Edited by Steven Irvine
Banking's real climbers
Not content to climb simply within their own organizations, a growing number of bankers are to be found digging their crampons into the ice of some of the world's most perilous mountains.
Standard Chartered's chief executive Malcolm Williamson managed to squeeze a week off work in 1994 to climb Africa's highest summit, 5,900-metre (19,400-foot) Kilimanjaro.
"I had to go into a fax-free zone for a week," says 56-year-old Williamson. "This would not have made me too popular with my chairman had there been a bid for the bank in my absence."
He says he found it a liberating experience: "There were few opportunities to worry about the bank on Kilimanjaro. I came back physically exhausted but mentally recharged. You need to have a real break, even if it's only a week."
Mark Warham, 34-year-old corporate finance director at Schroders, has been climbing for the past 14 years. He recently returned from an ascent of 4,900-metre Mount Vinson, Antarctica's highest peak, where temperatures were as low as minus 30oF - without taking account of the wind-chill factor.
Warham's summit record is Nepal's 7,200-metre Pumori, although he climbed higher on Everest before having to retreat with pulmonary oedema.
"You can draw some analogies between success in business and mountaineering," he says. "In both activities, you have to be focused and able to cut away the periphery. People who are successful in business are driven people and that translates itself into drive in another environment."
Stephen Bell, director of UK-based Himalayan Kingdoms, takes an increasing number of bankers on mountaineering expeditions. Bell's guided tours have even placed one banker on the 8,848-metre summit of Everest. Scott McIvor, an executive with National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, paid $20,000 to exchange Saudi Arabian sand for a view from the top of the world.
Michael Pitcher, Barclays' 53-year-old deputy managing director of UK banking services and another Kilimanjaro summiteer, also believes there is a link between the conquest of mountains and business success. "There are a lot of similarities," he says. "For one thing, a mountaineer is the sort of person who is constantly seeking the next challenge in life."
Pitcher's next goal is Europe's highest peak, 5,600-metre Elbrus in the Caucasus. "It's really a function of time," he says. "It normally requires two or three weeks but, looking at my time-constraint, it will have to be done in a week or so." Jules Stewart
CS First Boston's football field
CS First Boston, never one to run with the crowd, is set to move to an area of New York not normally associated with investment banking. In fact, there are no other banks in the Flatiron district where CS First Boston will move in 1996 when the lease runs out on its Park Avenue Plaza building.
The new building, called the MetLife, is in Madison Avenue, territory where red braces and cufflinks are less common than berets and telephoto lenses. The area houses some of New York's most chic cafés and also boasts a number of model agencies, including Elite, which has on its books most of the world's supermodels.
A helpful secretary at one top international modelling agency describes the district as "a nice trendy area with a good mix of apartment blocks, fashion houses and furniture stores". She couldn't recall ever having seen any investment bankers.
The attraction for CS First Boston is the prospect of being able to redevelop the 28-storey MetLife Building. "Yes, we are staking out new territory," says an enthusiastic spokesperson, "but we are also creating one of the world's biggest private trading floors." The renovation process will cost $300 million.
The move was engineered by Dom Prezzano, the senior vice-president who heads MetLife's corporate property group. At first he received little encouragement from a banker he knew at CS First Boston who responded: "I don't think we could ever get our investment bankers to go to midtown south."
But Prezzano made the bankers change their minds when he showed them the potential: "I stood them underneath these holes we had cut and told them to look up, and I was able to show them clear ceiling heights of 16 feet eight inches. I then had them stand in the middle of the floor and we looked from Madison Avenue to Park Avenue and from 24th to 25th street. And they couldn't believe it. If this were a football field, you're looking at one that is 140 yards long and 64 yards wide.
"That's really what whet their appetite for the building." Steven Irvine
Rich man, poor man
Kichinosuke Sasaki delights in flouting convention. So what if his property company, Togensha, has debts of ¥389 billion ($3.83 billion) and for the past four years has rung up net losses totalling another $2 billion? His Japanese creditors may be pulling out their hair but not Sasaki. "There's been no change in my lifestyle. None at all," he breezes.
Just as during the heyday of Japan's bubble, when Forbes ranked him as one of the world's billionaires, Sasaki is still chauffeured to work in a pink Mercedes. His office carpet is also pink. Bottles of expensive brandy line one wall.
The secret of his equanimity is that "I'm too big to fail". Sasaki gets to keep his 104 buildings and a golf course because the likes of Mitsui Trust and Banking (owed $259 million by Togensha), Industrial Bank of Japan ($233 million), Long-Term Credit Bank ($219 million) and Mitsubishi Trust and Banking ($13.5 million) are terrified of adding to their bad-loan books by foreclosing on their loans.
In 1991 Sasaki unilaterally announced to his 46 creditors that he would "pay only a sliver of interest" on his debt. "I am paying two-fifths of the prime rate," he confides. The prime rate itself is now only 2.8%.
Even more brazen is the criminal law suit Sasaki has brought, together with seven other strapped Japanese tycoons belonging to his Association for the Rebuilding of Japan's Economy, against the Bank of Japan and the ministry of finance (MoF). They are demanding $876 million in damages from the Japanese government for destroying their fortunes or, as Sasaki prefers to put it, "violating our right, under Article 29 of the constitution, to own assets".
Sasaki argues that Japan's 1980s bubble was engineered by the government and that it was the MoF'S U-turn in suddenly tightening monetary policy which caused land prices to collapse and nearly forced firms like Togensha to the wall.
A medical postgraduate of the prestigious Keio University, Sasaki ran his own Tokyo clinic - specializing in "brain metabolism" - before catching the property fever and starting Togensha in 1980. During the bubble, he drove a jeep up Italian mountains to pick marble personally for his Tokyo buildings.
Sasaki himself will admit to no misjudgements. He remains proud of his greatest failure, the 10-floor Kamata Building which runs alongside Kamata railway station in southern Tokyo and whose exterior is finished in polished marble and gold trim. The building cost $916 million to construct and was finally sold in April 1994 to a consortium of creditors for $384 million. For the past three years, it has stood empty. Sasaki still considers it a visionary achievement. Peter McGill