Lebanon

"The meeting place for Arab businessmen in the early '70s was "The Paris of the Middle East," Beirut. The Lebanese trading traditions were an important factor, as was Beirut's role as the financial center of the region. All major banks had an office in the capital of Lebanon. But just as important were Beirut's beaches, the modern hotels, and the bustling nightlife. It acted like a magnet on men from the still orthodox and almost dry countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and partly Turkey."

"My vision was not coming together on the banking side, with analysts saying there wasn’t as much synergy in international telecoms as in pharmaceuticals, where you get real economies of scale. So I sold my Bulgarian and Czech telecoms investments within about ten months of each other. BTC was sold to the private equity arm of AIG, a US insurer, which popped out of the woodwork when I was expecting Greece Telecom, Deutsche Telekom or Turkish Telecom to buy it. Lehman Brothers advised us and AIG bought our 65 per cent stake for $855 million – far more than we were expecting. This sale wasn’t without complications either. Towards the end of the auction, I had lunch in London with Saad Hariri, the son of the late prime minister of Lebanon, and prime minister himself in 2009–11. He was the head of Oger Telecom, a Saudi/Lebanese company that owned Turkish Telecom, and he signalled that he was interested in buying BTC. I was keen and thought it would fit well with the group’s Turkish operations. Then AIG made a late bid and I was summoned to Bulgaria to see the prime minister. ‘We don’t want to sell to the Turks,’ he told me. ‘We want the Americans.’ I told him it was basically down to price, but the prime minister made it clear that I should bear in mind the time that might be needed to clear the deal, depending on who I chose. ‘Fine,’ I replied. And of course we sold to AIG. I have no regrets about that. We made almost €400 million profit on that deal."