8:
I had enjoyed my years as an investment banker and was proud of the changes I, Andrew and our various national partners, such as Hemedra Kothari in India, had made. We had persuaded a string of governments to open up their countries to new sources of finance which would help to improve the lot of their people. I had also benefited from two very comfortable berths at CSWW and ML, where the element of personal risk was minimal. Now that I was free, the buccaneer in me was itching to enter the entrepreneurial fray again.
On the first day of October 1990 I found myself without a job and needing to post letters. I had no idea where to post them or buy the stamps, because for years I had had an office to do all that. It was a graphic reminder that, seven months short of my fiftieth birthday, I was now completely on my own. However, once I found my feet, my former incredibly efficient and loyal PA from ML, Linda da Cruz joined me, and to this day is still my colleague in my own investment company. This made the transition process much easier.
One of the first things I did, after taking a few weeks to gather my thoughts, was to secure an advisory role at Bangkok Bank, where I knew the founding family well. It was a big regional bank and they took me on to help them set up an investment banking arm. I duly did so, putting together an excellent team. Unfortunately, the idea died when the chairman, whom I liked and respected, but who came from a parsimonious Chinese tradition that did not believe in spending money unnecessarily, was reluctant to pay the salaries that these bankers had come to expect.
I decided to try to use this team elsewhere. I was invited to join Banque Indosuez in Hong Kong as an adviser to help build their investment banking business, and in the first year, this team I had brought in made the largest profit the bank had ever seen in Asia, at a time when most of the big players were losing money. But banks can be political places, and these high profits excited the “barons” in Paris. A turf war ensued, which the friend in Hong Kong who had hired me ended up losing. After three years, we all agreed that enough was enough, and I left.
In parallel, I was asked by the Singapore-based entrepreneur Ong Beng Seng to be a non-executive director of his company Hotel Properties Ltd, his only publicly listed company. Married to Christina Ong, who is also a very successful entrepreneur in her own right, he was held up by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, as a model entrepreneur because he was willing to go international and take risks, which are rare qualities in that rather risk-adverse country. The company has projects in Australia, the US, the UK, Bali, the Seychelles and China, and it is the leading resort owner in the Maldives. I have retained my involvement to this day and am very proud to be on his board.
I was also invited to become one of the hundred members of the Club of Rome. At one time this institution had been a very influential think tank which did good works and pursued interesting initiatives on the international stage. By the time I joined, it had lost some of that cachet and there was a huge amount of talking, which was often not very well directed or focused. After a year when, clearly, I was the odd man out, and had been too frank in my opinion at various conferences, I was asked to leave. I was actually quite relieved, but I had enjoyed attempting to put to good use my expertise on a part of the world I now knew very well.
By this point I had spent a couple of decades observing at first hand the integration of the Asia Pacific region, which was developing a sense of itself in the way the countries of Europe had. I grew tired of explaining the various countries of the region over and over again to people from other Asian countries, and, of course, to Westerners, all of whom were interested but did not have much knowledge, so I sat down to write a book called Asia Pacific: Its Role in the New World Disorder. It was translated into both Japanese and Korean, and it ended up on the syllabus of business schools around the world.
The Japanese edition brought me to the attention of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, set up by a billionaire called Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had built a gambling empire around motorboat racing in Japan. I became the only foreigner invited to be on the foundation’s main advisory board in Tokyo.
Amid these new challenges, one very sad event deprived me of the person who had done so much to give my life direction. My mother had lived in the lower flat of the house in Glebe Place until our children came along and we needed the space, at which point I bought her a house of her own in nearby Gunter Grove. She became the volunteer manager of the first refuge for homeless people established by the charity Shelter, which took up a good deal of her time for some years.
Because I was travelling so much, I used to see her perhaps once every three months, but our relationship remained as important as ever. Since she was the person who had prompted me to travel to the East and enter a monastery, and she had studied Buddhism herself, I naturally told her everything about the spiritual journey I had embarked upon in Japan. She liked the Japanese rooms we had made in our houses in Fulham and Chelsea, and she was more than happy to sit Japanese-style on our tatami matting when she came to dinner.
As ever, we treated each other as close friends, as much as mother and son. For example, when she flirted with lesbianism in mid-life, she discussed this development with me without inhibition. I had learned from her and my Asian mentors that one should not pass judgement, so she knew she could tell me anything. On two occasions, at her request, I intervened to fend off the attentions of an unruly and aggressive woman she had met at the Shelter and who was harassing her.
When she was in her late sixties, she had a terrible car accident on the autostrada in Italy. It left her with great difficulty in walking, and she became heavily reliant on painkillers, which was not pleasant for her. She remained more or less bed-ridden from that time onwards, with a live-in companion to look after her. It was very tough for her, and not the kind of old age that such an active, adventurous woman had imagined for herself. This long, slow deterioration finally came to an end when she died in London at the age of eighty-one.
We held a big memorial services for her where I wept freely, amid a rush of memories of everything she had done for me, as well as sadness for the difficulties of her last years.
After finishing my advisory stints with Bangkok Bank and Banque Indosuez, there then followed a period in which I initially lost millions as I entered the start-up world. I also received investor money from friends to finance new start-up businesses and then lost some of those friends when the businesses failed. I was cheated out of one deal by a giant corporation, and I lost another when world economic events thwarted the most ambitious venture I had ever contemplated, before or since. Such, I suppose, is the life of an adventurer.
