HSB's Reviews > The Key Man

I have always been fascinated by the contrast between people who have emerged from the brutally competitive, ruthless culture of social advancement, particularly in South Asia - and the highfalutin rhetoric of businesses driven by purpose, typically espoused by Western executives and corporates with an outsized global influence.

It is a grotesque sight watching 'saleoo banday' ('sales driven dudes' in the parlance of the Indian ad industry) pay lip service to looking out for the little guy, having to care for the feelings of their subordinates (or even regard them as human beings and not wholly disposable gofers), and to take steps to address absurdly distant issues like the environment.

It's not so much making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as it is carting a sow around, insisting it is a purse.

Many of these people, thanks to a combination of ruthlessness, agility and smarts, have carved out comfortable niches for themselves by the time they hit their mid-30s, doing significantly better than the generations who preceded them.

Expecting them to set aside every instinct that made them successful and abruptly transform into 'concerned responsible citizens of the world' is a conceit full of hubris and arrogance.

Going by 'The Key Man' Abraaj founder Arif Naqvi strikes me as a significantly smarter and (despite recent events) a much more successful version of a sort of person I've frequently encountered. A 'saleoo banda' who, instead of chafing uncomfortably under the yoke of 'good corporate citizenry', saw in it a massive opportunity for personal advancement.

Having recently finished Chasing Ghislaine by Vicky Ward which went into some detail on Jefrey Epstein's methods and reading about Naqvi's ability to convince money managers to part with millions of dollars, I am awestruck by how easy marks some of the world's wealthiest people appear to be.

Naqvi also effectively played on many of the follies, pretensions and goodwill of people who have never known poverty firsthand. He was comfortable weaponising liberal squeamishness about inequality and an increasingly expansive list of taboo subjects and attitudes. But on evidence of The Key Man, this appears to have been an entirely rhetorical device to impress potential investors or score brownie points at international fora - for instance, against allies turned adversaries like Bill Gates. There are no discernible signs of his regard for 'all stakeholders' considering the largescale embezzlement of funds intended to start hospitals across Asia and Africa, or in his interactions with colleagues.

His relationship with the employees of Abraaj again brought with it a nasty sense of deja vu. If you are 35 and older and have worked for any length of time in India, you've probably heard of or experienced this firsthand: the bizarre demands of 'loyalty', the feudalism that creeps into what ought to be a mostly transactional relationship between employer and employee, and a boss claiming to treat employees as 'family' which sounds great until you realise that families are the worst, most restrictive, suffocating and fundamentally unavoidable ties that one can get saddled with.

'The Key Man' covers a lot of this ground in an incredibly easy to grasp way. Considering the rather dense subject matter, Simon Clark and Will Louch do an fantastic job of simplifying complex concepts and transactions.

If there's a knock against the book, this simplification sometimes gets a little repetitive. And while it isn't anywhere close to being slow paced, the authors occasionally belabour a point that has been previously explained. It's however not much of a dealbreaker since having a full grasp of these concepts is often essential to understand what happens next.

What's missing and would perhaps be impossible to include in a book like this is the internal compulsions that drove Arif. There's little evidence of it in the publicly available material where he is - to all appearances - a socially conscious profit oriented investor. There are shades of it in his interactions with colleagues at Abraaj, but his inner life is an unsolvable puzzle. One that probably wouldn't be resolved even if the authors got ample interview time with their subject, because if a mask has worked so well and you owe nothing to the people you are talking to, why let it slip?

If I may hazard a guess, his actions strike me as being driven at least in part by a sense of injury that can be perceived across at least some of the people in corporate South Asia and I'd imagine, many other former colonies. A great contempt for the 'rules' created by people whose ancestors observed precisely no rules at all, as they ran roughshod over vast sections of geography, enslaving and impoverishing the local population. Places where decolonised citizens now find themselves in a constant Darwinian struggle against their countrymen. Places that the descendants of their former oppressors, patronisingly call "emerging markets".

The realisation that yes, if you leap through a series of increasingly narrow hoops, you will get a chance to play, but the rules themselves, and the attendant gatekeeping are all very self serving.

As the book makes amply clear, the collapse of Abraaj is driven by greed, selfishness and hubris. But beneath it all I sense an undercurrent also present in conversations I've had with Indian executives, especially, when they were a few drinks down, at some global soiree, away from home. A chafing at coming from a 'poor' country with a 'weak currency' and the relative lack of opportunities for massive self enrichment. Opportunities that Western corporates and captains of the industry, who now give pious bromides about 'doing well by doing good' and 'profit with a purpose' have already availed of.

Also disturbing is the ridiculously soft landing Arif appears to have wrangled for himself. I won't spoil it any further, but it will (or should) fill you with rage. The trial is ongoing, but if he did get away relatively unscathed, it wouldn't surprise me at all.