Europe edition

WORLD BUSINESS NEWSPAPER SATURDAY 19 JUNE / SUNDAY 20 JUNE 2021

HOW TO SPEND IT Putin’s éminence grise has

Lunch with the FT
LIFE & ARTS

THE ESCAPE ISSUE

Boats, bikes, cars and adventures

Football vs the culture wars

EU loses fight over AZ jab deliveries Gideon Rachman

LIFE & ARTS

3 Court battle over shortfall 3 ‘Serious breach’ of contract 3 Demand to speed supply denied
HANNAH KUCHLER — LONDON
MICHAEL PEEL — BRUSSELS
The EU has lost a legal bid to force Astra-
Zeneca to speed up delivery of Covid-19
vaccines or risk billions of euros in fines,
in the latest round of a bitter battle
between the bloc and the British-
Swedish pharmaceuticals company.
In a ruling yesterday, a court in Brus-
sels criticised AstraZeneca for a “serious
breach” of its contract with the EU after
repeated shortfalls. But the court did
not agree with the European Commis-
sion’s demands for AstraZeneca to
deliver 120m doses by the end of June or
pay fines of €10 per dose per day.
The dispute between the commission
and AstraZeneca has severely damaged
the company’s standing on the conti-
nent and in February spiralled into a
diplomatic row.
The Brussels court ruled that Astra-
Zeneca should provide 80m doses by
the end of September. However, Astra-
Zeneca has already delivered 70m doses
and plans to provide the remaining 10m
this month. The commission insisted
that the court judgment would nonethe-
less put pressure on AstraZeneca as it
“laid the tracks for the delivery of future
doses on the basis of clear contractual
principles”.
The ruling found that the drug com-
pany’s failure to send the EU vaccines
manufactured in the UK was inconsist-
ent with making the “best reasonable
efforts” on supply required by its con-
tract. But it did not order AstraZeneca
to use the plant to fulfil the EU order.
A UK plant operated by Oxford Bio-
Medica plant is nonetheless expected to
start manufacturing for the EU, accord-
ing to a person familiar with the matter.
AstraZeneca was originally expected
to supply up to 300m doses to the EU in
the first six months of this year but that
forecast was cut sharply after produc-
tion problems. With the pace of the EU’s
vaccine rollout accelerating, using
mainly BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna
jabs — and some countries imposing
restrictions on the Oxford/AstraZeneca
vaccine after the discovery of rare blood
clots — there is less practical need for
the doses.
Jeffrey Pott, AstraZeneca’s general
counsel, said: “AstraZeneca has fully
Some countries complied with its agreement with the
in the EU have European Commission and we will con-
restricted the tinue to focus on the urgent task of sup-
AZ jab because plying an effective vaccine.” The Biden world order
of blood clot
fears, cutting
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the
commission, said: “This decision con-
Edward Luce
demand firms the position of the commission: BIG READ
AstraZeneca did not live up to the com-
mitments it made in the contract. It is
good to see that an independent judge
confirms this.”

Games plan
Suga eyes gold
at ballot box
A protester outside the Tokyo building Call of the wild
housing the 2020 Olympics organising
committee yesterday as Japan’s top
Path to a nature-friendly garden
Covid-19 adviser said staging the games
without spectators was “desirable”.
Shigeru Omi said strict attendance caps HOUSE & HOME
should be enforced if they were allowed.
Prime minister Yoshihide Suga must
now respond to the recommendations.
But he will be buoyed by the latest NHK
poll, which shows opposition to the
games among Japanese has fallen to
31 per cent, from 80 per cent in May.
Suga is betting that a good Olympics
can deliver success in an election that
must be called by October 22.
Olympic fever page 2
Kimimasa Mayama/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Rich nations’ failure to cough up cash

threatens to derail UN climate summit
LESLIE HOOK — LONDON “It is unlikely that rich countries hit remains the most difficult part of all
the target of mobilising $100bn per year these negotiations,” said Molwyn Joseph,
Tensions over climate finance have by 2020,” said Amar Bhattacharya, co- environment minister for Antigua. “I do
threatened to derail the COP26 summit chair of the UN’s Independent Expert not believe that particular aspect was
in November after weeks of UN deliber- Group on Climate Finance and senior dealt with as it should have been.”
Fed rates rethink blows ations stumbled over how to proceed fellow at the Brookings Institution, Rich countries donated about $80bn
hole in ‘reflation trades’ with core principles of the Paris climate although official figures are yet to be tal- in 2018, according to UN figures.
accord. lied formally. Several aspects of the “rule book”
Analysis i PAGE 11 At a time when government coffers governing the 2015 Paris climate accord
The downbeat conclusion fuels further have been emptied by the pandemic, are due to be finalised at the COP26,
disappointment about progress on halt- reaching agreement on climate finance including how countries report carbon
Austria €5.50 Morocco Dh70 ing global warming, after last week’s G7 — public and private funding to help emissions. Negotiators will also try to
Bahrain Din2.20 Netherlands €5.50
Belgium €5.50 N Macedonia Den240 summit in Cornwall failed to produce developing countries cut emissions and craft rules for global carbon markets,
Bulgaria Lev8.75 Norway NKr54 specific plans for new climate funding. adapt to climate change — is more con- such as carbon offsets between nations.
Croatia Kn31 Oman OR2.20
Cyprus €5.00 Pakistan Rupee450 Rich countries appear to have missed tentious than ever. Patricia Espinosa, UN climate chief,
Czech Rep
Denmark
Kc140
DKr55
Poland
Portugal
Zl 25
€5.00
a target of providing $100bn in annual During three weeks of negotiations at admitted there had been a lack of
Egypt E£72 Qatar QR20 climate aid by 2020, creating mistrust the UN Climate Change intersessional progress. “I cannot say that there was
Finland
France
€5.90
€5.50
Romania
Russia
Ron19
€5.00
among the 191 countries that signed the meetings, which ended on Thursday, an really any breakthrough in the consulta-
Germany €5.50 Serbia RSD520 Paris agreement. The shortfall sets the undercurrent of discontent over climate tions that took place here,” she said.
Gibraltar £4.00 Slovenia €5.00
Greece €5.00 South Africa R130 scene for difficult discussions at the finance stymied talks on topics such as The promised $100bn was “abso-
Hungary
India
Ft1590
Rup260
Spain
Sweden
€5.00
SKr59
COP26 in Glasgow when it comes to carbon markets and transparency. lutely crucial” for the success of the
Italy €5.00 Switzerland SFr7.90 agreeing new goals for climate finance. “The issue of climate finance still talks, she added.
Lithuania €5.50 Tunisia Din9.00
Luxembourg €5.50 Turkey TL30
Malta €5.00 UAE Dh25.00