At this time we were still living in Hong Kong, but the expiry of Britain’s ninety-nine year lease on the territory from China was now only a couple of years away. There were already signs that the place was going to become less inclusive. For most of the years we had lived there, if Marie-Thérèse and I turned up at a cocktail or dinner party and there were Chinese people speaking their own language to each other, they would as a courtesy switch to English. But now I noticed that happening less often. The Cantonese are not known even within China for being especially polite or courteous to strangers. For example, if one stepped aside to let someone take a taxi, they were more like to just take it without demurring, let alone saying thank you first. Since I had been brought up to believe that courtesy to strangers is an important quality, I did not look forward to the prospect of a further deterioration of general manners. I also anticipated that the pollution in the adjacent Chinese city of Shenzhen and its industrial zones would affect the air quality in Hong Kong, and that there was likely to be conflict between the Hong Kongers, with their perfectly reasonable democratic aspirations, and the central Chinese government. Finally, I predicted that Hong Kong would change from being a regional base to being a very China-centric one, which was of no interest to me.
I already knew, having been there many times, that Singapore was an extremely courteous society where complete strangers would go out of their way to be helpful. The best example came when I parked too close to the car behind me in a parallel parking zone. A pedestrian knocked on my window and said: “I think you should move forward, because otherwise the car behind won’t be able to get out.” In the West this would be regarded as busy-body behaviour and might result in an earful of abuse, but to me it was the hallmark of a socially considerate society.
Singapore is also very efficient, clean and green, and it is just as favourable a financial and tax jurisdiction as Hong Kong. It therefore seemed an extremely comfortable place to live. The only downsides were likely to be the constant humid climate and the lack of discernible seasons. We would be able to avoid the worst of that by going to back to Europe every summer. So, in the year before the handover in July 1997, we moved to a flat just three minutes’ walk from the Singapore Botanic Gardens, which is Asia’s version of Kew Gardens. We have never regretted the move.
Meanwhile we still had our property in France, which was an undeniable extravagance, now that I no longer had the security of my regular investment banking income. The banks holding the mortgage on the château were pestering me to sell it, which we were loath to do. After spending so many years over the renovation, we had made it into a beautiful home and were not ready to part with it. Even if we were, the property would not have been easy to sell: there are not many buyers in the market for a place that large, and disposing of it would probably have meant selling at a loss. Nevertheless, the annual maintenance of around a quarter of a million euros would not pay itself, so I needed to find another source of income.
As a possible solution to the problem, my thoughts turned to Myanmar. Previously known to the rest of the world as Burma, the name its British colonial rulers had given it, this isolated, heavily repressed country had exerted a fascination on me ever since my fleeting, forty-eight hour visit in 1965. I now began to take a fresh interest, which would lead me to pursue the most ambitious project I had ever attempted. If it worked out, I might end up spending the rest of my life there. If it did not…well, so be it – there were always other opportunities.
The country has rich natural resources, such as gold, copper, oil, gas, jade and teak, and, in general, its people are remarkably gentle and courteous to foreigners. As I had briefly discovered in the Sixties, it is the most Buddhist of all the countries in Asia, and even its military rulers had always considered themselves deeply devout, for all their corrupt practices and their regular tendency to turn guns on whichever of their fifty-odd ethnic groups had fallen out of favour. For decades, however, it had been kept in a time warp by the military dictator, General Ne Win. He eventually had to step down in 1988, and by the mid-Nineties it was run by a junta which called itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council. This was usually abbreviated to Slorc, an acronym reminiscent of the evil agency Smersh in the James Bond film From Russia With Love. It did nothing for the regime’s international image.
In Hong Kong, I had met a striking Australian woman called Miriam Segal. Of indeterminate age, she was the daughter of Polish Jews and had actually been born on a fishing boat off the coast of Palestine, before being raised in Australia. She had clearly been a great beauty in her youth and she had made her fortune in the Sixties with a chain of fashion accessory boutiques in Manhattan. She had now settled in crumbling, down-at-heel Yangon (which the British had called Rangoon), where she was an unusual sight in her designer outfits and her long, crimson-painted fingernails. She had first arrived in Myanmar in the mid-Seventies in search of handicrafts to sell in New York, but along the way she had befriended the generals and she now proposed introducing me to them. She wanted to see if we could marry her unlikely connection to the military government with my expertise in the financial markets in order to help the country develop.
It was without doubt a very interesting opportunity. Unlike Miriam, I had no liking for generals and no illusions about the tyrannical record of the regime. I could see, however, that this desperately poor nation with virtually no modern infrastructure was ripe for the kind of development that had launched Japan and Korea on the road to post-war success. Those countries had moved forward via vast conglomerates involved in all aspects of economic life in their respective countries; what the Japanese call zaibatsu or the Koreans chaebol.
As I saw it, economic growth in Myanmar would lead to the development of a middle class. A larger middle class would mean more educated people who could then put the legitimate argument that they needed democracy to progress further. This had been a key stage in the process towards liberalisation in all the other countries of Asia, and while it had not worked perfectly everywhere, it still struck me as Myanmar’s best hope, by far.
I therefore developed the idea of forming an industrial/agricultural conglomerate for Myanmar, with the likes of Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Samsung and Hyundai as my models. Its role would be to facilitate any project – from a cement plant to a dairy or meat ranch, from growing timber to building a port – as long as it looked financially viable and was something the country needed. That last part was important. If the venture worked, it could give its investors a handsome reward, but it should not just be about making money. It would help an impoverished nation enjoy the basic modern developments that most of the rest of the world took for granted. Industrial or infrastructural development might not sound as romantic as a popular uprising to free the oppressed Burmese people from the yolk of military dictatorship, but I knew from my years in the investment banking world that arid-sounding financial deals could, in the right circumstances, make a huge difference to ordinary people’s lives.
