Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Money sans frontieres

WHERE MONEY TALKS

It was Britain that backed Lakshmi Mittal when he was buying Sidex, it's India today.

The rich have no nationality. That's something the Luxembourgeois, French and Spanish, grooved in narrow ethnicity, have not realised in grappling with Lakshmi Mittal. Indonesia's Chinese Salims, Hongkong's would-be Chinese Harilelas, and Mohammed al Fayed yearning to be a subject of the Queen's are other instances of the rootless rich. But when push comes to shove, even they seek a fall-back country.

The British understand this. Having roamed and raided the world, they know that race and nationality do not change the colour of money. In the heyday of stringent foreign exchange restrictions, Lord Aldington, the controversial World War I military commander who became a Tory grandee and chairman of the now, alas, vanished Grindlays Bank, told me how his suave cosmopolitanism had thwarted the Reserve Bank which wanted foreign banks with an Indian connection to disclose accounts that Indian nationals held abroad.

What Lloyds, Mercantile, Chartered and Hongkong - the other banking giants of that era "" did I don't know, but the astute Aldington countered with a flanking reply. He deeply regretted his inability to tell whether his client "Mr Patel" was British, Kenyan, Ugandan, Pakistani or Indian.

I was reminded of Aldington's a-client-is-a-client approach in Jamshedpur some years later. A Bihar minister had just asked General Shiv Verma who had a post-retirement job in Telco how many Biharis he employed. "I told him", Verma said with a flick of the snowy handkerchief always tucked into his cuffs, "that I had no idea, but that I always made a point of employing only Indians!"

Nasty comments by Guy Dolle, Arcelor's chief executive, also recall the late Robert Maxwell's attempt to acquire the British Sunday newspaper, News of the World. Born in Czechoslovakia, Maxwell had learned how to speak English without an accent from listening to the BBC, acquired a British passport and called himself an Englishman. But, of course, that didn't make him any more English for the Anglo-Saxon establishment than a life peerage does Lord Swraj Paul. The NoW editor's passionate plea on television against the takeover ended with an unabashed appeal to ethnicity. "The News of the World is as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," he declared. "Let's keep it that way."

It wasn't a very flattering advertisement for England, for the old NoW lucratively glorified sleaze and sensation. True, the reinvented tabloid has done a public service by revealing British atrocities against harmless young Iraqis. But in the sixties, of which I am talking, the NoW was said to be the only paper that fitted the legendary C.P. Scot's famous dictum about news being sacred and comment free. That was because law court reports of prostitution, rape, sodomy and sexual abuse constituted the only news it printed. Of comment, it had absolutely none.

But it's not England, with all its shortcomings, that Mittal, reckoned to be worth $25 billion and the world's third richest man (after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet), wants to storm. England has become pretty blase about making the most of wealthy foreigners. People wonder in fact whether Tony Blair would have written to Romania's prime minister, Adrian Nastase, supporting Mittal's bid for Sidex, the state-owned Romanian steel company, without his handsome £125,000 gift to the Labour Party. Richard Ralph, Her Majesty's ambassador to Romania at the time, who felt the takeover would help British business, pleaded he had no idea of Mittal's donation.

The Tories made an interesting disclosure amidst the Romanian row. Apparently, they thought Mittal's Ispat absorbing Irish Steel in the mid-nineties would harm British interests: they did not regard Ispat as a British company. That cut Mittal to the quick. He might still be an Indian national. His company might be based in Rotterdam. He might rent the Tuilleries and Versailles for his daughter's wedding bash. But like all good Indians, he insists that Britain flows in his emotional bloodstream. "I have a very British identity," he boasted. "I have British companies with a turnover of £40m a year. What is more I have settled here and raised my family here. I pay tax here."

The clincher may not sound too pleasing to Indian ears. "It's true that I run a multinational group but I have no interests in India (this was before his Jharkhand promise). So please tell me what should my identity be?" The European Union's David O'Sullivan deplores talk of racism but French newspaper comment and cartoons and Dolle's crude remarks suggest that race is never far from the surface. Reports at the time of writing suggest that Mittal might just happen to be in New Delhi while Manmohan Singh chats with Jacques Chirac. Even if he doesn't drop in, he cannot have been averse to Kamal Nath's spirited defence of his bid.

Much as the steel man might avoid India, every so often even the global glitterati need a nation behind them. But they are not stuck with just one, like us ordinary mortals. It was Britain when Mittal was assimilating Sidex; it's India today; it might be Spain, France or Luxembourg tomorrow. Truly are the rich men of the world.