World Markets
Subscribe In print and online
STOCK MARKETS CURRENCIES INTEREST RATES
www.ft.com/subscribetoday
email: fte.subs@ft.com Jun 18 prev %chg Jun 18 prev Jun 18 prev price yield chg
Tel: +44 20 7775 6000 S&P 500 4183.46 4221.86 -0.91 $ per € 1.186 1.194 £ per $ 0.724 0.717 US Gov 10 yr 146.25 1.46 -0.03
Fax: +44 20 7873 3428 Nasdaq Composite 14055.42 14161.35 -0.75 $ per £ 1.381 1.395 € per £ 1.165 1.168 UK Gov 10 yr 0.75 -0.03
Dow Jones Ind 33437.33 33823.45 -1.14 £ per € 0.859 0.856 ¥ per € 130.701 131.631 Ger Gov 10 yr -0.20 0.04
© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2021 FTSEurofirst 300 1744.89 1773.48 -1.61 ¥ per $ 110.240 110.225 £ index 82.153 82.174 Jpn Gov 10 yr 116.67 0.06 -0.01
No: 40,738 ★ Euro Stoxx 50 4079.33 4158.14 -1.90 ¥ per £ 152.198 153.776 SFr per £ 1.274 1.277 US Gov 30 yr 111.56 2.04 -0.05
FTSE 100 7017.47 7153.43 -1.90 SFr per € 1.094 1.093 Ger Gov 2 yr 105.88 -0.67 0.00
Printed in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, FTSE All-Share 4002.07 4071.33 -1.70 € per $ 0.844 0.837
Frankfurt, Milan, Madrid, New York, Chicago, San
CAC 40 6569.16 6666.26 -1.46
Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul,
Dubai Xetra Dax 15448.04 15727.67 -1.78 COMMODITIES price prev chg
Nikkei 28964.08 29018.33 -0.19 Fed Funds Eff 0.06 0.07 -0.01
Hang Seng 28801.27 28558.59 0.85 Jun 18 prev %chg US 3m Bills 0.04 0.04 0.00
MSCI World $ 2996.51 3008.48 -0.40 Oil WTI $ 71.56 71.04 0.73 Euro Libor 3m -0.55 -0.55 0.00
MSCI EM $ 1362.88 1370.00 -0.52 Oil Brent $ 73.45 73.08 0.51 UK 3m 0.08 0.08 0.00
MSCI ACWI $ 714.87 717.84 -0.41 Gold $ 1778.70 1860.75 -4.41 Prices are latest for edition Data provided by Morningstar
2 ★
WORLD|
WEEK IN REVIEW|
Hamas tests new Israeli PM with
launch of incendiary balloons
The credentials of new Israeli prime minister Naftali
Bennett were tested within days of the creation of his
coalition government when Palestinian militants
Hamas launched incendiary balloons into Israel.
Bennett ordered fresh air strikes in the Gaza Strip
in response to the Hamas move, which came after the
government permitted rightwing settlers to march to
the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem. Social media
showed images of Israeli police beating back Pales-
tinian youths and throwing stun grenades to keep
them away from the settlers.
Bennett, who replaced five-time premier Ben-
jamin Netanyahu, heads an eight-party coalition,
which includes far-right and leftwing parties and
relies on votes from an Islamist Arab party.
US judge grants injunction against
Biden’s pause on fossil fuel leases
A judge cleared the way for oil and gas lease sales to
resume on US public lands by blocking a decision by
Joe Biden’s administration to suspend them.
The Louisiana court ruled in favour of 13 states,
including Texas, Alaska and Oklahoma, granting an
injunction against the White House’s pause on new
leases. The decision allows for the leasing process to
resume while the court hears further arguments.
The president in January ordered the suspension
of new leases while a review of the permitting process
was carried out. The suspension, which did not affect
existing drilling permits, fulfilled an election pledge
and marked the president’s most significant move
against the energy sector after he campaigned on a
promise to “transition away from oil”.
Slovakia businessman faces retrial
after murder acquittal overturned
Slovakia’s Supreme Court overturned last year’s
acquittal of businessman Marian Kocner, above in
court, accused of ordering the 2018 murder of reporter
Jan Kuciak, and ordered a retrial. The killing triggered
protests that led to premier Robert Fico’s resignation.
Web inventor Berners-Lee to
auction original source code
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web,
created a non-fungible token containing the web’s
original source code to put up for auction.
Sotheby’s will auction the NFT next week, ena-
bling Berners-Lee to raise money for the first time
from one of the greatest inventions of the modern era
but one that was never patented. He will use the pro-
ceeds to support new initiatives.
Investment in NFTs has declined since the $69.3m
sale in March of Beeple’s digital artefact Everydays:
The First 5000 Days.
The auction package includes Berners-Lee’s origi-
nal archive of time-stamped files for the world wide
web browser. Bidding starts at $1,000.
MAKE A SMART INVESTMENT
Subscribe to the FT today at FT.com/subscription
FRIDAY 31 MARCH 2017
Trump vs the Valley
Tech titans need to minimise
political risk — GILLIAN TETT, PAGE 13
HMRC warns
customs risks
being swamped
by Brexit surge
3 Confidence in IT plans ‘has collapsed’
3 Fivefold rise in declarations expected
JAMES BLITZ — WHITEHALL EDITOR
A computer system acquired to collect
duties and clear imports into the UK
may not be able to handle the huge
surge in workload expected once Britain
leaves the EU, customs authorities have
admitted to MPs.
FINANCIAL TIMES
Bracken House, 1 Friday Street, London EC4M 9BT.
Subscriptions & Customer service
Subscription offers: www.ft.com/subscription
Contact: +44 207 775 6000, fte.subs@ft.com
Manage your personal account: mma.ft.com
Advertising
Tel: +44 20 7873 4000 asiaads@ft.com,
emeaads@ft.com
Letters to the editor
letters.editor@ft.com
Executive appointments
Tel: +44 20 7873 4909
www.exec-appointments.com
Published by: The Financial Times Limited,
Bracken House, 1 Friday Street, London EC4M 9BT.
Tel: +44 20 7873 3000; Fax: +44 20 7407 5700.
Editor: Roula Khalaf.
Germany: Demirören Media, Hurriyet AS-Branch
Germany, An der Brucke 20-22, 64546 Morfelden-
Walldorf, +49 6105 327100. Responsible Editor, Roula
Khalaf. Responsible for advertising content, Jon Slade.
Italy: Monza Stampa S.r.l., Via Michelangelo Buonarroti,
153, Monza, 20900, Milan. Tel. +39 039 28288201
Owner, The Financial Times Limited; Rappresentante e
Direttore Responsabile in Italia: I.M.D.Srl-Marco Provasi -
Via G. Puecher, 2 20037 Paderno Dugnano (MI), Italy.
Milano n. 296 del 08/05/08 - Poste Italiane SpA-Sped. in
Abb.Post.DL. 353/2003 (conv. L. 27/02/2004-n.46) art. 1
.comma 1, DCB Milano.
Spain: Bermont Impresion, Avenida de Alemania 12, CTC,
FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021
INTERNATIONAL
Austrian compromise
EU reaches deal on Belarus sanctions
Bloc agrees penalties for tarian government, reflecting outrage made $4.2bn from export revenues ‘The EU promise was agreed. “It is in our com-
over the forced landing and detention of from January to the end of November. mon interest that Belarus is not pushed
forced landing and arrest Roman Protasevich and his partner, Financial sanctions will target activi- cannot even further into the sphere of influence
of dissident and partner Sofia Sapega, last month. The sanctions ties including securities trading, money allow itself of Russia.”
will test both the durability of Lukash- market instruments and export credits, The proposed EU package also closes
MICHAEL PEEL — BRUSSELS enko’s 27-year rule and the EU’s ability diplomats said. There is a proposed to be what one diplomat described as “last
JAMES SHOTTER — WARSAW to push for political change while mini- carve-out for private bank deposits and divided. loopholes” in an existing arms embargo,
mising harm to Belarusians. humanitarian transactions. including a halt to the export of preci-
EU countries have provisionally agreed The package still needs to be legally Austria’s initial opposition to the The regime sion rifles used by biathletes.
sanctions on Belarus’s financial, oil and finalised and details of precise measures planned finance measures had angered is trying to The measures have some overlaps
potash sectors in a bid to punish Presi- remain confidential until publication. some fellow member states, especially with proposals set out by the Belarusian
dent Alexander Lukashenko’s regime Its aim, diplomats said, is to target state given the large role of Austrian banks in see how far opposition last month.
for its interception of a Ryanair flight to companies and other big sources of rev- international financial transactions they can go’ Yesterday, Belarus’s exiled opposition
arrest a dissident. enue for the regime. involving Belarus. But Vienna insisted it leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, said
The measures are expected to win for- Belarus is one of the world’s biggest just wanted to craft the package to cause sanctions needed to be strong enough to
mal political agreement from the Euro- exporters of potash, a crucial ingredient as little damage as possible to the Bela- “send a message” that the EU would
pean bloc’s foreign ministers on Mon- in fertilisers, and generates significant rusian people — and to avoid pushing continue to put pressure on Lukash-
day after a compromise to end Austria’s revenues from refining oil. Belaruskali, Minsk deeper into the Kremlin’s orbit. enko’s regime until “all political prison-
opposition to some proposed curbs on the state-controlled group that accounts “It is of high importance for Austria ers have been freed”.
bank transactions, diplomats said. for about 20 per cent of the global pot- that financial sanctions do not target the “The EU cannot allow itself to be
It marks a significant escalation in the ash market, sold $2.4bn abroad last population of Belarus,” the foreign min- divided. The regime is trying to see how
EU’s pressure on Lukashenko’s authori- year, while state oil group Belneftekhim istry said in a statement before the com- far they can go.” she told the FT.
Tokyo 2020. Postponed games
Japan PM pins hopes on Olympic fever
Potential electoral boost from
feelgood factor outweighs the
political risk of cancellation
ROBIN HARDING — TOKYO
At the lowest point in May, more than 80
per cent of the Japanese public wanted
the upcoming Olympics cancelled or
postponed, almost nobody in the coun-
try was vaccinated and medical experts
were lining up to call the games an intol-
erable Covid-19 risk.
Despite the intense pressure on Tokyo
2020, Japan has not yet come close to
cancelling the Olympics, according to
government and organising committee
officials. Instead, they have sought to
run down the clock and build a sense of
inevitability around the games.
That determination to go ahead has
nothing to do with financial considera-
tions, said analysts, but reflects instead
a mixture of electoral politics, one-up-
manship on China and practical calcula-
tion by Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s prime
minister.
There are growing signs that Suga’s
political judgment was correct. The per-
centage of the Japanese public wanting
the games cancelled has fallen to 31 per Handover: ing on September 5, Suga hopes to go to doned the games after years of effort games by the International Olympic
cent, according to the regular NHK poll, Olympic torch the public almost immediately after- and trillions of yen in public money. Committee. “We have been cornered
and almost two-thirds said the games bearers wards and ride an Olympic feelgood fac- Several other political factors weigh in into a situation where we cannot even
should proceed with suitable limits on exchange the tor to another four years in power. favour of going ahead. The Tokyo games stop,” said Kaori Yamaguchi, a former
spectators. “People are basically becom- flame in Some bureaucratic advisers to Suga are central to the legacy of Shinzo Abe, judo champion and executive member
ing resigned to the games taking place,” Kaminoyama. regard holding the Olympics as an elec- Suga’s predecessor as prime minister. of the Japanese Olympic Committee,
said Atsuo Ito, a political analyst and Below, toral risk, said Ito, because a big rise in Abe is still a powerbroker in the LDP this month.
former official in the ruling Liberal Yoshihide Suga Covid-19 infections traceable to the and Suga needs his support. But lawyers said the IOC had limited
Democratic party. “If it’s going to hap- Carl Court/Getty
games could turn into a damaging scan- Japanese leaders are also acutely leverage, since Japan had relatively little
pen, then so be it.” dal. Advice from epidemiologists, how- aware that Beijing will host the Winter to lose financially from a cancellation.
For Suga, one simple fact dominates ever, suggested that simply holding the Olympics in early 2022. A triumphant “Most of the money that Japan put in has
calculations about the Olympics: it is games was not that dangerous, not least games in China, held just eight months already been spent on infrastructure,
four years since Japan’s last general elec- because 80 per cent of those who travel after an ignominious Japanese failure, is hotels, the Olympic Village and things
tion and he must call another by Octo- to Japan will be vaccinated. The main a prospect few LDP politicians want to like that,” said Irwin Kishner, a sports
ber 22. For him to survive as party danger stems from increased domestic contemplate. lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in New
leader, the LDP must do well in that travel and social contact, but Tokyo Suga has been betting for months that York.
election. 2020 organisers hope to control that by sentiment will change when voters While the Tokyo 2020 organisers
Many of his allies believe their best limiting the number of spectators at receive their Covid-19 vaccinations, and have no contractual right to cancel, the
bet is a successful games. “Suga and the venues. after long delays, Japan’s rollout is IOC would have little recourse if Japan
people around him think that if the Cancellation raises political risks of its finally gathering pace. The country is simply closed its borders and made it
games happen, then Olympic fever will own. Suga might get a short-term delivering more than 600,000 vaccines impossible for the games to take place.
take hold,” said Takao Toshikawa, edi- boost if he were seen as a a day and aiming to reach 1m this Fortunately for the IOC, the interests
tor of political newsletter Tokyo decisive leader protect- month. About 30-40 per cent of the of Japan’s prime minister have aligned
Insideline. “If there is a medal rush ing the country, but he country will have had at least one dose with its own. Unless the Covid-19 situa-
for Japan, then they’ll want to call would then have to by the time the games start. tion deteriorates markedly over the
an election as soon as possible.” contest the election as One common theory in Japan is that next few weeks, the Olympic cauldron
With the Paralympics clos- the man who aban- the country is being forced to host the will be lit in Tokyo on July 23.
Latin America
Brazil’s worst drought in a century deepens Covid-19 misery
BRYAN HARRIS — RIBEIRAO PRETO ing effect on the important farming than a decade. As hydroelectric power activation of thermoelectric plants
CAROLINA PULICE — SAO PAULO
WORLD BUSINESS NEWSPAPER UK £2.70 Channel Islands £3.00; Republic of Ireland €3.00
A Five Star plan?
Italy’s populists are trying to woo
the poor — BIG READ, PAGE 11
Dear Don...
May’s first stab at the break-up
letter — ROBERT SHRIMSLEY, PAGE 12
industry, which accounts for about 30 accounts for about 65 per cent of Brazil’s which, in addition to being expensive,
Lloyd’s of Brussels Insurance market
to tap new talent pool with EU base
UK £3.80; Channel Islands £3.80; Republic of Ireland €3.80
Briefing
SATURDAY 1 APRIL / SUNDAY 2 APRIL 2017
The worst drought in almost a century per cent of gross domestic product. electricity mix, the drought has also increases greenhouse gas emissions.”
THE END
i US bargain-hunters fuel Europe M&A
“The lack of water in the rivers and curtailed electricity production. Brazil’s government has issued warn-
Europe has become the big target for cross-border
dealmaking, as US companies ride a Trump-fuelled HOW DRIVERLESS
has left millions of Brazilians facing
equity market rally to hunt for bargains across the
OF THE TECHNOLOGY IS
Atlantic.— PAGE 15; CHINA CURBS HIT DEALS, PAGE 17
i Report outlines longer NHS waiting times
A report on how the health service can survive CHANGING AN
ROAD
more austerity has said patients will wait longer for
AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE
reservoirs means farmers won’t be able This has forced a switch to the more ings of possible blackouts, stoking fears
non-urgent operations and for A&E treatment while
some surgical procedures will be scrapped.— PAGE 4 Censors and sensitivity
water shortages and the risk of power
i Emerging nations in record debt sales Warning: this article may be
FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY 4 2017
Developing countries have sold record levels of
government debt in the first quarter of this year,
upsetting — LIFE & ARTS
taking advantage of a surge in optimism toward
emerging markets as trade booms.— PAGE 15
Credit Suisse
Art of persuasion Mystery deepens
to irrigate their lands, which will lead to expensive thermal power, pushing elec- that energy use will be rationed. Local
i London tower plans break records
A survey has revealed that a
record 455 tall buildings are
over disputed painting of Jane Austen How To Spend It
blackouts, complicating the country’s
planned or under construction
engulfed in
adjust its negotiation position with the in London. Work began on
EU, a Whitehall official said. “If running almost one tower a week
our own customs system is proving during 2016.— PAGE 4
much harder than we anticipated, that
ought to have an impact on how we i Tillerson fails to ease Turkey tensions
fresh tax probe
a fall in agricultural production,” he tricity prices for businesses and con- media have reported that the govern-
press for certain options in Brussels.” The US secretary of state has failed to reconcile
In a letter to Andrew Tyrie, chairman tensions after talks in Ankara with President Recep
Chic new lodgings
efforts to recover from the devastating
of the Commons treasury select com- Tayyip Erdogan on issues including Syria and the
impact of the coronavirus pandemic. said. He predicted the drought would sumers up to 40 per cent higher this ment was preparing a decree on ration-
28821, Coslada, Madrid. Legal Deposit Number
(Deposito Legal) M-32596-1995; “fuel inflation and commodity prices on year, according to estimates. “Our cur- ing to control electricity use in times of
Publishing Director, Roula Khalaf; The agricultural centres in São Paulo a global scale, and decrease Brazilian rent model based on hydroelectric and shortages.
Publishing Company, The Financial Times Limited,
registered office as above. Local Representative office; state and Mato Grosso do Sul have been GDP. It has direct repercussions.” thermal energy is not sustainable,” Lat- The ministry of mines and energy said
C/ Infanta Maria Teresa 4, bajo 2, 28016, Madrid. ISSN
1135-8262.
worse affected, after the November- Jose Odilon, a farmer from Ribeirão erman said. it was discussing energy rationing with
UAE: Masar Printing & Publishing, P.O. Box 485100, March rainy season produced the lowest Preto, a booming agricultural hub in the “The increase in droughts puts pres- “large consumers and industry for
Dubai. Editor in Chief: Roula Khalaf.
France: Publishing Director, Jonathan Slade, 46 Rue La
level of rainfall in 20 years. interior of São Paulo state, said his sure on the reservoirs of hydroelectric times of greater energy demand”.
Boetie, 75008 Paris, Tel. +33 (0)1 5376 8256; Fax: +33 (01) Water levels in the Cantareira system sugarcane crop had been badly affected. plants and the answer we have is the The drought comes as Brazil grapples
5376 8253; Commission Paritaire N° 0919 C 85347; ISSN
1148-2753. of reservoirs, which serves about 7.5m His vast plantation is dotted with with the economic and social effects of
Turkey: Dunya Super Veb Ofset A.S. 100. Yil Mahallesi people in São Paulo city, dropped to heavy farming equipment — much of it the pandemic. Almost half a million
34204, Bagcilar- Istanbul, Tel. +90 212 440 24 24.
Sweden: Responsible Publisher - Christer Norlander below one-tenth of its capacity this year. automated — to strip the cane of its Brazilians have died from Covid-19, the
© Copyright The Financial Times 2021.
Brazil’s mines and energy ministry has leaves, harvest the stalk and then dump second worst of any country after the
Reproduction of the contents of this newspaper in any called it the country’s worst drought in it into an awaiting fleet of Mercedes lor- US, and the death rate remains above
manner is not permitted without the publisher’s prior
consent. ‘Financial Times’ and ‘FT’ are registered trade
91 years. ries for transport to the local mills. 2,000 per day.
marks of The Financial Times Limited. “Lately we’ve been without water Odilon blamed an inversion of the La The country’s vaccine rollout has also
The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a every other day, but it was usually at Niña weather pattern, which has meant lagged and is only starting to gather
self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of night. But on Thursday we had no water more rain falling on the Amazon basin pace. Just over a quarter of Brazil’s 212m
Practice: www.ft.com/editorialcode
all day,” said Nilza Maria Silva Duarte and less in the country’s south. people have received a first shot.
Reprints are available of any FT article with your
company logo or contact details inserted if required
from São Paulo’s working-class east Marcelo Laterman, a climate cam- With consumer prices increasing
(minimum order 100 copies). zone. paigner from Greenpeace Brazil, said more than 8 per cent in the year to May,
One-off copyright licences for reproduction of FT articles
are also available.
José Francisco Goncalves, an ecology the drought was “directly connected” to inflation has combined with high levels
For both services phone +44 20 7873 4816, or email professor at the University of Brasília, deforestation in the Amazon, which last Capybaras rest on the dry bank of a of unemployment to hit the nation’s
syndication@ft.com
said the drought was having a devastat- year surged to its highest level in more river near the city of Joanópolis poorest citizens.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 3