My initial task was to get the military government to see the advantages of opening up to foreign investment, and in order to do that I needed to set up a base in Yangon. When learning of my plans, the regime kindly offered me, for a nominal rent by international standards, the former mayor’s house as my headquarters and home. It had a wonderful view of the Shwedagon Pagoda – the beautiful gold-leaf-covered Buddhist structure which is the city’s most famous landmark – through the branches of a durian tree. The fruit of this tree is famous for its off-putting smell but is nevertheless regarded by many people as a great delicacy. I also planted a nice little vegetable garden along the side of the house, and tending it was a good way of relaxing from the stresses of trying to put my series of ambitious deals together.
Despite this comfortable home environment, I quickly learned that Myanmar was not the easiest country to live in. The foreign exchange situation was a nightmare because there was a black market rate that was ten times the official one, and lots of ordinary consumer goods were simply not available, which meant stocking up in Singapore or Hong Kong. But the whole enterprise was the kind of challenge I enjoyed, and I had never been daunted by the prospect of living in tough territory. I felt like a pioneer, which naturally appealed to my sense of adventure.
A more formidable obstacle was the political campaign led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who had been under house arrest since her return to the country some six years earlier. Her strong links to the West, with her British husband and two sons back in Oxford, had done a great deal to put Burmese human rights on the global agenda, which was, naturally, a good thing. She was now calling for a level of democracy which the generals had made clear they were not prepared to grant, and the world was listening. To counter their refusal, she had demanded international sanctions on Myanmar. Her campaign was getting a lot of traction abroad, with the influential support of the prominent US Senator Pat Moynihan. He had a Burmese left-winger on his staff who persuaded him to adopt the cause, and apparently he then struck a horse-trading deal to get the support of President Clinton, so it became official US policy.
To me, however well-intentioned all this was, it was a retrograde step: sanctions would restrict the kind of normal economic growth which, to my mind, was key. The transition to democracy was not guaranteed, but I was convinced this would be a better option for the Burmese people than isolating the country still further.
I therefore wrote a public letter to the government newspaper saying that Aung San Suu Kyi was wrong to insist on sanctions. This position was regarded as sacrilege by most of the outside world. My letter was published in full, and I was subsequently interviewed about it on CNN in New York, which earned me a degree of instant notoriety. I got used to being attacked as a Slorc stooge every time I went on the internet. My monastic training was once more invaluable in helping me deal with the brickbats. Personal attacks are hurtful because they damage the ego. If one can successfully minimise the ego, it is possible to stand back from the personal criticism and assess dispassionately whether or not it is justified.
In this case, I was convinced that it was not. I reckoned I understood the situation in Myanmar and the prospects for its development better than the vocal émigrés and their supporters around the world. So I pressed on with my plans and, little by little, I made progress. After some months, I had managed to get a number of Asian firms interested in investing in a series of projects that we had identified.
The most important component of the investment was due to come from a syndicate of Japanese banks and companies. It took a lot of long, patient work to put it together, culminating in a make-or-break meeting at the Tokyo headquarters of one of the banks. I had sunk all the money I had left into this project and, if I did not get the funding, I would be flat on my back. As I went up in the lift to the boardroom, I remember saying quietly: “Please, please; this needs to work.” It was the only time in my life I had ever sought divine intercession.
To my intense relief, the syndicate’s answer was that they would provide the seed funding of US$4 million to get the venture started. I now had around US$250 million dollars in “soft circles”, whereby investors agreed that, subject to the government granting the relevant licences, they were interested in putting in amounts of, say, ten or twenty million dollars. I had a list of specific projects earmarked with partners, and we had provisional interest in each one from the relevant section of the regime. I was euphoric. All that time, effort and patience really had paid off, and I was now on the brink of something very big, which could dramatically change both Myanmar’s fortunes and mine.
I had, however, reckoned without the Asian financial crash.
Our fund was predicated on the Association of South East Asian Nations, ASEAN for short, formally admitting Myanmar as an accredited member. ASEAN announced in early 1996 that it was prepared to do so, with formal ratification due to take place in July 1997, so that element of my plan seemed to be in place. But at the beginning of the very month when ratification was supposed to happen, the Thai economy collapsed. That led to the domino collapse of some of the other Asian economies, in particular Indonesia and Korea, and it had a serious negative effect on Asian economies in general. The only one largely unaffected was Japan. The crash did not destroy Myanmar’s chances of admission to ASEAN; that happened on schedule. By that time, however, my US$250 million of interest had disappeared like an ice-cream in the Sahara. The entire region had suddenly become risk-averse, so for my investors it was now inconceivable to put money into a blighted, backward country living under a rigid military dictatorship.
Having been so excited by the vision of the development I could facilitate, I now found myself on the verge of bankruptcy. I moved out of my house overlooking the Shwedagon Pagoda and went to live in a dank room in a warehouse belonging to a business contact. I lived there for two months, surviving on chicken, rice and fruit, and conserving what few funds I had left to pay for my two older children at university in the United States, as well as to provide for Marie-Thérèse and Charlotte in Singapore. The situation was bleak and depressing, and it would have been very easy to lapse into self-pity. Once again, however, my training on the Japanese mountaintop was my bedrock. It enabled me to detach myself from my sudden change in physical circumstances and from the enormous disappointment. This setback had been another of life’s adventures, I was able to assure myself, from which I would learn and move on.
