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Jake Van Der Kamp

'Hong Kong is hoping the world's largest sovereign wealth fund will set up shop in the city, boosting its profile as an international financial hub.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which manages an estimated US$650 billion of the oil-rich emirate's investments, is open to having a presence in Hong Kong, Ronald Arculli, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing chairman, said yesterday.'
SCMP, February 1
Iought to be awarded a Grand Bauhinia Star. I know I don't meet the criteria of proven grand larceny but I can prove that I cracked the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority 25 years before the Donald and Ronald Circus got around to trying it last week.
Back in 1983, with the stock market deep in the dumps, I was research manager at Sun Hung Kai Securities when we started seeing evidence that British broking houses were getting large  'buy' orders for Hong Kong stock from a Middle East account that had never played much in the Hong Kong market.
This wouldn't do. SHK Securities was the largest locally founded broking house at the time.
Why should names like Vickers da Costa, W.I. Carr (Overseas) and Hoare Govett be left to pick up all  this Hong Kong business?
Get yourself over to Abu Dhabi, said the boss, and we'll send our man in London to meet you there for a team effort.
So I went, arriving very early in the morning because these were the days when Boeing 747s couldn't yet reach London in a single hop from Asia and refuelled in the Middle East.
They had to take off again before the sun was more than an hour above the horizon or they wouldn't get enough lift from the hot desert air.
Our man in London, Flash, had made arrangements for a meeting with ADIA at 9am but Abu Dhabi still operated purely on desert time back then and we just had to join the other people waiting around the hotel pool for you-can-come-now calls from their business contacts.
Ours came at 5pm and Flash and I hustled over with an investment presentation I had cobbled together to find only a single person meeting us, a Malaysian fellow who had been hired a few weeks before as a dealing clerk. Flash and I looked at each other dolefully - wipe-out.
We soldiered on,  nonetheless, and about 20 minutes later there was a sudden stir at the door of the conference room. Three people came in, all Arab, all clearly senior and all, as was quickly apparent, very clued up.
Introductions were followed by a little polite chit-chat for 30 seconds and then No1 man said: 'Go ahead, we're listening.'
He had no sooner said it than a telephone on the table rang. No2 took the call, made some obvious 'Yes, Sir' sounds and all three rushed out the door again with brief apologies. The minister wanted them in his office. Wipe-out.
But when I got back to Hong Kong two days later, our chairman, old Fung King-hey, and God bless his memory, what a gentleman, came out to greet me and clapped me on the back in congratulation. Wipe-out had turned out to be a cascade of orders. It was, I believe, ADIA's way of apologising for a meeting cut short. Those orders kept coming, too. We hadn't expected a bonus that year but we got one.
I doubt that Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen or anyone on his sandstorm tour of the Gulf last week knows it, but ADIA and its counterpart in Kuwait, the Kuwait Investment Office, together lifted the Hong Kong stock market out of the dumps in the mid-1980s. Their orders were enormous.
I later visited ADIA several times on investment trips, learning on the second occasion, by the way, to leave the coffee untouched. The caffeine jolt from just the thimbleful of the stuff they serve you can lift the scalp off the top of your head and have you blathering when, with these people, you need to be 100 per cent up on your pitch. Ronald clearly wasn't aware of it.
There is no fumbling about in ADIA. They know what they are doing. They were always among the most professional fund managers I encountered and it wasn't often that I could tell them anything about the Hong Kong market which was news to them or an investment angle they hadn't already considered.
It's my guess that they had a good chuckle about the naivete of Donald and Ronald after seeing them to the door and we should be glad if this was all.
They could easily have taken offence at the way the Ronald McDonald clown show set so much store by the cheap showmanship gesture of an office opening while ignoring the very real support that ADIA gave us at a critical time,  both economically and politically.
These are the people who picked our market off the ground in 1983, who showed faith in Hong Kong with hard cash investment of billions and  billions of dollars when the rest of the world was getting ready to write us off because of a looming 1997 sovereignty deadline.
We just make ourselves look foolish now by demonstrating that we have forgotten it with such beggar's wheedles as 'Please show us you like us by opening an office, puh-leeeze'.
Please understand, Ronald, that getting ADIA to open an office here is highly unlikely to make any difference to the amount of money they invest here or on the mainland, that's how long they've already been here.
And I think I deserve at least a little of the credit for it. Where's that GBS?



Gulf in understanding on show in desert tour