INTERNATIONAL

Football great Ronaldo seeks

Email leaks

Poland accuses Russia after

cyber assault on top officials
perfection on and off pitch JAMES SHOTTER — WARSAW

Senior Polish officials were targeted in

Portugal star appears ageless as he strives for international goalscoring record
Simon
Kuper
Cristiano Ronaldo tells us who he is
through his body. It is his personal crea-
tion, still perfect at 36: that impossibly
narrow waist and straight back, the
abdominal muscles of a socialist realist
statue, the standing leap of a basketball
star, the sulky looks of a boy-band
singer, and the ultramarathoner’s heart
whose beat will hardly rise today when
reigning champions Portugal meet Ger-
many at Euro 2020.
God made his footballing rival Lionel
Messi, but Ronaldo is proud of having
made himself.
The odds were stacked against Ron-
aldo when he was born on the island of
Madeira, the poor periphery of poor
peripheral Portugal. His mother had
wanted to abort him, but Portuguese
law did not allow it in 1985. His father, a
veteran of the Angolan war, was “drunk
almost every day”, Ronaldo has said.
The unwanted child acquired a constant
need to prove his right to exist, theorises
one biographer, Jan-Cees Butter.
A homesick adolescent in Sporting’s
academy in Lisbon, he was teased for his
Madeiran accent. Aged 18, his brilliance
took him to England and Manchester
United. A year later, Portugal lost the
Euro 2004 final against Greece, but by
then he was already remaking himself.
He realised his lone trick — the step
over — would not make him the world’s
best player. Nor could he head well,
tackle or take free-kicks. He taught
himself those skills, and through repeti-
tion memorised a repertoire of feints.
A skinny sprinter, he did not look des-
tined for a long career, but through
obsessive workouts — he can do 142 sit-
ups in 45 seconds — he encased his body
in muscle. Even on holiday, he exercises
constantly. His ice baths and instant
glare whenever he suspects he is in the
company of amateurs terrify his team-
mates into professionalism.
He became a model for the Portu-
guese generation that emigrated after
the financial crisis, said Raquel Vaz-
Pinto, a political scientist at the Portu-
guese Institute for International Rela-
tions and Security. She defined his mes-
sage as, “If you have talent and ambi-
tion, if you sacrifice a lot, you are going
to succeed”.
Warned about chronic damage to his
left knee, in 2014 he converted himself
from an all-rounder into a scoring cen-
tre-forward who typically takes just one
touch before shooting. He leaves
defending to teammates, the extras in
his personal drama.
In the Euro 2016 final, playing for Por-
tugal’s first major prize, he went off
injured after 25 minutes, then coached
from the bench as if the manager did not
exist. Portugal beat France, and in his
speech to the squad, Ronaldo cast the
trophy above all as a personal event:
“This was the prize I was still missing in
my career. A prize I won thanks to you.”
Net profit: He has won the Ballon d’Or for the
Cristiano world’s best player five times, compared
Ronaldo scores with Messi’s six. The argument about
a penalty during who is better is as silly as debating
Portugal’s first whether Michelangelo outshines Leon-
Euro 2020 ardo. The two players’ personal duel
game against improved them both.
Hungary. Below, Messi and Ronaldo belong to the
lifting the Euro cohort of modern greats who have
2016 trophy defied ageing thanks to improved pro-
Hugo Delgado/EPA-EFE;
fessionalism, nutrition and medical
Franck Fife/AFP/Getty
care: tennis stars Roger Federer and Ser-
ena Williams are 39, while Tom Brady
won this year’s Super Bowl aged 43.
God made Ronaldo’s drive remains undimmed:
every defeat is a personal insult, every
footballing teammate’s failure to supply him a trag-
rival Lionel edy. He is equally perfectionist off the
field: he helped get his brother Hugo off
Messi, but drugs and gives quietly to charities.
Ronaldo is Three of his four children were born
to surrogate mothers, who are not
proud of involved in their childcare, as if no
having mere partner could meet his parental
standards.
made Yet for all his 148m Facebook follow-
himself ers, the most of any human, Ronaldo’s
achievements have not made him uni-
versally loved outside Portugal.
Unfairly, brilliance on demand can
seem mechanical. Opposing fans taunt
him with chants of “Messi!”, while the
Hungarian crowd on Tuesday tried
homophobic abuse. Unfazed, he scored
twice in a 3-0 victory.
In the prematch press conference, he
nonchalantly helped wiped billions off
Coca-Cola’s share price by removing two
Coke bottles set in front of him, praising
water instead.
Ronaldo has 106 goals in 176 interna-
tional games. Playing now in a stronger
Portuguese team than that of five years
ago, he is closing in on Iranian Ali Daei’s
all-time record of 109 goals. He does not
seem anywhere near finished.
a cyber attack that originated in Rus-
sia, Poland’s de facto leader Jaroslaw
Kaczynski said yesterday.
The claim comes two weeks after an
account on the Telegram social media
platform began leaking what it claimed
were emails sent by government offi-
cials, including the top aide to Prime
Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Kaczynski, leader of the ruling Law
and Justice party, alleged that “the most
important Polish officials, ministers
[and] MPs of various political groups”
had been targeted in the attack, whose
purpose was to “hit Polish society and
destabilise our country”.
“The analysis of our [intelligence]
services and the special services of our
allies allows us to say clearly that the
cyber attack was carried out from the
territory of the Russian Federation,” he
said. “Its scale and scope are broad.”
Russia has repeatedly denied carrying
out cyber attacks against western tar-
gets. However, in recent months the
question of cyber warfare has become
an increasing irritant in relations
between Moscow and the west.
Earlier this week, US president Joe
Biden warned Russian counterpart
Vladimir Putin that certain critical
infrastructure should be “off limits”
from attacks, as the US and Russia
agreed to hold talks on cyber security.
Pandemic support
Germany central bank head
urges end to ECB bond buying
MARTIN ARNOLD — FRANKFURT
The head of Germany’s central bank
has said Europe’s emergency bond-
buying scheme should end “in the com-
ing year”.
Jens Weidmann’s comments in an inter-
view with Handelsblatt newspaper yes-
terday are a signal that the European
Central Bank will face mounting pres-
sure to start winding down its €1.85tn
pandemic emergency purchase pro-
gramme as the eurozone economy
rebounds.
ECB president Christine Lagarde said
last week it was “premature” to start
discussing the winding down of PEPP, its
main crisis-fighting tool. Its chief econo-
mist Philip Lane said this week it may
still not have enough information to do
so in September.
Weidmann, one of the more conserva-
tive “hawks” on the ECB’s governing
council, said: “We should certainly not
withdraw support too soon.” But he
added: “With further progress in coping
with the pandemic, I am thoroughly
optimistic that we can make progress in
overcoming the crisis and then dispense
our purchases more cautiously.”
Weidmann rejected recent calls for
some of the extra flexibility embedded
in PEPP — such as its ability to make
outsized purchases of one country’s
Military assessment
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,
on Thursday denied that Biden had
accused the Kremlin of being behind
cyber attacks, but conceded that attacks
could be taking place from Russian soil.
Meanwhile, Nato heads of state and
government approved a cyber defence
strategy and extended powers to invoke
the western military alliance’s Article 5
principle of collective defence in cases of
co-ordinated cyber attacks.
Kaczynski said that Poland was still
gathering evidence on the attack on its
officials. The government briefed MPs
on the attacks on Wednesday during a
sitting of parliament made secret at the
request of the prime minister.
Michal Dworczyk, the top aide to
Morawiecki, admitted last week that
some information was stolen from mail-
boxes and social media accounts
belonging to him and his family. But he
also warned that some of the informa-
tion that had been published was fabri-
cated.
“At the moment I am not in a position
to say precisely when my mailbox was
broken into, but I would like to under-
score that I did not use it to send any
information which could pose a threat
to state security,” he said.
“The goal [of such attacks] is spread-
ing disinformation including by mixing
true information with false information
which has been fabricated on purpose
for the needs of these sorts of activities.”
Additional reporting by Henry Foy
bonds — to be transferred to the tradi-
tional asset purchase programme,
which will continue for much longer.
He also pushed back against the idea
that the ECB should only withdraw
PEPP once its inflation forecasts were
back to pre-pandemic levels — some-
thing Lane has proposed. “That doesn’t
convince me,” the Bundesbank boss
‘I am thoroughly
optimistic that we
can make progress in
overcoming the crisis’
said. “This is an extraordinary emer-
gency programme, and the emergency
will probably be long gone by then.”
German producer prices for industrial
products rose 7.2 per cent in May from a
year earlier, their highest increase since
2008 — according to data published yes-
terday. The Bundesbank has predicted
overall inflation in the country will
exceed 4 per cent later this year — its
highest level for more than a decade.
However, Weidmann said “the sharp
rise in prices in Germany is temporary”,
adding: “Stubbornly excessive inflation
would require, among other things,
excessive wage agreements. So far we
have no evidence of this.”