Fortunately, I had not spent all the seed capital and so the company had no debts. That meant I was able to give a modest amount back to my founding investors. As my share, I collected what equipment was left in the office in Yangon and took it back to Singapore, to start the next adventure.
As it turned out, Myanmar did open up to outside investment eventually: I was merely ten years ahead of my time. Looking back, I suppose I am grateful that this massively ambitious scheme did not come off: if it had done, I would have had to live in Yangon almost full time. That would have appealed to my pioneering instinct, but it would have been intellectually relatively barren, as well as very difficult for Marie-Thérèse and our children. I would be totally immersed in Myanmar today, rather than pursuing the diverse and hugely exciting range of projects that have occupied me since then.
But I cannot deny that the whole experience was very tough.
The most uplifting element was the generosity of my friends. To my eternal gratitude, they helped tide me over financially at a time when I was close to ruin. One was a close Thai friend called Varin Pulsirivong, who lent me a substantial sum with no questions asked nor any conditions imposed. Another was Andrew Korner, whom I had sacked for attempting to lead his own walk-out from Merrill Lynch. We had repaired our friendship a couple of years earlier, after my book Asia Pacific was published, when I used it as an excuse to knock on the door of his office and offer him a copy with a signed dedication. He graciously accepted it and we resumed our close friendship. Andrew was another of the people who now simply asked how much I needed and wrote out a cheque on the spot; he did not say a word about when he wanted it back or whether he wanted interest. In the event, I was able to repay it in full a year later, but I could never have reached that position without the enormous help of these friends. Andrew’s willingness to put our past animosity behind him and come to my assistance when I needed it most was a mark of very considerable friendship, which I will never forget. The episode was a perfect example of that Japanese proverb about the earth being firmer after a thunderstorm. Then another close Asian friend of mine simply made me a large gift. I haven’t mentioned his name, as his country’s tax office can be very difficult sometimes.
As I looked around me and began to pick up the pieces, I still had the problem of owning an absurdly extravagant château that cost a fortune to run but was virtually impossible to dispose of in a hurry.
A close Japanese friend of mine, Hideo Ishihara, the chairman of Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, spoke highly of a thirty-something American protégé of his, by the name of David Heller. By coincidence, my daughter Justine had just started working for Goldman Sachs in London (with no help from me: it took her no fewer than twenty-eight interviews before they accepted her). She happened to meet David in the office, they embarked on a relationship, and she invited him to Tourreau for the weekend. When he arrived, it was clear he was impressed by the house. After I had showed him around, including my extensive wine cellar, I told him that I was looking to see the house and would offer half of my cellar if he could introduce a buyer. He said that he would think about it. Then, while we were having a cognac and a cigar after our last dinner, while sitting listening to Gregorian Chant booming out into the park, with the brilliant night sky as the ceiling to this extraordinary music, he proposed entering into a partnership, in which he would buy fifty per cent of the estate. He explained that acquiring fifty per cent made more sense, as he would have our local knowledge to help him run the place, and we would not need to part with somewhere we had put so much effort into. Having established that this proposal had nothing to do with Justine – I was naturally concerned about what might happen to the partnership if their relationship foundered – we concluded an agreement. In the event, the relationship did not last, and David and Justine both moved amicably on. But he did become a superb partner.
With his participation, we embarked on the second round of restoration. We put in central cooling, and we adapted the swimming pool so that it had a waterfall around all four edges. It was a wonderful pool, dug to a depth of five metres so I could dive from a one-metre Olympic springboard. It was big enough for vigorous games of water polo – and for small children we had a second one alongside it. We also populated the place with animals. We had some sheep for a while, and a couple of donkeys, until a donkey kicked a sheep into the moat, where it drowned. We also discovered that donkey dung smells awful in the hot Provençal sun: whenever there was a cross-wind we would leave the swimming pool retching because of the stench. So we got rid of the donkeys and the sheep, and concentrated instead on wildfowl. At one point we had pairs of around thirty different species from all over the world. These included peacocks, Canada geese, and white and black swans. The whole park was animated with the movement of these birds, either marching across the lawns or dropping onto the octagonal basin or the moat. We loved having them, but sadly, so did our Rhodesian ridgebacks. Male peacocks fan their tail feathers into an astonishing display, but when they do so, they expose a bare rear end. This presented our dogs with a perfect target. The local fox population did not help, and our wildfowl flock steadily diminished, to the point where we were left with a couple of geese, one of which had gone mad, and two white swans. The crazed goose attacked everyone in sight, and one guest was so startled that he leapt back, fell down and broke his elbow. He spent three days in hospital, and we decided it was time to get rid of this particular goose – and had him for supper.
The château was not just about indulgent summers. I started a Tourreau Foundation with the aim of bringing together Japanese – and, later, other Asian – leaders with their top British or European counterparts. We had some very senior people: central bank governors, ministers of finance and major global company heads, such as the chairman of Unilever.
I invited between ten and fourteen people at a time. They would arrive on the Friday evening, leave on the Monday, and nobody was allowed to go out of the front gates once they came in. We provided extremely good food and wine, and my children would serve the cocktails and canapés. The point was to show Europeans, and particularly the British, a side of the Japanese that they would not normally see.
