UPDATE: Nightmare over” for UK banker held in Qatar
April 30, 2010
DAVID PROCTOR’S biography as a career banker remains proudly displayed on the website of Al-Khaliji Bank, the three-year-old Qatari bank where "we pride ourselves in finding ways to do things differently".
Outwardly, there’s nothing particularly unusual about that. Bank executives often have their CVs puffed on the ‘About us’ tab of their banks’ websites. And Gulf banks do it often, both projecting a progressive image and boasting about the foreign talent they’ve lured to modernize their oil and gas-drenched emirates as emergent financial centres.
And what bank, particularly an ambitious start-up like Al-Khaliji with regional ambitions, wouldn’t puff a CV like Proctor’s? He’s Cambridge-educated, 25 years a banker, solidly trained at Midland and then with a long stint at Bank of America, rising to be its boss in Bangkok, where he chaired the foreign bankers’ lobby during the 1990s Thai financial crisis. In 1999, he made a move to what would seem the natural habitat of this Peterhouse alumnus, Standard Chartered, as its global head of client relationships. He was made CEO of StanChart’s European group, then its boss in the Gulf until 2006, and was a favourite of its former executive chairman Mervyn Davies – now Baron Davies of Abersoch, Britain’s minister for trade and investment.
Indeed, as Al-Khaliji gushes of its "special adviser to the chairman and managing director", Proctor’s "breadth of understanding of the banking market – honed in the course of his 25 years in the industry – has equipped him as a natural leader with a proven track record of success at all points in the economic cycle". Proctor reads as a combination of process man and safe hand, combining emerging market exotica with the ambassadorial polish of an international banker. His experience leasing planes, ships and oil refineries would also seem perfect for the resource-rich Qatari story.
So, what’s wrong with this picture? And why should anyone care?
Because as with much in this reclusive, gas-rich Gulf monarchy, one of the world’s richest yet least transparent countries, not everything is as it appears. Proctor’s "special adviser" designation on the Al-Khaliji website seems as phony as what many anxious foreign bankers and businessmen in Doha posit is Qatar’s genuine commitment to due legal process. Qatar widely advertises a "world’s best practices" mantra but that is increasingly questioned internationally of financial centres across the Gulf as once-soaring Arab ambitions dissolve in a desert storm of bad debt and finger-pointing.
But Qatar’s claims to openness and transparency are questionable in Proctor’s case. Search the Al-Khaliji website and there is no official announcement that David Proctor is no longer the bank’s CEO. The only public pronouncement on the matter was a statement posted on the Doha Securities Market’s website in March last year announcing his new position as special adviser. No reasons were given for the sudden change.
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| David Proctor's biography as a career banker remains proudly displayed on the website of Al-Khaliji Bank, the three-year-old Qatari bank where "we pride ourselves in finding ways to do things differently" |
Moreover, Proctor – hired in February 2007 to create and build government-controlled Al-Khaliji into Qatar’s first regional bank – hasn’t actually provided any advice or management for almost a year, not since Sheikh Hamad Bin Faisal Bin Thani Al-Thani was installed as the bank’s new chairman in February last year. Proctor appears to be caught in a power struggle within Qatar’s ruling elite over control of the emirate’s emerging financial sector.
A senior member of Qatar’s remote ruling Al-Thani family, Sheikh Hamad is a former colleague of Qatar’s powerful finance minister Yousef Hussain Kamal. The sheikh was Kamal’s recent deputy at the finance ministry and is himself a former commerce minister. The wealthy Kamal is a prominent businessman in the emirate. He’s best-known for his long-time chairmanship of the country’s biggest bank, Qatar National Bank, an Al-Khaliji competitor. His former vice-chairman at QNB? None other than Sheikh Hamad.
A long way from home
Since his ouster from Al-Khaliji last March, Proctor has been trapped in Doha against his will. He’s been denied a visa to leave, his living conditions reduced to a month-to-month tenancy of a one-bedroom flat. He drives a borrowed car, communicates by pre-paid SIM cards and Skype, and has an uncertain future. Separated from his young family in Singapore – he has seen his new-born son for just two weeks, when his wife Trinh visited him in October – Proctor is unable to work or earn an income in Qatar. He is steadily going broke, and is under considerable psychological pressure. Although he frets that his movements and possibly his conversations and electronic traffic are being constantly monitored by Qatari security services, Proctor is under no personal restriction or formal house arrest by any Qatari authority. Proctor is able to go wherever he likes within Qatar’s sandy 11,000 square kilometres – he just doesn’t have permission to leave the emirate, return to his family and resume normal life.
