander Weyer
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Borat is right, however, to imply that Kazakhstan has a darker side. It is certainly not a country where I would rush to do business, despite a rising tide of oil-fuelled wealth. Foreign contract workers whispered lurid tales of corruption and intimidation, and I met one British entrepreneur who on a previous visit had been kidnapped as soon as he arrived at Almaty airport. The kidnapper — apparently tipped off by a passport officer — greeted him warmly by name, chattered about the many folkloric attractions of Kazakhstan, ushered him into a cab and set off at speed into unknown territory. Luckily for the visitor, a powerful connection, a steady nerve and a mobile phone enabled him to escape. The moral of the story is beware of Kazakh drivers who sound like Borat. Unfortunately, they all do.
Intrepid
Steady nerves and powerful connections — preferably with the extended Nazarbayev family — are required for the success of any foreign expedition into this dangerous Central Asian fiefdom. I was particularly impressed in Uralsk by a middle-ranking British Gas executive called John Morrow who had been sent out to run the $4 billion, 18 billion-barrel Karachaganak oil-and-gas project, a Babel-like joint venture with Italian, American and Russian partners under the beady eye of the Akim, who made mirthless jokes about spying on Morrow’s every move. Anyone who thinks being a corporate big-shot is one long round of lunch, golf, back-scratching and counting your stock options should contemplate the challenges of an assignment like that, at the outer limits of engineering, logistics, diplom-acy and personal stamina. Morrow seems to be a glutton for punishment, having moved on from Karachaganak first to tackle a natural gas project in Iran for British Gas and then to drill for oil off Cameroon for a Scottish company, BowLeven. I take my souvenir Kazakh fur hat off to him.
Bang or whimper?
In next week’s issue we will mark the 20th anniversary of Big Bang — the reforms of the London stock market which changed the City forever by allowing banks to buy broking and market-making firms and put them together on vastly expensive new trading floors in imitation of Wall Street. On the day these ‘dual capacity’ trading arrangements began — Monday, 27 October 1986 — I was working for BZW, the doomed investment banking arm of Barclays, in an overcrowded basement in Tokyo, where my task was to supervise the installation of a vastly expensive trading floor in a gleaming tower nearby, to which we were about to move.
As the London market opened at 8.30 a.m. — mid-afternoon for us — the best we could do to make our puzzled Japanese staff think this was an historic moment was to get one of our bosses to shout ‘Bang!’ down a loudspeaker phone from BZW headquarters in London. But he missed his cue, so the event was a damp squib — offering a miniature metaphor for the way the entire global securities trading revolution of the 1980s failed to follow the script written for it by the blue-sky strategists of the time.
Within banks like ours it destroyed shareholder value, job security and collegiate trust and made millionaires of some very undeserving people. On a wider front it encouraged ill-conceived takeover deals and excessive risk-taking in increasingly volatile markets. It encouraged popular cynicism about City greed, and did nothing to protect or boost the savings and pensions of ordinary people.
But a visit to an investment bank in one of the new gleaming towers of Canary Wharf last week made me think that judgment may be too harsh — though I admit that the quality of the wines served at dinner may have been a factor. As I left, I joined an international throng of bankers heading home via Norman Foster’s great Underground hall at the end of what was probably a 14-hour working day. It occurred to me that two decades of what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ in the financial world has also produced extraordinary energy and physical renewal. I gather foreign banks have even found ways to make money in Tokyo, though none of it looks anything like what we imagined 20 years ago.
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