When the Japanese visit Europe, they normally do a whistle-stop tour, rushing around during the day and then relaxing with Mitsubishi Corporation or Nomura Securities at a Japanese restaurant in the evening. There is no real interaction on a personal basis. So the idea was to arrange gatherings with five, six or seven participants from each side, all at an equivalent level. There was a clear understanding that everything was off the record so people could have very frank discussions, and I would make sure everyone sat next to a different person for each meal. The former British Cabinet minister Lord Jenkin, the first chairman of the UK-Japan 2000 Group, said he had been to many meetings with his Japanese counterparts but had never had this level of intimacy and personal contact.
I held these gatherings for about five years. There was no commercial purpose. I simply felt I owed the Japanese a great deal from their kindness when I was a student in Japan, as well as from my banking years. They have a saying, “Koko made marimashita no wa mina-san no o-kage-san de, dakara nanika-wo, o-kaishi shitai”, which roughly translates as: “I have arrived at this point in my career thanks to everyone’s help and now I would like to give something back.”
Although my misfortune in Myanmar had nearly cost me everything I owned, I remained committed to the idea of applying the skills I had learned over my long career to business start-ups.
In the dot-com boom of 1999 and 2000, I advised a Silicon Valley company called Intertrust, which pioneered the field of data privacy. Instead of a retainer, I received a number of share options at fifty cents. At around this time we found a flat in Cadogan Square, London, which we very much liked. To buy it, I exercised a number of my options at ninety-five dollars. It was a good thing I did, because, in a less smart move, I kept the rest. Not being very interested in shares, I did not watch the price every day after the company had gone public, and I stupidly rode this investment down and down because I was too busy doing other things. After the dot-com crash, my remaining options plunged to around four dollars, when the company was bought jointly by Sony and Phillips.
I continued to pick up advisory assignments. I was retained by a couple of wealth management bankers from the now defunct New York investment bank Bear Stearns, who were running a private fund. My role was to help them meet wealthy investors in Japan, and I managed to get them in contact with the billionaire founder of a Japanese credit service company. In the course of negotiations, I had a long telephone conversation with Warren Buffett, the legendary US investor, who was interested in the possibility of investing in this company. I told him he would have to come to Japan and see the place for himself.
“I’ll do it on one condition,” he said. “You eat all that sushi crap and I’ll just have my hamburgers and coke.”
I assured him I would, and I looked forward to meeting him in person and introducing him to Japan. It was not to be, however, as the deal collapsed before we could get that far.
Instead, another big start-up now presented itself. I got to know an Australian who had acquired the licensing rights from the Australian government agency for scientific research, CISRO. This agency provided a lot of new technology to the agricultural sector, and the fellow I met had borrowed money against very little security in order to develop one technology in particular, which he had identified as having great promise. Following the crash, he had run out of funds and the National Australian Bank foreclosed on the company. The bank was then trying to find a buyer for the asset, as it had no idea what to do with the technology. This fellow’s idea was to make a very low-ball offer to take the technology off the bank’s hands, and I agreed to fund it.
The invention itself was undeniably brilliant. It was an osmotic process that removed the liquids from organic products – anything from oranges to the bark of a tree – to get the highest possible rate of extraction and, just as importantly, to leave a non-putrescible residue. Pressing an orange to extract the juice leaves the pulp and peel, which still contain residual liquids and will rot over time. With our process, what was left over could not rot, and it could be used as a filler for other foods because it was completely dry and neutral fibrous material. So we were improving efficiency in three different ways: by increasing the volume and quality of the juice extracted, cutting down on waste, and leaving what remained as a usable product rather than landfill.
The problem was the capital expenditure: this revolutionary equipment was expensive to install. We were approaching companies who had millions of dollars already invested in existing equipment. Asking them to toss it all out and spend millions of dollars on our new equipment was a tough sell, however good the technology. We quickly worked out that the only way it would work was if we sold the invention to a large international company which was building a new factory.
In our case we went to Ocean Spray, the giant US producer of cranberry juice. They liked our technology a great deal and could see the advantage in it for them – so much so, in fact, that they simply appropriated some of it.
The first time I tried to get a deal with them, we arranged to meet at the Mayfair Regent Hotel in New York. We talked in my room and then they repaired to their’s to discuss it. They kept telling me: “We’re going to have a win-win situation.” But I had the strong sense that they meant: “We’re going to win and you’re going to lose.”
We had known all along that we had to prioritise intellectual property. But getting patents is hugely expensive, especially if they are to apply all over the world. We spent a vast amount of money that we could ill-afford in the attempt to secure them. Now we discovered that having the law on our side and a patent in our back pocket was not enough, because going up against big companies is virtually impossible.
Thus, when we complained that they were stealing our technology and that any court would agree, Ocean Spray effectively said: “So – sue us.”
That, as they well knew, was easier said than done. They had a department of in-house lawyers waiting to bury a case like this in paperwork, whereas we had to pay an external lawyer who would no doubt cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the several years the case was likely to run. At that stage we could hardly afford a can of baked beans, let alone the cost of taking on a giant American company. The case became impossible to pursue and they ended up acquiring our company.
It was a dispiriting experience. I had learned fairly early in adult life that to enjoy any enduring relationship – personal or business – there had to be a measure of mutual respect, and in my view, mutual respect was based on fairness. The Japanese use a system called omakase shimasu which essentially means “I leave it to you”. In a business negotiation, provided there is trust between the two parties, the idea is to say: “Okay, tell me what you think is fair.” As long as the other party is serious about building a long-term relationship, that puts a moral obligation on them to try to be fair. It often works very well, because the other party may suggest the sort of deal that they would have accepted at the end of the negotiation, and both parties get straight to the baseline without wasting time and energy on bartering or negotiating every last penny. To me it is closely connected with the English concept of fairness, where it is generally accepted that one should not try to take advantage of the other person, and that so doing could open up a can of worms in which all the rules are altered.
