Criminals pretending to be British Gas officials made off with a staggering £1.5 billion yesterday in the most audacious raid Britain has even seen. The thieves, posing as energy suppliers, held the public to ransom and then grabbed an astonishing one-and-a-half billion pounds in cash...in broad daylight. 'It was simple,' said one astonished victim. 'They sent me a bill and threatened to cut me off if I didn't pay it.' He continued, 'I've got a wife and kids, so I had no option but to give in to their demands.' The mastermind behind the crime is believed to be an 'insider' with detailed knowledge of how a supplier of essential services can charge as much as it likes and get away with it.
During my time with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners in the 1970s I worked with Luigi Genazzini on a regional roads development project in Oman and on a property development project in Port Louis Mauritius. We became good friends so when I was living on the American East Coast in the 1980s I would always fly across the North Atlantic with Icelandair. This was not because of any particular affection for Reykjavik but because their pilots dropped us off in Luxembourg. From there it was an easy day’s train journey to London. By this time Luigi was working out of Luxembourg as the Chief Economist on the Africa and Middle East desk of the European Investment Bank. I would stay over in Luxembourg with him acclimatising myself before moving on to either Massachusetts or England.
The EIB which regards itself as the EU’s soft-lending development bank launched a £220 million joint fund last month with the Commission to subsidise low-interest loans for water, energy, transport and telecommunications projects in Africa. Luigi would have been trying to inject some sanity into the lending. But unfortunately he was attacked in his hotel room in Beirut more than a decade ago, left for dead and then invalided out of the bank.
Laudable as this fund might sound, many in the developing world have good reason to regard any intervention by the EIB with horror given the impact of ‘infrastructure’…mines, oil pipelines, dams etc…funded with EIB loans in the past. For starters the money itself doesn’t actually go to the developing countries very often. For instance a recent study commissioned by a group of NGOs in Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic and Holland revealed that ninety percent of EIB development loans in Latin America went to large European multinationals like Shell and British Gas. The figures are much the same for Africa. Perhaps this is not surprising. However it is not just European companies on the receiving end of this largesse from Luxembourg. In 2002 the EIB generously handed over oodles of euros to the Canadian/Australian copper mining company First Quantum so it could become a major polluter…or as the EIB would say ‘an investor in development'…in Zambia.
I have had my eye on John’s shower and bathroom since my arrival on Friday. So when he announced that he would be off to church for the ten thirty service I saw my chance. No such luck. He wanted ‘all the support I can get’. The new woman in the vicarage has introduced some evangelical happy-clappy routines into the first Sunday worship of every month. John…a good old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic Quaker member of the Anglican Communion’s Zambian church…hates every minute of it but feels the need to put in an appearance from time to time. Well I see his point. This sort of dumbing down of Christianity by turning the church into some sort of Pop Idol television studio just for the sake of a few more bums on seats seems a most peculiar direction to take. Billy Graham should be please with so easy a victory. Mosley, Hitler and the Billy Grahams of the Christian world are all much of a muchness to me. At one point in the service the whole congregation was expected to approach the altar, place their thumb in some ashes and make an impression on a sheet of cotton. That’s the way they’ll get everybody’s fingerprints was the thought that went through my head. I stayed in my pew.
On the way back leaning into a bitterly cold easterly wind we stopped for a while to watch the Purton Under 13s draw level at 1-1 with the visiting Lydiards team…an excellent goal after some very poor defending by the Lydiard’s defence. It was Luke that took the corner and Danny that ghosted in behind the defence to head in the equaliser at the far post. My father used to watch local football in Oxleas Woods and was coach for the Eltham Residents Association team for a few years. I would sometimes accompany him. You could become every bit as engrossed and excited by watching local teams as travelling for miles to see one of the Premier League clubs. I suggested to John that he appoints a sports reporter for Purton Today if he wants to reach a broader audience.
In the afternoon we worked on a grant application to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. There is a quarterly meeting of the lending committees coming up at the end of March and the deadline for applications was this weekend. Just over a year ago the Trust began a new programme to look at ‘the underlying issues of power and responsibility in a more holistic way across the public and private sectors’. Joseph Rowntree, a good earnest Quaker, saw business and politics as forms of service to be used to promote social justice, equality and a spirit of citizenship but was also much concerned about ‘the power of selfish and unscrupulous wealth’. We thought it was worth a try.