Lagos. Wealth disparity

Nigeria luxury property booms despite gloom
Ultra-rich look for somewhere
to park money as currency’s
value plummets in past year
NEIL MUNSHI — LAGOS
Just across the water from Lagos’s teem-
ing mainland, where most of the mega-
city’s 20m people live in slums, property
developers on upmarket Banana Island
are selling million-dollar luxury flats,
done out in gold, black and cream.
“What we sell is quality,” said Sijibomi
Ogundele, the 42-year-old chief execu-
tive of real estate developer and con-
struction company Sujimoto, waving his
hand around one such flat in the
Giuliano di Medici apartment building.
He points to the Dame Zaha Hadid-de-
signed bathtub in the master bathroom:
“This design is some of the most expen-
sive in the world.”
Ogundele is part of a luxury property
boom in Africa’s biggest city that has
taken off even as the broader Nigerian
economy has suffered soaring inflation,
sluggish growth and high unemploy-
ment. The driving force is ultra-rich
Nigerians looking for somewhere to
park their money in an economy where
the central bank has devalued the naira
by more than a third against the dollar
in the past year.
“We have a niche market — the 1 per
cent of the 1 per cent,” Ogundele said.
“There aren’t a lot of them, their
number is not increasing . . .[but] those
people, no matter how bad the economy
is, they will buy.”
The view from the Giuliano balcony —
past an empty lot full of construction
materials and a pair of lazy, big-horned
bulls — is of more apartment blocks
being built by Sujimoto.
The Lucrezia, a 14-story waterfront
luxury building under construction,
where flats will start at $1.9m, features a
private Imax cinema. Nearby is the
Leonardo, a 25-story complex that
advertises 22 swimming pools and a
“virtual indoor golf bar”.
“During Covid, people . . . were not
spending money because they weren’t
travelling, no shopping, no nothing, so I
think they felt rich,” said Andrea Geday,
chief of executive of El-Alan, a co-devel-
oper of the 25-story 4 Bourdillon devel-
opment, the tallest residential building
in west Africa. “And the devaluation of
the naira was a factor, because they
needed to solidify the funds somewhere,
and the only way is to buy property.”
From Geday’s 21st floor flat in 4 Bour-
dillon, the construction boom in Ikoyi,
arguably the richest and most exclusive
neighbourhood in Nigeria, is clear. Not
only are there half a dozen towers going
up, including one right next door, but
dozens of smaller projects — four-floor
multi-flat buildings or developments of
a dozen cookie-cutter town houses.
The luxury towers cater to Nigeria’s
ultra-rich, who Knight Frank estimates
number about 200,000 or 300,000, for
Hitting the
heights: the 25-
storey 4 Bourdillon
development, west
Africa’s tallest
residential building
whom money is no object and who own
other homes in London, Dubai, New
York or Miami.
Some analysts question who will live
in all these new properties, especially
given the many existing apartment
complexes in the Lekki and Ikoyi neigh-
bourhoods that are at just 30-40 per
cent capacity. The answer is that it may
not really matter, given how useful real
estate is as a laundry service for dirty
money, according to Timothy Nubi, a
real estate management professor at the
University of Lagos,
“There is one school of thought that it
is a means of storing capital by people
who have no opportunity of taking their
money abroad, or putting their money
in the bank — they just put their money
in property . . . and hope that they can
sell it years later,” said Nubi.
“It’s just crazy. You drive around Ikoyi
and you will see the whole left side of a
street [with buildings] that are vacant.”
Abdulrasheed Bawa, head of Nigeria’s
Economic and Financial Crimes Com-
mission, this week told Channels TV “90
to 100 per cent” of money-laundering
was done through real estate.
At the Lucrezia, Ogundele said he had
heard about money-laundering being
part of the real estate game in Nigeria
but never experienced it himself. “And
there’s no money to steal right now any-
way!” he said, joking about the parlous
state of the economy.
Given the huge disparities of wealth
and opportunity across Lagos and
Nigeria more broadly, Nubi said the gov-
ernment should focus on driving invest-
ment in affordable housing in a city with
a housing deficit of about 2.5m units and
in which two-thirds of residents live in
slums, according to UN estimates.
“We have this problem of mismatch in
the property market in Nigeria,” said
Nubi. “What is coming to the market is
not actually what people need.”
US senior general plays down
fears China will attack Taiwan
KATHRIN HILLE — TAIPEI
The US’s most senior general has dis-
missed warnings of an imminent Chi-
nese invasion of Taiwan, insisting that
the People’s Liberation Army was not
yet capable of annexing the island.
“I think China has a way to go to develop
the actual, no-kidding capability to con-
duct military operations to seize,
through military means, the entire
island of Taiwan, if they wanted to do
that,” General Mark Milley, chair of the
joint chiefs of staff, told a Senate com-
mittee hearing.
Milley added that he thought China
had little intention to take Taiwan by
force. “There’s no reason to do it mili-
tarily, and they know that. So, I think
the probability is probably low, in the
immediate, near-term future.”
His assessment contrasts with the
warning issued in March by Admiral
Philip Davidson, then commander of US
forces in the Pacific, who told lawmak-
ers that China might attack Taiwan in
the next six years. Admiral John Aqui-
lino, Davidson’s successor, said a Chi-
nese attack on Taiwan could be “much
closer to us than most think”.
A senior US government official also
told the Financial Times there was con-
cern that President Xi Jinping viewed
progress in unifying Taiwan with China
as important to his quest for a third
term in office. Over the past year, the
Chinese military has raised the pressure
on Taipei, such as flying aircraft into
Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.
Since Taiwan announced the incur-
sions in September last year, People’s
Liberation Army Air Force aircraft have
entered the buffer zone 20 days a month
on average. The participation of fighters
and bombers in these flights has steadily
risen, peaking at 44 fighters in April.
After a lull at the start of June, China
flew 28 military aircraft towards Taiwan
on Tuesday, the largest single-day incur-
sion. That was seen as a reaction to G7
and Nato statements that chided China,
and the arrival of a US aircraft carrier in
the disputed South China Sea.
Some experts believe China’s rapid
military modernisation has given the
PLA the confidence that it could suc-
cessfully invade Taiwan.
“The Chinese military counterparts
that I’ve been talking to tell me that they
can do the landing, that they are confi-
dent,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China
expert at Stanford University, said on a
podcast this week.
But other analysts disagree. “The PLA
currently lacks the required amphibi-
ous lift, logistics, and materiel for a
robust cross-Strait invasion and shows
no urgency to achieve it,” Andrew Erick-
son, a professor at the US Naval War Col-
lege, wrote on Monday.
4 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

INTERNATIONAL

Virus fight Islamic republic

CureVac refuses to give up on Covid jab Iranians

Company expresses hope
shot will be useful despite
disappointing trial data
Kemula said the company believed a
final analysis could confirm the jab
might potentially be offered to certain
age groups or as a booster.
other producers of mRNA vaccines,
with Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer
beating it to the market.
The latest data came from a study of
studies from other big vaccine makers
suggested those jabs have handled vari-
ant coronavirus strains better than
CureVac’s.
lose faith in
second. “We are so close. We are two, chance of
change via
three weeks away from final data . . . If
we have something, then, of course, we
will leverage it,” he said.

ERIKA SOLOMON — BERLIN

HANNAH KUCHLER — LONDON
CureVac’s chief financial officer said the
company had not given up on its corona-
virus vaccine despite disappointing
results from trials, with hope remaining
that the jab might be targeted at some
parts of the population.
Interim findings from CureVac’s late-
stage trial suggested that the vaccine
had only 47 per cent efficacy, but Pierre
“There is a lot of need for vaccine out
there,” said Kemula.
“We will define . . . hand in hand with
the agencies where the sweet spot of the
vaccine is.”
Early in the pandemic, Europe had
pinned high hopes on CureVac, based in
the south-western German city of
Tübingen.
The German government bought 23
per cent of the company to stave off con-
cerns it could move to the US.
But since then, it has fallen behind
40,000 people in 10 countries across
Latin America and Europe. CureVac
argued that the results could not be
compared with those of other vaccine
producers, whose jabs did not come up
against as many variants.
Kemula said CureVac was not now
willing to drop its treatment without
sifting through the completed data from
the final study, which will analyse 200
cases of coronavirus contracted in the
trial.
But real-world evidence and lab
The company had aimed to produce
300m doses of its vaccine this year and
1bn in 2022 and had a partnership with
Bayer to do so.
Although the trial results threw the
viability of those projects into doubt,
they were not necessarily bad news for a
next-generation vaccine CureVac is
developing with GlaxoSmithKline
aimed at tackling variants.
But Kemula said the company at this
stage was not considering dropping its
first candidate drug to focus on the
“We need to look at the data and see,
OK, What would be the best value? How
we can place this vaccine to make this
available?”
As with the Moderna and Pfizer vac-
cines, CureVac’s jab uses messenger
ribonucleic acid, but its mRNA is
unmodified and uses lower doses — 12
microgrammes compared with Mod-
erna’s 100mcg and Pfizer’s 30mcg. This
would result in a lower cost of produc-
tion and be stable at conventional fridge
temperatures.
ballot box
NAJMEH BOZORGMEHR, ANDREW
ENGLAND AND MONAVAR KHALAJ
TEHRAN
Iranians yesterday voted in a presiden-
tial election that is forecast to cement
regime hardliners’ control over the
Islamic republic, but any victory for
the conservatives risks being marred
by a low turnout.

