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Alternative Strategies - A year away from the City - January

Patrick HealyBy the time this is published we hope to be in Australia but at the moment we are well into the South East Asian leg of the trip and things have taken a distinct turn for the exotic.  For example, we recently visited the Cao Dai Holy See near Saigon.  To get a picture of this you could try to envision the Vatican re-imagined by Walt Disney during an opium dream.  The ceremonies are lavish and colourful and the vestments are gorgeous.

Caodaism seems to be a benign and decent faith but with Victor Hugo as a saint and a creed that incorporates elements from Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Taoism, it isn’t too hard to be slightly overwhelmed by what seems to be an excessively diversified religious portfolio.

I’m writing this from Cambodia.  I haven’t been here long but it has made an impression, several impressions even.  Here in Phnom Penh I feel weighed down by recent history.  The killing fields are fresh, and fact that Pol Pot seems to have been some kind of sick parody of other dictators of the 20th century doesn’t lessen the fact that his regime may have killed one in five Cambodians.  Many, many people were tortured or brutalised by the regime.  Anyone over thirty must have lived through the years when the Khmer Rouge turned the country into a monstrous labour camp and when I talk to older people here I find myself wondering whether they were guards or prisoners.  It’s not that simple of course; everyone lost family or friends in the madness and the regime followed the usual pattern by turning on itself in its death throes so not even those who joined were spared loss.

Happier impressions of the vast and beautiful temple complexes around Angkor Wat and their life-support system; the crazy party town of Siem Reap.  A number of the people we have met on the journey had converged on Siem Reap while we were there as there is a slightly bonkers running and cycling event through the park each year on that weekend.  We ran the 10k through the ruins and in the company of friends, elephants and orange-robed monks.

Photograph by Lucy Reeve.

A few days ago we travelled from Angkor to Battambang by boat across the Tonlé Sap lake.  The lake is a wildlife reserve and home to the floating villages of the Cham people.  It is utterly lovely and our journey was brightened by the hordes of smiling, waving children along the route through the channels in the marshes.

The Cham children were poor but it is undoubtedly a picturesque form of poverty.  Cambodia seems to me to be strikingly poorer than Vietnam and, aside from tourism, the main industry appears to be foreign charity. The non-bike and scooter traffic in the countryside seems to be divided between tourist businesses and NGOs and there are limbless beggars and semi-beggars; booksellers, trinket vendors and postcard merchants, on the streets.  The combination of a spectacular level of unexploded ordinance, mainly mines but lots of other nasty stuff, and the fact that 64% of the population is affected by Tuberculosis means that the public health system is strained to bursting point and charity has to try to fill the gap.

The capital looks like a busy modern city with high rises, smart restaurants and cool boutiques but the countryside is different; there is real and not always pretty poverty.  Cambodia placed 137th out of 182 countries on UN development measures* but it’s star performance seems to be in Transparency International’s corruption index, where it manages to come 158th out of 180, in a tie with the Central African Republic, Laos and Tajikistan but below models of propriety such as Zimbabwe and Yemen.

The comparison with Vietnam is puzzling as, by a lot of measures it doesn’t seem to be doing much worse, but the industrious buzz I felt in Vietnam seems to be lacking.  Small other matters have also affected my perception; for example cash machines here dispense US dollars, which seems to be a pretty striking concession of failure.  In haggling they also seem to fall well behind their Vietnamese neighbours and when I arrived I was taken aback by the fact that tuk-tuk drivers and shop-keepers generally seemed to sadly accept my first counteroffer rather than, in Vietnamese style, engaging in a lengthy battle over every cent given off the original price.  I found this very demoralising and now generally just pay what they ask so perhaps there is a more subtle strategy at work.

Looking at the UK, income inequality also seems to be the hot news in the pre budget report.  I mean of course the inequality that exists between those in the City who work for banks affected by the bonus windfall tax and those in other City firms, fund managers for example, who do not.  It seems that your last job change was more important than you thought.

For those in the affected firms the implication from the Chancellor’s statement is that the Inland Revenue will be diligent in tracking alternative forms of bonus payment but it does not take much in the way of prophetic powers to foresee a battle of measures and countermeasures.  Would moving the bonus date until after the windfall period solve the problem?  I predict a lot of verbal agreements to make good the differences next year.  Great for staff retention.

I wish you all the very best for 2010.

* By comparison, Vietnam was 116th, the UK came 21st and Norway came first.  I have a certain patriotic pride in noting that Ireland came 5th but it did make me question whether the effects of the slump have been worked in, particularly when I saw that Iceland was third.

Patrick Healy was the Group Head of Risk Reporting for Man Group plc
© Patrick Healy.

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