Allan Zeman
THE CROWDED back of Allan Zeman's name card is as good a place as any to start. It begins with Lan Kwai Fong Properties Ltd (plus LKF Development Ltd, Concepts Holding Ltd, Capital Holdings Ltd, F&B Group Ltd), skips on to Colby International Ltd, his first company in Hong Kong, lists 10 restaurants in red, then switches back to black for three more business interests. There is an address in Causeway Bay. He said he had 500 people working there and I presumed he was exaggerating. He wasn't. The point about Zeman is that he doesn't need to exaggerate. He is richer, more successful and better connected than you or I will ever be.
The thought of 500 employees milling around an open-plan office was daunting, so we met in a place he has in Lan Kwai Fong which isn't on his card. It had pale furniture, a few shirts in a cupboard, a large television. No one else was there - no PRs, no secretaries, no hangers-on - and the silence seemed exceptional, particularly to Zeman, perhaps, who dislikes being alone. He uses the word 'we' constantly in conversation and, for a while, I thought he was being unnecessarily royal. But, as he explained, it's because he is rarely in the singular. There is always somebody with him.
Of course, to the media (particularly overseas and particularly last year), he has been singular: reporters in a variety of countries have used him as a metaphor for the success possible in Hong Kong. He came via the fashion business, he saw opportunity, he made diverse millions. How's the metaphor doing now that someone's switched on the lights at the party and everyone's blinking at each other in a daze? 'I'd say the party's only beginning. There are lots of opportunities, especially with Zhu Rongji taking over, I feel very comfortable. I see the changes.' Here he recalled a bombing campaign orchestrated by the Quebec Liberation Front when he was living in Montreal. 'The bombs were in mailboxes on street corners. I saw one go off, I just missed one when I was parking my car. People got nervous, but the crisis taught me not to panic.' He appears to have sprung from the womb as a fully-formed business mind. He will be 50 this year, which means he's spent four decades earning a living. 'I started working when I was 10, delivering papers and clearing tables in a steakhouse at weekends, and I had more money than a married man.' That might have bothered his father, except that his father died when Zeman was eight; he had sporadic parenting from his mother. He brought himself up, skipped school for the racetrack (by which, a little questioning revealed, he meant not just the one in Montreal, but in Miami too), and ate only in restaurants. To this day, he eats at home perhaps five times a year.
Who was the authority figure in his life? 'I really didn't have one. I was clever enough to learn from bad things ... I saw so many people, older people, who would lose their salaries at the track, it was a sickness.' He neither drinks nor smokes. He tried marijuana, it didn't do anything for him. Asked to describe himself as a child, Zeman replied in the lonely singular, 'He was gambling, he was having a good time. He had very good morals.' These days, what are his weaknesses? There was a long pause. Zeman said carefully, 'I'll have to think about that. I didn't grow up in the computer age. I'm versatile on the computer but not as much as I'd like. That's a weakness.' I said I was thinking more of character. 'Umm. I would say - maybe I wasn't the ideal father. Always off, making money, working. I guess people would refer to me as a terrible father, although I wasn't. But the kids, they didn't have a normal father.' They are a son and daughter, both of college age, by Charmaine, his wife of 25 years. 'It's hard for kids to grow up with a famous dad. I had the thrill of making it on my own, it's difficult for them to follow in those footsteps.' Hong Kong has been the only family home. Zeman said he first became interested in the territory when he discovered it occupied the time zone diametrically opposite that of Montreal - so he could realise the long-held ambition of making money 24 hours a day. This is uttered without embarrassment: business is his life. Why? 'Oh, it's fun.' Naturally, the fun almost killed him. He has Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestine which, luckily, is dormant. But about 20 years ago, he thought he was having a heart attack. A doctor told him that he'd still never be the richest man in the cemetery. Since then, he has worked out for an hour at home every morning: exercise machine, 20-minutes in the pool, weights.
'That's the most important thing in my life, I must work out every morning. If people suggest breakfast meetings I say I have a previous engagement.' Last year, he kept former President George Bush waiting for breakfast because of the regime; Zeman, tieless and sockless as usual, had presumed he would sidle into a ballroom of 1,500 people when in fact the invitation was more flattering - six in a private room. He broke the (considerable) ice by passing on the best wishes of a mutual friend. That's the sort of company he keeps.
He's about to go into film production in Los Angeles with the cinema version of the game Dungeons and Dragons, which will be released next year. Isn't this a faintly seedy, Dodi Al-Fayed, wannabe thing to do? 'If you travel with the unseedy people, you don't have to sink.' He could by no means, however, be described as a film buff. When I asked him what he'd seen recently, he had a think and said, 'Oh yeah, the Bond film, Michelle Yeoh's a friend of mine. I don't go to films much.' Could this be a drawback? 'No,' replied Zeman, comfortably. 'I'm a businessman. Everything to me is business. It's not how much, it's the act of doing it.'
