Sigma triggers global meltdown
This is The Sigma Affair, a virtual banking crisis designed to test players and the system to their limits. The finance professionals, playing bank chiefs and risk managers, central bankers and government officials, each with their own agenda and set of information, must live and fight through three days rolled into one. They are supported by arbitrators and controllers, and goaded by journalists, including a film-crew from Reuters Television.
The battlefield is a suite of private rooms with telephones from which each interest group can communicate, arrange meetings and brief the press. There are two plenary rooms for press conferences, refreshments and gossip. PA Consulting Group's management centre at Sundridge Park has become a microcosm of the world financial system. Rooms and corridors become countries and flight paths.
Sigma is a large, diversified commercial, investment banking and insurance group, based in Amsterdam, with a capital of €20 billion. Sigma chairman Perseus Marconi is obsessed with telecommunications, whose future he predicts will be ever more closely linked to that of finance. His banking group, with major operations in London and New York, has many debt and equity participations in the telecom sector.