LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION

       A Curse of Riches

      OPPOSITE THE New York Stock Exchange, at what the tourist information sign calls the ‘financial crossroads of the world’, the stately stone façade of 23 Wall Street evokes the might of the man whose bank it was built to house in 1913: J. P. Morgan, America’s capitalist titan. The exterior is popular with Hollywood – it doubled as the Gotham City stock exchange in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises – but when I visited in late 2013 the red carpet lay grubby and sodden in the drizzle blowing in off the Atlantic. Through the smeared glass in the shuttered metal gates, all that was visible in the gutted interior where once a vast chandelier glittered were a few strip lights, stairways covered in plywood, and a glowing red ‘EXIT’ sign.

      Despite its disrepair, 23 Wall Street remains an emblem of the elite, a trophy in the changing game of global commerce. The address of its current owners is an office on the tenth floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper. Formerly the site of a British army barracks, 88 Queensway has been transformed into the mirrored towers of Pacific Place, blazing reflected sunlight onto the financial district. The sumptuous mall at street level, air-conditioned against the dripping humidity outside, is lined with designer boutiques: Armani, Prada, Chanel, Dior. The Shangri La hotel, which occupies the top floors of the second of Pacific Place’s seven towers, offers suites at $10,000 a night.

      The office on the tenth floor is much more discreet. So is the small band of men and women who use it as the registered address for themselves and their network of companies. To those who have sought to track their evolution, they are known, unofficially, as ‘the Queensway Group’.¹ Their interests, held through a web of complex corporate structure and secretive offshore vehicles, lie in Moscow and Manhattan, North Korea and Indonesia. Their business partners include Chinese state-owned corporations; BP, Total, and other Western oil companies; and Glencore, the giant commodity trading house based in a Swiss town. Chiefly, though, the Queensway Group’s fortune and influence flow from the natural resources that lie beneath the soils of Africa.

      Roughly equidistant – about seven thousand miles from each – between 23 Wall Street in New York and 88 Queensway in Hong Kong another skyscraper rises. The golden edifice in the centre of Angola’s capital, Luanda, climbs to twenty-five storeys, looking out over the bay where the Atlantic laps at southern Africa’s shores. It is called CIF Luanda One, but it is known to the locals as the Tom and Jerry Building because of the cartoons that were beamed onto its outer walls as it took shape in 2008. Inside there is a ballroom, a cigar bar, and the offices of foreign oil companies that tap the prodigious reservoirs of crude oil under the seabed.

      A solid-looking guard keeps watch at the entrance, above which flutter three flags. One is Angola’s. The second is that of China, the rising power that has lavished roads, bridges and railways on Angola, which has in turn come to supply one in every seven barrels of the oil China imports to fire its breakneck economic growth. The yellow star of Communism adorns both flags, but these days the socialist credentials of each nation’s rulers sit uneasily with their fabulous wealth.

      The third flag does not belong to a nation but instead to the company that built the tower. On a white background, it carries three grey letters: CIF, which stands for China International Fund, one of the more visible arms of the Queensway Group’s mysterious multinational network. Combined, the three flags are ensigns of a new kind of empire.

      In 2008 I took a job as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Johannesburg. These were boom times – or, at least, they had been. Prices for the commodities that South Africa and its neighbours possess in abundance had risen inexorably since the turn of the millennium as China, India and other fast-growing economies developed a voracious hunger for resources. Through the 1990s the average price for an ounce of platinum had been $470.² A tonne of copper went for $2,600, a barrel of crude oil for $22. By 2008 the platinum price had tripled to $1,500, and copper was two and a half times more expensive, at $6,800. Oil had more than quadrupled to $95, and on one day in July 2008 hit $147 a barrel. Then the American banking system blew itself up. The shockwaves rippled through the global economy, and prices for raw commodities plunged. Executives, ministers and laid-off miners looked on aghast as the recklessness of far-off bankers imperilled the resource revenues that were Africa’s economic lifeblood. But China and the rest went on growing. Within a couple of years commodity prices were back to their pre-crisis levels. The boom resumed.

      I traversed southern Africa for a year, covering elections, coups and corruption trials, efforts to alleviate poverty and the fortunes of the giant mining companies based in Johannesburg. In 2009 I moved to Lagos to spend two years covering west Africa’s tinderbox of nations.

      There are plenty of theories as to the causes of the continent’s penury and strife, many of which treat the 900 million people and forty-eight countries of black Africa, the region south of the Sahara desert, as a homogenous lump.³ Colonizers had ruined Africa, some of the theorists contended, its suffering compounded by the diktats of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; others considered Africans incapable of governing themselves, excessively ‘tribal’ and innately

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