At a fairly select dinner party last week, a senior French banker pronounced: “Privatization is like castration, it works better on dogs.” You could have heard a pin drop. A delightful Austrian lady asked me whether the Frenchie didn’t like animals. I quickly explained that in this instance “dogs” probably referred to state assets which no sensible person would want to touch unless wearing surgical gloves.
Of course the Komarovskys, like other once proud families, have been experts on privatizations since the beginning of 1944, except that our experience was in reverse privatizations – the invading Russians taking all the family assets into their private possession in exchange for one bottle of vodka and a zero-coupon perpetual rouble IOU.
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