Polling stations were quiet in the morn-

ing as a trickle of mostly conservative
Election. Democratic primary voters cast their ballots. But by late
afternoon, more people showed up in
cities and towns, raising the possibility

Policing shapes race for New York mayor
Rising crime is making public
safety the candidates’ top
priority but solutions vary
JOSHUA CHAFFIN — NEW YORK
When New York’s mayoral race began in
earnest late last year, the city was still
convulsed by the murder of George
Floyd and cries to “defund the police”
rang out from the Bronx to Battery Park.
Now, as Tuesday’s Democratic party
primary nears, Eric Adams — a black
former policeman who has called for
more NYPD officers — is one of the fav-
ourites to win a contest that has become
a referendum on New Yorkers’ attitudes
towards policing and public security.
Several polls have shown Adams lead-
ing a crowded field as a surge in shootings
and hate crimes has pushed public secu-
rity to the top of voters’ concerns while
the response to the coronavirus pan-
demic, once the leading issue, has faded.
From the party’s moderate wing,
Adams is vying with entrepreneur
Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, a
former head of the city’s sanitation
department whose campaign appears to
be gaining momentum. All have pro-
posed reforms to policing, from better
training to raising recruitment ages and
imposing stiff penalties for bad officers.
Yet they have remained rhetorically
supportive of the police force and its
role in the city, and have rejected pro-
gressive calls to cut its resources.
“Nothing works in our city without
public safety, and for public safety we
need the police,” Yang declared last
month after the daylight shooting of a
four-year-old girl in Times Square.
Garcia, meanwhile, has dismissed
“defunding” as not serious, saying:
“Black lives matter, full stop . . . But we
still need safe policing.”
To their left is Maya Wiley, the former
chief lawyer for Mayor Bill de Blasio,
who has promised to strip $1bn from the
NYPD’s $6bn budget and redirect it
toward social services.
“Here’s the reality, we are hiring
police officers to do the work of social
workers,” she said on Wednesday night
in a final debate that was dominated by
questions about public safety.
Jumaane Williams, New York’s public
advocate, said he felt compelled to sup-
port her campaign after concluding that
voters were being given a false choice:
between more policing or more vio-
lence. “Policing alone can’t, and never
has, provided public safety,” he said.
Another progressive candidate,
Dianne Morales, a former schools offi-
cial, wants to take $3bn from the NYPD
and has claimed that police were mak-
ing the city more dangerous.
Shake on it: In an overwhelmingly Democratic city,
Eric Adams, the winner of Tuesday’s primary will
right, in Harlem almost certainly win November’s elec-
this week. tion and take charge of the US’s biggest
Below, Andrew city at a perilous moment, as it tries to
Yang and recover from a pandemic that has killed
Kathryn Garcia more than 33,000 residents and frayed
Mary Altaffer/AP; David ‘Dee’
Delgado/Reuters
the commercial and social fabric.
Whoever wins, some analysts and
observers have concluded that the polit-
ical winds have shifted on security.
“The pendulum had swung way out to
the defund movement, and I think now
it’s swinging back,” said Richard Aborn,
president of the non-partisan Citizens
Crime Commission, which campaigns
for better policing. “I think the defund
movement only thrived for the short
time it did because crime was so low.”
Alexander Reichl, a professor at
CUNY Queens College, agreed that ris-
ing crime had “reshaped” the mayor’s
race, saying: “It has taken the wind out
of the sails of many of the progressives.”
Similar debates are playing out in other
US cities also afflicted by rising crime.
Yet, as Reichl observed, it was a uniquely
salient issue for New Yorkers because of
“the long shadow of the 1970s and the
fear of the city going out of control”.
According to NYPD statistics, shoot-
ing incidents are up 64 per cent this year
through to the second week of June
compared with the same period a year
ago, when the number was also ele-
vated. Over a 12-month period, shoot-
ings have more than doubled compared
with the previous 12 months. Murders
are up 13 per cent and reported hate
crimes are up 117 per cent.
“The situation is very bad. The city
has almost given up politically on any
enforcement of quality-of-life crime,
whether it’s illegal peddlers, drug deal-
ers on the corner, [or] all the emotion-
ally disturbed individuals among the
homeless population,” said William
Bratton. He led the police department
from 1994-96 under mayor Rudolph
Giuliani when falling crime rates set the
stage for booming property prices and
New York’s rebranding as “the safest big
city in America”.
Bratton blamed criminal justice
reforms passed by city and state politi-
cians for much of the resurgence. He
also lamented how the May 2020 mur-
64% der of Floyd by Minneapolis police offic-
Increase in shooting ers, and other such incidents, “tore
incidents in New apart” trust with communities of colour.
York this year. Over To Williams, that analysis overlooks
a 12-month period, the role of the pandemic, and the eco-
shootings have
more than doubled nomic and social dislocation it has
compared with the wrought while also shutting the courts.
previous 12 months For those advocating only incremental
reforms, he noted that the Minneapolis
Police Department had undergone its
13% own overhaul before Floyd’s murder.
Increase in murders,
while reported hate
“We have to reimagine public safety
crimes are up in its truest form because we’ve been
117 per cent allowing police to take all this responsi-
bility and it does not work,” he said.
In his 22-year police career before
retiring at the rank of captain, Adams
co-founded the group 100 Blacks in Law
Enforcement Who Care to address rac-
ism within the force and build better
relations with the black community.
But his reputation as a pragmatist and
‘The dealmaker has reassured the city’s busi-
ness elite. “Gun violence,” he answered
pendulum this week when asked what his first pri-
had swung ority would be if elected mayor. The toll,
he explained, was human but also con-
way out to nected to the city’s economic recovery,
the defund which is reliant on tourism.
Among other changes, Adams has
movement, proposed hiring more officers of colour
and I think and cutting back on bureaucracy to
send more police into neighbourhoods.
now it’s With older voters wanting more police
swinging and younger residents to defund the
force, the election result will depend on
back’ which generation comes out to vote.
that none of the four candidates would
secure more than 50 per cent of the vote,
which would force a second round.
The polls take place as the Biden
administration seeks to de-escalate ten-
sions in the region and revive the
nuclear deal Tehran signed with world
powers.
Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric who heads the
judiciary, is the frontrunner after the
authorities banned leading reform can-
didates and Ali Larijani, a prominent
conservative who helped negotiate the
2015 nuclear accord, from taking part.
According to opinion polls, Raisi has a
lead over his main rivals: Abdolnaser
Hemmati, who was central bank gover-
nor before announcing his candidacy as
the main reformist candidate, and
Mohsen Rezaei, a senior conservative.
But even if one of the hardline candi-
dates wins, a low turnout would under-
mine the victory and damage the
regime’s claims that the elections pro-
vide popular legitimacy.
“I will not vote, nor will any of my
close relatives,” said Ali, 36. “If our votes
could have changed anything, the
regime would not have let us cast a vote.
The whole voting is a show and the pres-
ident’s share in decision making is less
than 5 per cent.”
Polls are predicting that turnout could
fall below 50 per cent. The bleak mood,
amid an economic crisis and the corona-
virus pandemic, contrasts with the last
election in 2017 when more than 70 per
cent of voters cast ballots to secure a sec-
ond term for President Hassan Rouhani
with a landslide victory. That poll, in
which Raisi came a distant second, was
viewed as a referendum on the 2015
nuclear deal, which Rouhani promised
to use to turn round the economy.
But those hopes were crushed after
President Donald Trump withdrew the
US from the pact in 2018 and imposed
swingeing sanctions on the republic,
plunging the economy into a recession.
The crisis severely undermined
reformers who had backed Rouhani, a
centrist, in the hope of securing change.
But it emboldened hardliners who had
warned the US could not be trusted.
President Joe Biden has said the US
will rejoin the accord and lift many
sanctions if Iran comes back into full
compliance with the agreement. Iran is
expected to continue negotiations with
the remaining signatories to the deal —
France, Germany, the UK, China and
Russia — if Raisi wins, with hardliners
keen to have sanctions lifted to ease
pressure on the economy.
But after four years of hardship, many
Iranians have given up any lingering
hope that their votes can translate into
change for the better. Instead, they
believe the elections are used by the
regime to validate its theocratic rule.
Low turnout, a rare act of civil disobe-
dience by voters, is likely to favour Raisi,
analysts say, as he has a core constitu-
ency of conservative voters who are
expected to cast their ballots.

Obituary Key figure in Iran revolution who helped create Hizbollah

Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur
Cleric and politician
1947-2021
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, who has
died at the age of 74, was a leading figure
in Iran’s 1979 revolution and its after-
math. The cleric and politician helped
Contracts & Tenders shape Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia
militia, into the proxy force the young
Islamic republic felt it needed to fight
the US and Israel.
Hizbollah, designated a terrorist
group by the US, is seen as a key form of
regional leverage by Iran’s leadership,
which has tried to replicate its success
by creating similar groups elsewhere in
the Middle East, notably in Iraq.
Within Iran, however, reaction to
Mohtashamipur’s death earlier this
month was muted and his role in estab-
lishing the proxy force barely men-
tioned. “Today’s hardliners do not want
to give him the enormous credit of
founding Hizbollah,” said Mohammad
Ali Abtahi, a reformist former vice-
president, who added that Mohta-
shamipur was “one of the republic’s
most complicated characters”.
Mohtashamipur was born in Tehran
in 1947 and studied at seminaries in his
home city, as well as in Qom. He came
under the influence of a charismatic
teacher, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
future founder of the Islamic republic.
In the early 1960s, he fell foul of the
Shah’s regime and was arrested and
detained for a time in 1962. Three years
later he joined Khomeini in exile in the
Iraqi city of Najaf. In 1978 he followed
Khomeini again, this time to France.
Back in Iran after the 1979 revolution,
Khomeini’s inner circle debated
whether the best way to “export” the
Islamic republic’s ideals of justice and
fighting imperialism in regional states
was through existing groups or by creat-
ing new forces, a policy championed by
Mohtashamipur.
In 1981, he was posted as ambassador
to Syria. Iran was by then in a deadly
war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and
Syrian president Hafez al-Assad was the
only Arab leader to back the Islamic
republic. Assad’s support helped
Mohtashamipur convince Tehran the
best way to further the revolution’s aims
in neighbouring Lebanon, which had a
significant Shia minority, was to create a
new force, rather than supporting Amal,
then the main Shia political grouping.
“He believed the Shia in Lebanon had
no political or financial support,” said
Fazel Meybodi, a cleric and former
friend of Mohtashamipur. “He created
Hizbollah and started sending financial
and military support through Syria, a
route that is still used.”
Hizbollah’s power grew in the chaos of
Lebanon in the 1980s and it was later
blamed by the US for the 1983 bombing
of its marine barracks in Beirut, in
which 241 US soldiers were killed. Hiz-
bollah and Iran denied responsibility.
Back in Iran after the end of the disas-
trous war with Iraq, Mohtashamipur
opposed moves towards a more open
economy to pay for reconstruction. But
when his old revolutionary comrades
became reformists and swept to power
in 1997 on promises of political develop-
ment, he quietly joined in, publishing a
pro-reform newspaper that hardliners
shut down. He was then elected to the
reformist-dominated parliament.
In 2009, he opposed the re-election of
Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, which he
said was the result of “extensive fraud”
that rendered the poll “meaningless”.
Sidelined from politics, he moved
back to Najaf, living as a cleric. Diag-
nosed with coronavirus earlier this
month, he was transferred by car to the
border province of Kermanshah and
then to Tehran, where he died on June 7.
“He was a symbol of the unsuccessful
idealism of the generation who made
the revolution,” said Ali Mirfattah, a
journalist who worked with Mohta-
shamipur at Bayan, a weekly journal.
Najmeh Bozorgmehr
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 5

FT BIG READ. US POLITICS

The US president spent the past week reassuring European leaders of America’s commitment to the region.
But he made clear his ‘real business’ was in the Indo-Pacific, including tentative moves to isolate Beijing.
By Edward Luce