Unfortunately this approach seems incomprehensible to most Americans, who live in such a litigious environment, and have what is effectively such a young national culture, that they are still really a bunch of teenagers, in historical terms. They will try anything, and they rely on the legal equivalent of the school authorities to keep them on the straight and narrow. Their lawyers make sure the contracts are written to favour their client, or have loopholes that can be exploited later, and moral responsibility becomes an alien concept. The only exception in my experience is the Midwest. In that part of the United States they have a work and moral ethic that came from Germany and Scandinavia, and handshake deals still exist.
There was no such attitude at Ocean Spray. Their lawyers were obdurate and absurd, with no respect for any kind of fairness. At the same time, I was learning other key lessons, most notably that, in the pre-internet days, it was not sensible to have our management sitting in Hong Kong, with an operating guy in Sydney, and another operating guy in Melbourne.
To make matters worse, along with this technology came the fellow who had invented it. While he was an undoubted scientific genius, he turned out to be a very difficult person, as did his wife. She tried to interfere in everything, and had hysterics whenever her husband disappeared from the house for more than half an hour. The record was when she called my hotel room in Sydney fifty-five times in two hours. The hotel operator got so fed up she reported it to the management of the hotel, who pleaded with me to get a restraining order because this woman was wasting so much of their staff’s time.
The Australian who introduced me to this mad inventor dropped out, because I held him responsible for a lot of problems and we fell out. In the end, I had to give up as well, because it was all too much of a drain on my limited resources. The venture had eaten up a lot of my own capital – I am talking millions – and I had raised finance from good friends who were not very happy with the result. I lost two of them permanently. They felt I handled the situation badly, and they may have been right.
Not everything I touched turned to mud, even if it sometimes felt like that. I have never played golf, but I became the proud co-owner of a golf course in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. I founded it with Varin, the Thai friend who was one of my rescuers during my quasi-bankruptcy. We spent four years looking for a site, and we then had it built by a Japanese construction company. We opened our fifteen-hundred-acre Royal Chiangmai Golf Resort in 1998. We hosted all kinds of people there, including General Prem, the former Thai prime minister, who remains today a figure of immense influence. I could see that the grounds would be a wonderful location to set up an Asian institute for the Sasakawa Peace Foundation back in Japan, of whose advisory board I was still a member. We got as far as producing architect’s drawings, but the foundation had a change of management after Sasakawa himself died, and they decided they did not want to embark on this “foreign adventure”. It was a shame, because one of Japan’s biggest problems is that its people do not really have the ability to mix easily culturally in an open forum, even with other Asians.
Mixing with very influential people came with the territory where Varin was concerned. A few years earlier I had been at a dinner party at his home in Bangkok at which one of the guests was General Suchinda, the then supreme commander of the Thai armed forces. During the meal Suchinda revealed what was going to happen the next morning: Prime Minister Chatichai was due to fly to visit King Bhumibol at his palace in Chiang Mai, but the plane would be diverted back to Bangkok and Chatichai would be placed under house arrest. He was planning a coup, in other words, and explaining it in uninhibited detail to the assembled guests. I would have taken this as quite an honour if he had not, at one point in this explanation, noticed me at the end of the table and said: “Michael! I had forgotten you were here.”
At that moment I began to wish I had not been.
“I’m sure you know that Thai jails are not very pleasant,” the General continued, “so I advise you to keep your mouth shut about what you are hearing.”
I did indeed know that.
“Don’t worry, General, don’t worry,” I assured him.
I have rarely been more sincere.
The next morning, Prime Minister Chatichai was indeed ousted in precisely the way Suchinda had described. He had presided over a famously corrupt administration and had been ridiculed in the country for it, so he was no loss. But I was relieved that no physical harm came to him, and after a short period of exile he was able to return to Thai politics.
Elsewhere in South-East Asia I did some work for a large Indonesian conglomerate called Texmaco, which bought used equipment from other parts of the world and applied it using very cheap Indonesian labour. This was a difficult restructuring job and there were some big consultancy firms helping too. Despite their efforts and mine, the owner would not let go, and, unfortunately, he ended up losing his empire for a pittance. In a more successful engagement, I became an advisor to a company called Sithe International, run by a French entrepreneur in New York, which built and acquired power stations in Asia. My contribution was to help acquire two power stations from Hyundai Engineering, after South Korea had been badly hit by the Asian crash and a lot of its big conglomerates had to sell off assets. I had good Korean contacts and was able to play a pivotal role, for which I earned a substantial advisory fee. I knew I could put it to good use if I could only find the right start-up.
A new candidate now emerged in the telecommunications sector. I was approached by a fellow based in the Isle of Man who asked if he could come to see me in France. He had found a way of generating very cheap international calls from SIM cards, in a system he called Call Key. This was long before Skype and WhatsApp developed technologies which made international communication free to anyone with the right hardware, and calling abroad was still very expensive. Affordable mobile services would be very attractive to the huge numbers of people who were beginning to migrate around the world in search of work.
