What an exciting life I lead! My last few articles have been on topics including:
- The future of PPP/PFI in Scotland: can it survive the regime of first minister Alex Salmond, a self-declared PPP-o-phobe?
- A recent change in Spanish takeover law that is expected to make it harder for the Spaniards to “circle their wagons” when a national champion such as Endesa is targeted for takeover.
- How best to commercialise the science and knowledge-base which is locked within Scotland’s 14 universities.
- An interview with the Brechin-based “Superwoman” Katherine Garrett-Cox, who recently moved to Dundee to become chief investment officer of Alliance Trusts.
The article I found most interesting to write was the one on Katherine the Great (as she became known by the media during early days of outperformance at Hill Samuel Asset Management) . This was partly because it involved paying a visit to Dundee to meet the woman herself.
The widespread assumption in the Square Mile when it transpired that Garrett-Cox was quitting her handsomely paid job at Morley to become chief investment officer at the much smaller Alliance Trust in Dundee was either that she had either gone off her rocker or had effectively thrown in the career towel for family reasons.
Dundee was portrayed as a provincial backwater whose glory days of “jam, jute and journalism” were long gone and which faces only inexorable decline. The idea that Garrett-Cox should want to leave London for a life in the Angus glens was seen as incomprehensible.
Well I enjoyed one and a half hours in Katherine Garrett Cox’s company on Tuesday, and can assure you she is 100% sane. Nor has she thrown in the towel as far as fund management is concerned. Indeed she has some interesting plans for reinvigorating the performance at Alliance Trust, more of which later.
She also seems to be pretty happy at having swapped the grime of London for the clean air of eastern Scotland, and soon intends to start sailing her Hobie Cat (a type of catamaran) off the Stonehaven coast. Not many City types can do that within half an hour after leaving the office.
For the record, I’d also like to assure readers that, after spending an hour or so walking through Dundee’s pedestrianised centre, the city is past the worst. Indeed Dundee appears to be going through something of a renaissance: not only is it home to one of the world’s leading centres for life sciences research, it also boasts an excellent cultural hub in the DCA. Oh, and there’s an excellent statue of Desperate Dan and his dog, Dawg.
Finally here are my personal thoughts on public/private partnerships. The lawyers and accountants who have made millions out of advising the public sector and construction-led consortia about such projects over the past 10 years are genuinely worried.
They have woken up to the fact that, driven by his determination to ensure that taxpayers get better value for money where large-scale public projects are concerned (and in its early, we all know PFI didn’t deliver that), Alex Salmond is about to kill the goose that’s been laying the golden eggs. Indeed, because of his stated intention to replace PPP with the more equitable Scottish Futures Trust, whose structure is not yet finalised, the man who wishes to extricate us from the UK has gone and put PPP into a sort of limbo.
If Professor Allyson Pollock is to be believed, this is probably no bad thing.
And now it seems the lawyers and accountants who so enriched themselves on the PFI/PPP bandwagon are finding it possible to export their skills to countries including Tanzania and Cyprus. Now that got me thinking. What do governments in these countries find so attractive about PFI/PPP?
Perhaps they have been persuaded it will represent better value-for-money for their citizens? Or are they adopting it for the same reason as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown found it so attractive?
That is: PFI/PPP will enable them to play smoke and mirrors with the national accounts, at the same time as impressing present day voters with plenty of shiny new public buildings whilst lumbering future generations with unfavourable leases and seemingly interminable debts.
This blog post was published on 13 September 2007