F
rom Europe’s point of view,
Joe Biden’s one-week visit
could hardly have gone better.
Having spent four years being
pilloried by Donald Trump —
for low Nato defence spending, trade
surpluses, freeriding on US generosity
and behaving like a “geopolitical foe” —
Europe was craving Biden’s diplomatic
balm.
The 46th US president did not disap-
point. America’s friendship was “rock
solid”, Biden said; Europe’s security was
America’s “sacred obligation”. In addi-
tion to strategic reassurance, Biden also
lifted punitive US tariffs on Europe and
called off the long-running Boeing-
Airbus subsidy dispute.
The relief among European officials
was visible. Ursula von der Leyen, presi-
dent of the European Commission,
referred to America’s president as “Dear
Joe” — an endearment it would be hard
to imagine being used for many of
Biden’s predecessors, not just Trump.
“Biden’s language and tone was every-
thing Europeans wished for,” says Jer-
emy Shapiro, research director at the
European Council on Foreign Relations.
Differences remain — not least over
Europe’s low defence spending. But the
larger purpose behind Biden’s trip,
which began with the G7 gathering in an
occasionally drizzly Cornwall and
wrapped up with the Vladimir Putin
summit in Geneva, had more to do with
the Indo-Pacific than the Atlantic.
Prior to Biden’s first overseas presi-
dential foray, there was speculation
about where his strategic priority lay.
Was it the contest between democracy

Biden’s pivot to China

and autocracy, managing the new era of
great power competition, reasserting
US-led multilateralism or forging
coalitions to tackle the pandemic and
global warming? The answer is “all of
the above”.
But Biden’s trip conveyed what mat-
ters most. His overriding preoccupation
is China. Biden’s much-hyped Summit
of Democracy, which received rote cita-
tion from the G7, has been put off until
next year. No venue was specified. By
contrast, the China challenge appeared
three times in the G7 communiqué and
was for the first time cited by Nato — an
alliance supposedly about defending the
north Atlantic.
“Biden’s basic message to his Euro-
pean friends was: ‘Don’t worry guys, I’ve
got your back. Now let me go and do my
real business in the Indo-Pacific’,” says
Robin Niblett, director of Chatham
House, the London-based think-tank.
“The language on China was careful. But
it threaded through everything.”
China also hovered unspoken over the
US-Russia summit. The contrast
between Biden’s meeting with Putin in
Geneva and Trump’s infamous one-on-
one 2018 parley with him in Helsinki
was perhaps the most striking feature of
Biden’s trip. Unlike Biden’s domestic
critics, who accused him of giving Putin
the undeserved gift of appearing on the
same stage, most Europeans were
happy to see them talking.
“Negotiating with your adversaries is
what diplomacy is supposed to be about
— as long as you have aides and note-
takers present,” says Fiona Hill, who, as
Trump’s Russia adviser, was not allowed
into his private meeting with Putin.
“Not talking makes no sense. Should
Biden refuse to meet Xi Jinping because
China has concentration camps?”
Pragmatic on Russia
One surprising aspect to Biden’s
approach was his businesslike treat-
ment of Putin. He refrained from giving
sermons about democracy, although he
threatened Putin with “devastating”
‘During the consequences should Alexei Navalny,
leader of Russia’s banned opposition,
Obama die in jail. He also vowed to retaliate
years if you against future Russian cyber attacks fol-
lowing SolarWind’s deep penetration of
mentioned US government systems last year. The
the Quad, two agreed to establish a nuclear work-
ing group and another on cyber security,
people which some see as today’s equivalent of
thought of cold war arms talks.
America, The latter process is likely to be rid-
dled with distrust — Russia, or groups
Britain, the US believes to be connected to Rus-
France and sia, has visited great disruption on the
US at very low cost. But the fact that the
Germany. group now exists might make Putin
Now it can think twice.
By contrast, Biden made only fleeting
only mean references to “values” and “freedom”.
the Indo- The only one of the two who referred in
public to ideals — perhaps trollingly —
Pacific’ was Putin, who praised Biden’s “moral
values”. Again, the contrast with Trump
was striking.
“Trump was always seen as transac-
tional and Biden as sentimental,” says
Stephen Wertheim, co-founder of the
Quincy Institute for Responsible State-
craft. “In practice Biden was pragmatic
with Putin, while Trump was obsessed
with status and prestige.”
The explicit goal was to make US-Rus-
sia relations less dangerous and unsta-
ble. The test of whether Biden has suc-
ceeded will be in the dogs that do not
bark — the overseas poisonings of Rus-
sian dissidents and cyber attacks on the
west that do not take place. That will
take time to assess. It is hard to prove a
negative. Biden’s implicit goal was to
assuage Putin’s paranoia.
Biden attracted derision at home for
describing Russia as a “great power” and
Putin as a “worthy adversary”. He was
likewise criticised last month for declin-
ing to impose sanctions on the Nord
Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany. Biden also gave short shrift in
Geneva to rumours that Ukraine would
be admitted to Nato. The word
“appeasement” has begun to creep back
into Washington vocabulary.
Yet there was a purpose to Biden’s flat-
tery. Some call it a “reverse Henry Kiss-
inger”, after Richard Nixon’s renowned
national security adviser, who took trips
to Beijing in the early 1970s to capitalise
on the Sino-Soviet split. China eventu-
ally broke away from the Soviet bloc.
Beijing is the senior partner today. The
longer-term hope is to drive a wedge
between Russia and China.
‘Donald Trump was
obsessed with
status and prestige’
in his meeting with
Vladimir Putin, says
Stephen Wertheim
“The more Biden treats Russia with
respect as a great power, which is
what Putin craves, the easier it will be
for him to loosen Russia from China’s
embrace,” says Hill.
Such an approach means downplay-
ing Biden’s “democracy versus autoc-
racy” framing. America would instead
play on Russia’s anxiety about being
treated as a little brother by China.
Some of America’s partners, including
France, Japan and India, are also trying
to forge closer relations with Russia with
a view to weakening its China ties.
“At this point it would be geopolitical
malpractice for America not to attempt
a “reverse Kissinger”, says Shapiro. “At
the very least, America should stop
driving Russia into China’s arms. But it
will take more than one presidential
term to pull off.”
European relief
Biden’s game of geopolitical chess is
fraught with obstacles. Chief among
these is Europe’s reluctance to view
China with the same existential concern
as America does. The continent does
more trade with China than the US.
Biden did get references to the China
threat into the various summit commu-
niqués. But joint statements are not the
same thing as concrete action. For exam-
ple, Europe is a long way from following
America’s lead to impose a continent-
wide ban on sensitive Chinese technol-
ogy, such as the Huawei 5G network.
Biden is also limited by Europe’s scep-
ticism about whether he will be re-
elected in 2024. Europeans listened
politely to Biden’s focus on democracy
versus autocracy. But their greater con-
cern is over the future of US democracy.
Will Biden’s “America is back” mantra
outlast his term in office?
“Europeans are as obsessed with
America’s internal divisions as they are
with the future of global democracy,”
says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the
Centre for American Progress, a liberal
think-tank. “One European official told
me he thinks about America in the way
an amputee feels that a missing limb is
still there. Will it grow back?”
The relief with which Biden was
greeted in Europe suggests that he has
convinced allies that America is at least
temporarily back in action. There was
also appreciation for the way in which
Biden conveyed that message. Instead of
talking about the US returning to the
head of the table, Biden said America
Joe Biden was “back at the table”. Rather than
mended fences America leading, it was “America lead-
with allies in ing with allies”. Such modulations
Europe, the G7 sound trivial. But they showed a sensi-
and Nato, and tivity that has recently been lacking.
shook hands Europeans also noted that Biden had
with Vladimir spent hours prepping for his summits.
Putin as he “It was almost a shock to see profes-
seeks to build sional diplomats in action again,” says
bulwarks Niblett. “Biden’s team is experienced
against China
FT montage; Getty; Reuters
and understands the game.”
Yet there was little disguising the fact
that the Atlantic is no longer the world’s
most important geopolitical theatre in
America’s eyes. That distinction belongs
to the Indo-Pacific. Though this was
Biden’s first presidential trip, his first
summit was a virtual one in March with
the leaders of the Quad — the US, Japan,
India and Australia. The Quad is not a
formal alliance. But it plays a bigger role
in Biden’s plans than the future of Nato.
“During the Obama years if you men-
tioned the Quad, people thought of
‘At the very America, Britain, France and Ger-
many,” says Hill. “Now it can only mean
least, the Indo-Pacific.”
America Transatlantic relations are moving
into a phase of better repair. The impon-
should stop derable is Russia. The coming months
driving will reveal whether Biden’s more flinty
approach to Russia will pay off. At
Russia into Putin’s press conference on Wednesday,
China’s he was asked whether there was now
arms. But it trust between him and the US president.
“There is no happiness in life,” he said.
will take “There is only a mirage on the horizon.”
more than Minus the Russian gloom, Putin could
have been giving a lecture on the limits
one to end-of-history thinking. Biden’s
presidential destination is clear — a stable global
order with America as first among
term to equals. That horizon is always likely to
pull off ’ be just beyond reach.

Obituary Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s founding

president who has died aged 97, was a
1964 — and newly created state-owned
farms proved a failure.
rebels’ unilateral declaration of inde-
pendence on November 11 1965.
Pro-independence events had also left
Kaunda at a serious disadvantage. The

Independence
towering figure of African nationalism
and the anti-colonial independence
movement that swept the continent in
leader who the 20th century. For his 25 years in
office he fought apartheid, yet was more
Abroad, his influence never quite
matched his rhetoric. He denounced
white rule but was inhibited by land-
locked Zambia’s dependence on trade
through Rhodesia and apartheid South
For the next 15 years his political life huge Kariba hydroelectric dam was
was dominated by the Rhodesian bush built on the Zambezi river that formed
war, which spilled over into Zambia. He the boundary with Rhodesia. Its genera-
provided a base not only for Joshua
Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s
tor was on the south bank, leaving the
latter in control of power supplies to