Unfortunately, I had not learned my lesson from the food-processing venture, because once again we had the problem of being scattered all over the world as we developed the project. The Isle of Man fellow had as his partner an ageing hippie friend based in Tucson, Arizona. I brought on board a close friend of mine who was based in Scotland, and I myself divided my time between Singapore, London and France. Furthermore, the whole enterprise turned out to be a complete mismatch in terms of discipline and focus. My Isle of Man partner was a bright IT man but the hippie turned out to be a flake and we were constantly frustrated with him. Despite their difference in ability and attitude, the pair of them were somehow bonded together, and the IT man always came to the hippie’s defence, right or wrong. As a result, my relations with both of them grew steadily worse. Then my Scottish friend had a stroke and was out of action for a while, and when he returned he could only function at around fifty percent intellectual capacity.
I tried my best to bring order to our affairs. Having come from the investment banking world, it was natural for me to be structured and organised, and to have a proper understanding of corporate governance. To my other two partners this was all new. I tried in vain to convince them that they needed proper documentation for everything, that there had to be a paper trail, and that every expense needed to be accounted for.
“Remember that you have shareholders,” I said. “You are responsible to them, and you can’t just do what you like.”
But they would not accept the importance of it, and we ended up fighting all the time.
I would say: “Why the hell didn’t you do this?”
And the IT fellow would say: “Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’m your chairman,” I would say. “I and my friends have put up the money.”
“I don’t care,” came the response.
It was not very mature.
In the end they combined to ask me to remove myself from the group, which I happily did, and they ended up cheating me out of a fairly large payment. Again, the law turned out to be a strange animal when I tried to recover what I was owed. It was a clear case of being cheated, but I got a bad feeling when the lawyer who wanted to take the task on said: “I hope I’ll get a successful result for you.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “It’s quite clear that they are in the wrong.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that the law will agree,” he said.
I let the matter lie, not wishing to throw good money after bad if there was no guarantee of a just resolution. I had also persuaded some friends to put money in, but this time I had been a little smarter. I said to them: “Don’t put in a sum more than you would spend on a weekend jaunt somewhere with your friends. So if it goes, it goes, and you’re not going to blame me afterwards.”
That worked, and I did not lose any more friendships.
Despite this latest failure, I was still determined to make one of these ventures work. After my success with Intertrust, I remained fascinated by technology, and was keen to be part of a breakthrough. My goal was to make a big killing with massive leverage, which I knew was possible because I had witnessed it with the dot-com venture, Intertrust. My problem remained that I was an ex-investment banker who had never really done any investing in that part of my career, so I was not particularly good at it.
My third start-up was another telecoms business called Global Mobile Technologies. The idea was to provide various responses on a mobile phone: for example, tsunami alerts could be put out, so that every mobile phone in the area of the alert could pick up an emergency message. There was quite a lot of interest in this, and again I got friends in, on the same principle of not committing more than they could afford to lose.
The original idea came from a business partner called Jeff, who was an American lawyer based in the Philippines. He had found a true geek, who completely looked the part, with white hair and skeletal face. Our venture looked promising: we even persuaded people like Sony and DoCoMo, the biggest mobile phone operator in Japan, to take a good look. Once again, however, we were plagued by our poor management: we had two people in Manila (one of whom was in California half the time) and myself in Singapore, and I could not follow what they were doing on a day-to-day basis. We eventually brought in a Hong Kong investor – a successful, hard-nosed Chinese businessman – who put up the US$ 6 million dollars we needed, but there was immediate conflict between him and my two partners in Manila. Then the American lawyer was arrested returning to the US, when police at Los Angeles airport found obscene pictures of underage children on his computer – I immediately fired him but my Chinese investor’s response was “Shit happens and we need him”. So he re-hired him.
So it all seemed to be unravelling, but suddenly, out of the blue, I found myself with a major personal problem of my own to worry about.
We were in London in the New Year of 2007, and Marie-Thérèse and I were due to spend a weekend in the country with my old friend Kevin and his second wife, Victoria Glendinning. Based on a strong, intuitive desire, I had persuaded Marie-Thérèse that we should have a colonoscopy and gastroscopy. We had arranged to go together and the plan was that, once we had got the all-clear, we would head off immediately afterwards to Kevin and Victoria’s house in Somerset.
The afternoon did not begin well, as the specialist was two hours late. When he eventually turned up, we were each lightly sedated and he did what he had to do. Once we came round, he gave Marie-Thérèse the good news.
“Mrs Dobbs-Higginson, you’re fine,” he said. “There’s no problem at all.”
Then he turned to me, and his expression was less reassuring.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Dobbs-Higginson, you have a tumour the size of a golf ball in your colon.”
By this stage I was something of a veteran of minor cancers: over the past few years I had had basal skin cancers removed from my face and an early-stage melanoma taken from my upper back, along with a long strip of muscle. That last procedure had been a day-patient job, and three days later I was travelling, so it had not any great impact on me. But it was clear from the specialist’s face that we were now dealing with something of a different order.
“It would be inappropriate for me to pretend that it’s not a big problem,” he said. “There is an eighty percent chance it is cancer, but we have to wait for the biopsy results to be certain. I strongly advise you to get it seen to by a surgeon.”
Emerging a little dazed into the chilly January afternoon, I called Kevin and Victoria. We were already late, I apologised, and we would now have to cancel completely.
After an unsettled, unhappy weekend at our flat in London, I went on the Monday morning to see a surgeon in Harley Street. He wanted to remove the tumour right away, but I had an important business trip to Japan a few days later, and then we already had our flights booked back to Singapore. We lived five minutes’ walk from one of its two top hospitals, so it made sense to have the operation there.
