Roddy Sale studied at Eton and served in the British Army, but now helps big Indian and overseas companies make deals with each other. Rrishi Raote speaks with him.
Eton, Sandhurst, family regiment; Northern Ireland, Falkland Islands, Buckingham Palace guard; City of London, merchant banking, Jardine Fleming; cricket, racehorses, sailing, skiing; nizam, maharaja, private secretary to the viceroy... Who knew that such a collection of names and terms, ranging from the old-fashioned to the historic, could be in orbit around any one single person in this century?
And an honorary Mumbaikar, at that. Roddy Sale, Brit in “Bombay”, is a finance professional, now in his early 50s, who moved to India in 1993 in the wake of liberalisation, and stayed on. The paragraph above contains the briefest summary of his working life and social background; among the things it doesn’t say is that his cellphone caller tune is a rather shrill-sounding religious song featuring the words “Jai Ganesh”. Apt, just after Ganesh Chaturthi, but when that sound yields immediately to words spoken in a plummy upper-class British accent, the caller’s confusion is acute.
Sale had a busy 1990s in finance. Before India’s liberalisation came the opening up of Eastern Europe. Western investors were eager to get in on the ground floor of the newly free economies. Sale found himself raising a $30-million closed-end fund for the London-based Fleming Investment Management, focused on the Czech Republic. “That was quite interesting,” he says, with understatement. “The countries were free but most of the business was PSUs. It took quite a long time for the management culture of companies to change. It wasn’t so easy to invest. There wasn’t a stock market.” He told an American newspaper in 1993 that “the lead time from deal to investment is often more than a year ... there are legal questions, a laborious bureaucracy, and there is not the sense of deadlines.”
Good preparation, one imagines, for India, his next big assignment. But in India, he points out, despite the size of the public sector and “semi-isolation” from the global economy, there was an “underlying entrepreneurial culture”, not to mention a stock market, whose “depth”, however, “was not enough”. He found himself helping Indian companies raise money abroad. From 1993 to 2001, he was director and head of capital markets/investment banking, India and Sri Lanka, for Jardine Fleming. “At that time,” he says, “the fees were relatively attractive, 2-3 per cent; now they are much lower.”
His investment bank was one of the three global coordinators for the GDR offering of VSNL in 1997, and also assisted with GDRs for Gail India and the first strategic disinvestment of Bharat Aluminium (Balco). None was a smooth operation, not least because of the turmoil in Asian markets around that time, but also because of the difference between the price expected by the government and the price European markets were willing to pay. But “investors were keen to participate in India”, says Sale, and “in a sense most of the constituents were happy”. Some issues were five to 10 times oversubscribed, he says. It helped, of course, that VSNL and Gail were then “semi-monopolistic”. In all, he “raised something like $3 billion for about 60 Indian companies, including Hindalco, Sterlite...”
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More personally rewarding: after liberalisation, foreigners in India were once again permitted to own racehorses.
“I was one of the first foreign owners of Indian bloodstock,” Sale says, “in Poona or Bombay”. It was a half-share in the late 1990s, and he doesn’t own a horse at the moment, but does still go to the races. He is very happy to offer a short lecture on the Arabian origin of the world’s racing stock.
It’s an immediate reminder of his own origins. He studied at Eton College, the elite British boarding school next door to Windsor Castle, where he entered the combined cadet force (like India’s NCC, he says); went to army officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (like IMA Dehra Dun); and joined the Welsh Guards (like his father, two godfathers and a brother) as an infantry officer. He owns land in Gloucestershire. It is but a step from here to horses, fox hunting and the Conservative Party.
Indeed, in his years in the army, between 1979 and 1986, Sale even performed ceremonial guard duties among the colourfully dressed soldiers who guard Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. “One had quite a lot to do with the Royal Family,” he says. A day on palace duty includes “drill movements, cleaning and polishing”. There is the changing of the regimental “colour” at 11 am, after which the guards are “put out around the palace” and “officers do rounds twice a day. Sometimes,” he adds, “you have dinner with the Royal Family, simply to make up numbers.” He met Princess Diana several times, he says.
Is ceremonial duty tedious? He answers for all the guards: “One is young, in a glamorous uniform, and it is a great honour to do it for your sovereign.” And then adds, more prosaically, that the duties frequently “change over”. Guard duty alternates with “weapons training, physical training, exercises, adventure training” — he trained in Arctic warfare and signals (“I’m actually proficient in Morse Code, but don’t test me”), and did exercises in Cyprus and elsewhere. The system is “quite well thought-out”.
Fresh out of Sandhurst, as a 19-year-old junior officer, he was sent to Northern Ireland for six months. He won’t say much about that. “You don’t know where the enemy is. From that point of view it’s quite stressful. It wasn’t especially bad but the IRA was quite active. Well, that was what you were trained for.”
In 1982 Margaret Thatcher sent troops to fight Argentina for the Falkland Islands. “Statistically, there were three Argentinian troops to one British. The supply chain was stretched. It was extremely wet and cold. The Argentinian air force was very effective. It was a pretty testing experience, but nonetheless very interesting.” One company of his regiment was hit and over 30 soldiers killed. “You don’t think about it because you’re trained. You’re following systems which you’ve rehearsed.”
Like many of his fellow officers, Sale served a short commission. In 1987 he quit to go into the City and merchant banking. Six years later, he was in India. Tasks like handling GDRs for state-owned entities have clearly brought him quality contacts in Indian government. And there is the extensive network of Old Etonians. Sale says he helped as a speechwriter for Conservative leader David Cameron, an Eton old boy, on his India visit in 1999. Another Old Etonian is George Curzon, Viceroy of India (1899-1905). Sale has long had an interest in British India — generations of his ancestors worked here, including Sir George Abell, secretary to the last two Viceroys, Lords Wavell and Mountbatten, and a 16-year-old who was hired by the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1822. (See the painting of Sale in “sherwani”, by Mumbai-based amateur artist Richard McConkey.)
In 2006, Sale “privately republished” a collection of 26 Curzon speeches, “a number of them of interest to modern readers”. They reveal Curzon’s enlightened views on India’s culture and archaeological heritage, education, the Afghan frontier, foreign policy and keeping India’s neighbours at a safe distance. “I sent copies to the president, the prime minister, Montek Singh, Jaswant Singh,” he says, and got back “some very nice letters of appreciation”.
Sale is leveraging old and new contacts as an independent consultant since 2002. He put some money of his own into a “sustainable” ski resort in Himachal Pradesh which hasn’t taken off. He is looking for real estate investments for Hongkong Land, a huge Hong Kong property company. He helped BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, look into a bauxite mine and refinery in eastern India, but that did not come to pass. He is helping Indian companies tie up resources abroad — like thermal or cooking coal from Indonesia or Australia, where permissions are much simpler. “Other deals,” he says, “include formation of a telecom technology startup, opportunities in the mining retail and food sectors, boutique hotels.” That is work. Otherwise, Sale sails, swims, goes to the races, visits Rajasthan, and is a Patron of the St John’s Ambulance charity that trains volunteers to administer first aid at disasters, including bombings. Sale is a Mumbaikar, even if not quite of Mumbai.