helped shape a victim of southern Africa’s white

minority regimes than an instrument of
their collapse.
southern Africa After taking office at independence in
1964, Kaunda banned all political par-
ties except his United National Inde-
pendence party in 1972. In 1991 he
reluctantly conceded multi-party elec-
Kenneth Kaunda tions, in which he was soundly defeated.
Founding president of Zambia Nonetheless, Kaunda ruled Zambia
1924-2021 with a rare benevolence in an era of dic-
tatorships and systematic abuse of
human rights. His Christian faith,
together with socialist values, was at the
heart of his doctrine of “Zambian
humanism”.
At home, his policies were little short
of disastrous economically. Zambia’s all-
important copper mines were national-
ised shortly before a fall in the commod-
ity’s price, while industries were taken
over by an administration short of man-
agers — the country had only a dozen
university graduates at independence in
Africa. Closure of the border with Rho-
desia left his country dependent on a
road to the Tanzanian port of Dar es
Salaam for its fuel imports. A Chinese-
built rail link opened in 1975, but the
line never met its potential.
Born at Lubwa Mission on April 28
1924 in what was then Northern Rhode-
sia, Kenneth David Kaunda was the
eighth child of teacher parents. After
secondary school he too became a
teacher, but in 1949 he gave up teaching
to enter politics. By 1953 he was secre-
tary-general of the country’s African
National Congress party. Impatient and
ambitious, he formed his own party in
1958, which was banned a year later.
In 1960 he took over the leadership of
the United National Independence
party. It swept to victory in the inde-
pendence election of 1964, ending Zam-
bia’s legal status as a British protector-
ate. Almost immediately, Kaunda was
confronted by the white Rhodesian
Union but South Africa’s own African
National Congress, Namibia’s South
West Africa People’s Organisation, the
FNLA of Angola and Frelimo from
Mozambique.
His frequent tearful warnings of
regional cataclysm, invariably delivered
while holding a freshly ironed white
handkerchief, were heartfelt but inef-
fectual. Historical and geographical
realities left him with a weak hand.
His decision to keep the border with
Rhodesia closed hurt Zambia far more
than it did his neighbour, and its even-
tual reopening in 1973 was a humiliating
climbdown. A meeting with John
Vorster, prime minister of apartheid
South Africa in 1975, achieved little,
while his secret talks with Ian Smith,
Rhodesia’s white minority leader,
served only to sour relations with
Nkomo’s rival, Robert Mugabe, who was
to win the elections for an independent
Zimbabwe in 1980.
Zambia’s copper mines.
Perhaps his finest hour came when he
hosted the 1979 Commonwealth confer-
ence that helped pave the way to Rhode-
sia’s transition to an independent Zim-
babwe. The highlight was a beaming
Kaunda leading Margaret Thatcher
around the dance floor.
Trade union-led pressure for an end
to the country’s one-party system even-
tually became irresistible, and in 1991
he conceded to demands for the multi-
Kaunda in 1964. He banned all party poll that led to his ousting.
political parties except his in 1972 One of his last public appearances was
at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, where
he attempted to get the crowd of mourn-
ers to join him in a rendition of “Tiyende
Pamodzi” (let us pull together), a rous-
His frequent tearful ing Unip anthem sung at Unip rallies.
The response was an uncomprehend-
warnings of regional ing silence. Kaunda had become discon-
cataclysm were heartfelt nected from the Africa that he, Mandela
and others had worked to shape.
but ineffectual Michael Holman
6 ★
SATURDAY 19 JUNE 2021
The Federal Reserve
deftly changes tack
Hawkish tilt is justified given an encouraging but uncertain outlook
The Federal Reserve has begun tiptoe-
ing away from the extraordinary meas-
ures it adopted to help the US cope
with the coronavirus pandemic. For
the moment, this does not consist of
any big leaps — in its meeting this week
it did not change its policy rate nor
“taper” the pace at which it purchases
assets through its quantitative easing
schemes — but of changing how the
central bank communicates its inten-
tions. The Fed is right to tread care-
fully: there is still a lot of uncertainty
about the outlook.
Chair Jay Powell noted in the press
conference on Wednesday, following
the meeting, that the prognosis for the
US economy was better than the Fed
had previously forecast. Vaccinations,
policy support and the reopening of
businesses all meant that growth,
employment and inflation were higher
than the central bank had expected.
“There’s every reason to think that
we’ll be in a labour market with very
attractive numbers,” Powell said.
The rise in inflation, however, is a
concern for the central bank. The
speed at which prices have risen has
surprised the policy committee — the
central bank was forced to revise up its
forecast for core inflation, which strips
out volatile food and energy prices, to
3 per cent this year from 2.2 per cent at
its March meeting. “Bottlenecks” from
the reopening of the US economy had
been larger than expected, the Fed
said, although it still expects these
effects to be “transitory”, with core
inflation falling to 2.1 per cent in 2021.
Nevertheless, this faster than
expected inflation has contributed to a
more hawkish tilt to communications,
albeit in the context of a very dovish set
of policies — the central bank kept its
interest rate target at 0-0.25 per cent
and rate of asset purchases at $120bn
a month. Investors should think about
this meeting as “the talking about
Bosses should persuade
staff back to the office
Good arguments beat coercion to wean employees off remote working
Legions of Goldman Sachs bankers
returned to its Manhattan headquar-
ters this week, as the first of the big
banks called back staff from remote
working. They must disclose whether
they have been vaccinated. Meanwhile,
Morgan Stanley’s boss mused that if his
underlings are happy to eat at restau-
rants, they should be happy to come
into the office. That may be right but
Wall Street titans would be better
advised to make the case persuasively
rather than by taking a hard line. There
are strong arguments to deploy.
For businesses, the advantages are
manifold, not least cutting the expense
of redundant real estate. Operational
risk is reduced if staff are on-site. While
the relative productivity of remote
working versus the office is still being
debated, there are potential competi-
tive advantages — a banker pitching for
business in person may trump a rival
on a screen. For employees too, there
are pluses. One is the boost for new
starters, particularly trainees, who
learn from observation. There is no
substitute for face-to-face interaction
— for understanding how to complete
tasks but also for absorbing a com-
pany’s way of doing things. The longer
working remotely continues, the
harder it is to transmit office culture.
Office camaraderie is also important.
Loneliness has become an acute prob-
lem, not to mention the burnout many
have suffered as remote working has
fostered an “always on” mentality.
In recent history, calamities such as
war or a pandemic have catalysed
change in labour practices. It would be
rash to pretend the past 15 months did
not exist. Most employers will choose a
middle ground, cherry-picking positive
parts of remote working while under-
scoring the importance of frequent
office attendance. Even Goldman is
granting some discretion on flexible
working.
talking about tapering meeting, I
guess”, in the words of Powell. Such
indications that the central bank was
beginning to think about reducing its
asset purchases was enough, along with
an update to the central bank’s fore-
casts of interest rates to lift yields on US
treasuries as well as the dollar.
The Fed has deftly handled this shift.
Investors and the central bank have
largely converged on the same point —
market-based estimates of inflation
have plateaued after rising at the start
of the year while expectations of an
interest rate rise in 2022 have faded.
The central bank has demonstrated
that it can, under its new framework,
respond to better than expected data
and signal rising interest rates without
destabilising markets.
This will be vital. There is consider-
able uncertainty about the outlook. As
Powell noted, while the labour market
is recovering, the long-term effect of
the pandemic has not become entirely
clear. The unemployment rate may
have halved in the past year but many
American workers have dropped out of
the labour market entirely. With time,
and supportive monetary policy, they
may come back. Or, of greater concern,
it may be that the “full employment”
the Fed is aiming for may already be far
closer than it thinks and keeping policy
loose will only contribute to inflation-
ary pressure.
Other cost pressures, too, may be far
less transitory than the Fed currently
expects. Lumber prices may have
fallen from the spike they reached ear-
lier this year off the back of a construc-
tion and DIY boom but they are still up
compared with the post-financial crisis
norm. Meanwhile, commodity traders,
for their part, are forecasting that oil
could reach $100 a barrel. Powell has
already demonstrated his ability for
fancy footwork. That is encouraging:
he is likely to need it again.
Société Générale, which reopened its
Paris office this week, will allow bank-
ers to work from home three days a
week; HSBC is yet to set an office-re-
turn date and is planning on extended
flexible working. These differing
approaches, while dictated also by cul-
tural mores, domestic employment law
and vaccination rates, show that even
among the same sector there is disa-
greement about the right level of office
attendance.
Initially, at least, blended working
will be much more difficult to manage
than a fiat demanding total attendance,
or that everyone stay at home. Requir-
ing vaccination disclosure as Goldman
has is particularly thorny. One fear is
that leaving staff to choose their own
working arrangements will lead to divi-
sions, as ambitious employees want
facetime with bosses and frequent the
office to maximise networking oppor-
tunities. Cliques have always existed in
office life but managers will have a
responsibility to ensure that status is
not equated with hours put in at the
office.
US investment banks are not known
for their softly-softly approach. But
even if they are correct in their think-
ing, the delivery of their message
seems jarring. Workers are demanding
a more conciliatory approach: Bill
Michael quit as KPMG UK’s chair in
February following a backlash over his
telling staff to “stop moaning” over
working conditions. A better approach
is to understand that personal circum-
stances differ wildly, as will the ability
and desire to return to office life.
Buoyed by a pandemic trading boom,
banks can get away with swagger — for
now. But in a tight labour market,
where they are vying for the very best
talent, notably with highly flexible tech
groups, a tin-eared approach risks
becoming a competitive disadvantage.
Persuasion beats coercion.
FTWeekend
Letters
Europe needs a better, rather than bigger, response to the recovery effort. A good start would be a centralised fiscal capacity and safe assets — Liv Cleverley
Statues lack artistic merit and aesthetic value
Statues which reproduce the bodies of
dead individuals in metal or stone are a
bad idea, full stop.
This ghastly genre has never
produced anything of artistic merit or
aesthetic value, which is a main reason
why — to be honest — only dogs and
pigeons take an interest.
Neither the “wokes” nor the
academics who feel under threat from
government policy, as they appear in
‘Thumping majority’ does
not capture politics today
I must flag a phrase from “The ‘war on
woke’: who should shape Britain’s
history?” (FT Weekend, June 12) as
questionable. That phrase is the
government’s “thumping electoral
majority”. The average majority since
1918 has been 92, the present majority
being 81 — ie, below average. Defining a
majority as thumping implies that
there is something noteworthy on the
part of the victor. Yet surely thumping
victories require credible opponents?
Napoleon. The Wehrmacht. Jeremy
Corbyn? Keir Starmer? In the absence
of an opposition worthy of the name
the English nationalist inclinations of
the present incumbents will continue
to shape and influence history in their
own image. As will their successors.
Bonamy Devas
London N1, UK
A proverb fit for the
COP26 climate conference
“Every snowflake in an avalanche is
responsible.” The Chinese proverb
quoted in Yuan Yang’s article should be
prominently displayed when world
leaders meet in Glasgow for the COP26
in November (FT Weekend, June 12).
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK
The joy of
returning to
real life
Notebook
by Gillian Tett
“The ‘war on woke’: who should shape
Britain’s history?” (Life & Arts, FT
Weekend, June 11), challenge the
genre. They seem to think that
introducing more “diversity” into this
bizarre world of effigies and mummies
would solve the problem.
It won’t, not least because heroes are
never saints and reputations wear out
faster than stone or metal.
So, no more statues! Our public
Nothing would stop a Scot
with a ticket for Wembley
I applaud Henry Mance for his
powerful and rather moving article on
the place of football in our national
consciousness (“The duelling
patriotism of English football fans”,
Opinion, FT Weekend, June 12).
He makes such a good case against
the ugly divisiveness of booing players
who take the knee, and for the
unifying, patriotic spirit which should
imbue its real supporters.
It all reminded me of more distant
times, when I was growing up in
Glasgow in the 1950s. Then, the annual
football match against England was the
supreme moment for Scotsmen to
come together. Of course, this long
predated the “Tartan Army”.
But in those days the working man,
albeit drably flat-capped and less
flamboyant than his counterpart today,
knew his football; a knowledge,
moreover, that had been acquired not
simply by watching television.
He had played football, gone to
watch football every week of his life,
and he was a connoisseur. For him, a
ticket and a trip to watch England vs
Scotland at Wembley was the dream of
a lifetime.
In those days, matches were