In the event, we decided to head straight for Singapore before my trip to Tokyo. When we got there, I asked around for colonic cancer specialists and was given two names. I made appointments to see them both.
The first of the two had green slime on his teeth, which did not seem a good start. If he could not look after his own dental hygiene, how was he going to look after my intestines? I was not impressed by his bitten fingernails either. He suggested two options, one minimally invasive, the other full surgery. He made it clear that he recommended the former.
“Just as a matter of interest,” I said, “is the fee for the minimally invasive option more than the fee for an open surgery?”
“Well, yes, it is actually,” he said. “It’s more complicated.”
“I see,” I said. “I’ll think about it properly and get back to you.”
As I was leaving, the receptionist called me over and said: “Here’s your bill for the consultation.”
“I wasn’t actually consulting him,” I said. “I was interviewing him, and he failed the interview.”
I walked out, leaving the receptionist and her two colleagues with their mouths agape. Clearly nobody had said that to them before.
The second surgeon, Dr. Ngoi Sing-Sang (known as Ngoi to his friends), recommended the opposite approach.
“I would prefer open surgery, because I can have an unobstructed view of your abdominal sac, and I will be able to do a much better job,” he said. “There’s always a risk that cancers have spread, and you’re at stage four already, so that’s what I strongly advise.”
I was to discover that he was one of the best surgeons in Asia. He was willing to undertake risky operations, where people’s lives were under serious threat, unlike most surgeons who gave those cases a wide berth because they did not want a death on their record. To me, that showed he had guts and integrity.
I checked into the hospital as soon as I got back from Japan. At this point I was very relaxed. As with every other hurdle in my life, it promised to be an interesting experience. If the worst came to the worst and I did not survive, my only real regret would be to have to leave my family and close friends behind – especially Marie-Thérèse, whom I worried about much more than myself. She had been an extraordinary life companion and deserved better than to be left alone at sixty.
I was very touched that our younger daughter Charlotte had taken some precious holiday allowance from her new job in Paris to keep Marie-Thérèse company while I was in hospital. They were both there while I was sedated.
I came round about six hours later, at around one in the morning. The pair of them were still there, looking rather anxious. I tried a few drugged quips to lighten their spirits.
But soon enough I was in no mood to quip any further. I had never known such confusion. In my intensive care bed I was surrounded by beeping machines, and I had tubes in my veins, nostrils and lungs, as well as a drain in my side and a catheter. Added to all that, I had a sense of evisceration. Most Asians believe that a person’s life energy, or chi, is centred in the abdomen. According to that view of the body, the surgery had played havoc with my normal energy flows. No wonder I was in such physical distress. I was given a click-plunger for voluntary self-doses of morphine. To reassure myself that I still had some say in what was happening to me, I resolutely refused to use it. I may have been placing too much faith in my own very high pain threshold, but I needed that sense of control more than I needed the pain relief.
Dr Ngoi told me the operation had gone very well and he had removed forty-four centimetres of my colon, plus twenty-three centimetres of my small intestine, because it looked in poor shape, and he thought it made make sense to get rid of it while he was there. I also learned that he had removed eight kilos of what he described as “fatty apron”. He told me he did it with a very elegant, swift swipe of his scalpel and then plunked it in a bucket. As a quick weight-loss method, it beat going on a diet.
I was moved out of intensive care, but despite the reassurance that everything had gone well, I was beginning to feel thoroughly beaten by this experience. I had had other hideous and extremely adverse experiences before – falling out of a tree when I was fourteen and spending two months being tied up to weights in hospital; losing five years of work and a fortune in Japan due to the CIA, and a few years previously I had undergone a seven-hour operation to rebuild my shoulder after a riding accident in the United States – but as I retched noxious green liquid, this felt much worse. I hated being so feeble and pathetic. The presence of Marie-Thérèse and Charlotte made a huge difference, as did Julien and Justine’s daily phone calls, but there was no getting away from how miserable I felt. The highlight of my day was having to learn how to use my bowels again. In front of the whole medical team I was encouraged to try and break wind and then pass solids, right there in my hospital bed. I rose to the occasion and managed both, to rapturous applause. I half-sat, half-lay there, with my own filth lapping at my bare buttocks, totally bemused by the Kafkaesque situation in which I found myself.
Finally, after six days, I began to feel better, and after a week I was allowed to go home. I now embarked on six months of chemotherapy. I was constantly exhausted, I could no longer feel my feet because of peripheral neuropathy, and on top of that I was having to work eighteen hours a day on the telecoms start-up. I was reduced to tears a couple of times by the awful weight of it, not just being reduced to sub-par, but sub-sub-sub-par. But thanks to the skill of the surgeon, the advances of medical science, the care of the hospital, and the tireless support of my family and friends, I had come through.
Unfortunately, the prospects for my business venture had not improved while I was out of action. My main partner committed suicide before he could face trial. Replacing him proved extremely difficult, and relations deteriorated with our Chinese investor business partner. Eventually I signed a drop-hands agreement, allowing me to walk away, and the Chinese businessman took over. The final straw for me was the discovery that my skeletal geek partner had only been working about three days a week in the office; we found out that he spent the rest of his time in his second apartment in Manila, separate from the one he was living in, with three prostitutes. It was his very own harem.
Again, my friends and I lost our money. They had not put much up, and this time I had not either, but it was a fairly awful experience. I did not seem to be very good at the start-up business. I had done three, they were all disasters, and I had lost millions of dollars for myself and my friends.