invariably played on a Saturday
afternoon, whereas Saturday mornings
Last week I participated in a ritual
that used to feel commonplace but
now presents a shock: entering a
television studio to give a live
interview. The prompt was the
meeting of G7 leaders in Cornwall and
the fact that I recently published a
book, with its inevitable tour.
Pre-Covid, this type of promotion
entailed a well-defined set of
ceremonies: popping into TV studios,
sipping warm wine at launch parties,
putting in appearances at bookshops
and pontificating on conference
platforms. The process required a lot
of all-too-physical travel. Now,
however, a book tour is largely
conducted from the safety — or hell —
of a spare room via video platforms,
after some hastily applied smudges of
make-up. It starts with a few clicks of
a mouse and can be accomplished
minutes after rolling out of bed.
(Depending on the timezone, this
occasionally happens.)
Last weekend I was bracing myself
for another Skype call, with a morning
chat show on America’s MSNBC
network. But then I learnt that the
studio was opening for “real life”,
since Covid-19 rates in Manhattan are
now so low and vaccination rates so
high. (This week, New York State hit
the 70 per cent vaccination rate and
fireworks were set off to celebrate.)
Cue a scramble to find vaguely smart
trousers, after a year of worrying only
about the state of my shirts.
My first reaction, as I raced to the
studio, was to feel startled and
irritated by how time-consuming
If you are not satisfied with the FT’s response to your complaint, you can appeal
to the FT Editorial Complaints Commissioner: complaints.commissioner@ft.com
spaces are cluttered with too many of
the damned things already and the
more that can be got rid of the better.
And just to avoid a misreading of my
argument: collective memorials, like
the Cenotaph, are entirely different in
character which is why they are more
readily appreciated both as prompts to
remembrance and as works of art.
Trevor Pateman
Brighton, UK
were for working. This counted for
nothing when compared with the
intense excitement of being able to
support Scotland against the Auld
Enemy.
On the Friday evening, men with a
ticket would finish work and begin the
long (and in those days expensive)
journey south, knowing that they
might well have no job to come back to.
Still, when they made the wearying
trip home they would go in to work on
the Monday — or even, occasionally,
the Tuesday — in the normal
way, hoping that somehow their
employer might have overlooked their
absence.
And in their infinite wisdom, most
employers did just that. Always tacit
and nowhere written, it was quietly
understood that attending the
Wembley match was a unique
experience, likely to build a man’s
morale.
Indeed my father went himself on
one occasion, full of hope. Scotland
lost. I remember him looking rather
wistfully at me as he told me that he
had been proud of Scotland but that
England had been the better team. His
was the “vulnerable patriotism”
referred to by David Baddiel, and that
Henry Mance describes so well in his
article.
Gordon Bonnyman
Frant, East Sussex, UK
physical experiences can be compared
with ones taking place in cyber space.
Going to a TV studio entails travel,
navigating security at the entrance
and hanging around for hours in a
green room.
My second thought, as I waited in
the green room, was time “wasted” in
physical space is never entirely
unused. Far from it. Just milling about
in a social environment generates
serendipitous encounters. It lets us
absorb non-verbal signals from others
and gain a sense of peripheral vision
that widens our lens on the world.
The issue at stake revolves around
customisation — and control. When
we go online, we tend to choose our
experiences and the boundaries of our
vision. But in the real world we have
less control over what we bump into.
Other people and other realities
intrude. This is immensely valuable
after a year in which we have been
cooped up, not just in a physical or
social sense, but also, all too often, in a
mental sense, only watching the
people and events on our screens.
At MSNBC, I encountered someone
I had never met before, rightwing
political commentator Max Boot.
Better still, in 2018 he wrote a book on
a topic I knew nothing about (and did
not even realise I knew nothing
about): the life of Edward Lansdale,
the 20th-century US military and
intelligence leader. After spending
time in that green room, I am now a
little less ignorant about this corner of
American history.
That encounter has shown me what
19 June/20 June 2021
Email: letters.editor@ft.com
Include daytime telephone number and full address
Corrections: corrections@ft.com
Visions for London that
are not easily reconciled
Deyan Sudjic’s reflections on London’s
Docklands (House & Home, FT
Weekend, June 12) reminded me of an
evening in October 1985 when, as a
planner working for Tower Hamlets, I
attended a presentation by G Ware
Travelstead of his vision for Canary
Wharf at an office on Bishopsgate. We
were ushered into a room dominated
by a model of the Canary Wharf Tower
and stood with some amazement as it
was explained.
After the meeting, I walked up
Bishopsgate to Spitalfields, where the
Spitalfields Trust was holding a street
party to mark the 300th anniversary of
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a
law that had precipitated the flight of
Protestant Huguenots to Spitalfields
and given the area its distinctive
architecture. Straw was strewn on the
street and candles lit the windows of
the houses. I would like to feel that the
subsequent 36 years of planning in east
London has managed to reconcile and
accommodate the two visions
represented by that evening. Like most
things, however, it has probably been
no more than a messy compromise.
Peter Studdert
Peter Studdert Planning, Cambridge, UK
The under-appreciated
subtlety of Japanese masks
Tobias Grey has confused the masks of
noh with the anything but impassive
make-up of kabuki in his review of Elia
Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven (June 12).
Masks are not used at all in kabuki,
and the noh masks themselves are far
from undisturbed by passion. Indeed,
part of the great subtlety of noh is the
varied emotion that can be shown by
the same mask presented at different
angles to the audience. Suleiman’s
earlier performances surely must be
described by a simple term, deadpan.
John V Baldwin
Cernobbio, Italy
I am missing by not doing physical
book tours: chance remarks in a
crowd, people telling you why you are
wrong (which they do not often do on
Zoom) and an opportunity to observe
the body language in an audience to
see if people are bored by your ideas.
Of course, I should have known all
this before I ended up on that talk-
show sofa, since my book explains
what we need to know about being
human in a digital age. It also lays out,
with reference to Wall Street, how
deeply modern work relies on the
lateral vision we have been forced to
abandon in the past year. The reason
why offices are valuable is not because
they uphold formal processes at work
but what social scientists describe as
“incidental information exchange”
(swapping ideas) and “sense-making”
(navigating the world through shared
knowledge and experience, including
non-verbal cues).
But my brain, like everyone else’s,
has a tremendous capacity to self-
deceive and forget. The act of
returning to the office — or TV studio
— still creates a new set of surprises,
irrespective of what my brain knows.
And that, perhaps, is the most
important lesson of all: physical
encounters enable us to collide with
the unexpected. That might not be
“efficient” compared with digital
work. Nor is it probably what most
office workers want to experience
each day. But these collisions are part
of the joy of life.
gillian.tett@ft.com
19 June/20 June 2021
Europe’s economic recovery effort should be smarter, not bigger
Lorenzo
Codogno
I
s Europe doing too little, too late
to support its post-pandemic eco-
nomic recovery? The question hung
in the air this week even after the
EU conducted its most ambitious
transaction on world financial markets.
For the future, the essential point is that
Europe’s fiscal, economic and monetary
support need not be bigger, but it must
be smarter.
Some respected policymakers, such
as Wolfgang Schäuble, the former
German finance minister, are in favour
of the EU’s debt-fuelled stimulus
programmes but nevertheless urge a
swift return to fiscal and monetary
discipline. Others warn about the risks
of withdrawing support too soon and
reverting to an inappropriate policy
mix. In my view, the starting point
Her selection as head
of the Federal Trade
Commission is causing
shockwaves, write James
Politi and Lauren Fedor
J
ust before Halloween in 2013,
Lina Khan wandered through
the vast selection of sweets at
her local Safeway supermarket
and came away with a disturb-
ing revelation.
The roughly 40 brands of candy on
the shelves offered only a mirage of con-
sumer choice; they were actually owned
by just two or three confectioners.
Khan, a junior policy analyst at the time,
was so dismayed that she wrote about it
in Time magazine. “If we want a health-
ier, more diverse market — and more
variety in our Halloween buckets — we
could start by reviving some of our anti-
trust laws.”
Khan’s critique of corporate power
has gone far beyond Big Candy. She has
explored concentration issues and
monopolistic behaviour in sectors rang-
ing from airlines to poultry and metals,
drawing similar conclusions. And she
started to train her attention on the
excessive market influence of Big Tech,
eventually becoming one of its most
vocal and prominent critics.
So when Khan, who is just 32, was this
week tapped by US president Joe Biden
to be chair of the Federal Trade Com-
mission, the top competition regulator,
it sent shockwaves through Washing-
ton, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The
prevailing expectation is that she will
now seek to usher in a new era of anti-
trust enforcement in America.
“Now she’s in charge, and she’s to be
feared,” says Robert Kaminski, a man-
aging director at Capital Alpha Partners,
a policy research group in Washington.
“She’s got the hammer and all she sees
are nails,” he adds.
Khan was born and grew up in Lon-
don, to parents from Pakistan; the fam-
ily moved to the US when she was 11.
The first hint of her interest in unfair
corporate behaviour came early.
A Starbucks coffee shop across the
street from her high school in Mamar-
oneck, in the north-eastern suburbs of
New York City, was stopping teenagers
from sitting down because they were too
rowdy. A furore ensued, which Khan
chronicled in her school’s newspaper
and which was subsequently picked up
by the New York Times.
Khan would go on to attend Williams
College, where she studied political the-
ory. After graduating, she arrived in
Washington, with a job at the New Amer-
ica Foundation, a centre-left think-tank,
that allowed her to research entrepre-
neurialism and competition. “Where we
once had a lot of independent businesses,
a lot of local businesses, a lot of variety,”
she said in 2012, “we now actually just
see a handful of companies that control
almost every industry.”
Khan eventually landed at Yale Law
School, and in January 2017 she pub-
lished in the Yale Law Journal the article
that would catapult her to fame: “Ama-
zon’s Antitrust Paradox”.
The piece went viral. “You can almost
think of it as the first article in what
quickly became a kind of renaissance of
antitrust revisionism,” says Robert
Hockett, a professor of corporate law at
Cornell University.
At the heart of Khan’s philosophy
is to frame the debate in a proper way.
The 27-nation EU and the 19-nation
eurozone that is at its core, are both
examples of unfinished business.
Among the missing pieces are adequate
tools of macroeconomic stabilisation.
The vulnerabilities of the current set-up
include the risk that fiscal and banking
distress can be mutually reinforcing, as
we saw 10 years ago. A lack of fiscal
capacity at the centre leads to an exces-
sive and politically contentious reliance
on the European Central Bank’s uncon-
ventional monetary policies.
During the pandemic, all EU coun-
tries, but particularly the most econom-
ically fragile ones, benefited from the
suspension of the EU’s fiscal rules and
from the ECB’s protective umbrella.
National policies involved state guaran-
tees of bank loans, compensation for the
lost incomes of workers and businesses,
job retention schemes and the post-
ponement of some taxes. Despite some
difficulties and delays, these measures
were by and large effective in stabilising
EU economies and laying the ground-
Person in the News | Lina Khan
The new antitrust chief
taking on Big Tech
is the idea that companies, including
Amazon, have benefited from lax anti-
trust scrutiny for decades, a period dur-
ing which low consumer prices became
the dominant factor in setting competi-
tion policy. She envisions a different
antitrust regime, similar to that which
existed earlier in the 20th century,
when US authorities did not hesitate to
break up monopolies.
Amazon declined to comment on her
appointment.
“What she’s doing is really just return-
ing antitrust and market policy to the
status quo ante, of the 20s through
the 60s, even the 70s,” says David Singh
Grewal, a law professor at the University
of California at Berkeley.
People who know Khan, who is
married to a cardiologist, describe her
as unassuming and even somewhat
reserved.
“She really maintains a private life
that’s private,” says Grewal. “It’s easy to
think of her as the face of ‘millennial’,
sometimes called ‘hipster,’ antitrust,
★ FTWeekend
Opinion
work for the recovery. A generous and
multi-faceted EU plan played its part,
too, in countering the downturn.
True, the policy response was less
than perfect. It was cobbled together in
an ad hoc, emergency fashion. It was
geared towards fiscal transfers among
member states, when what the euro-
zone really needs are European safe
assets and a centralised fiscal capacity.
Still, even if the response of govern-
ments could have been more timely and
efficient, it is difficult to argue that it
should have been bigger. The European
Fiscal Board, an independent advisory
body of the European Commission, con-
cluded this week that “policies adopted
or credibly announced by governments
to date appear to achieve an appropriate
degree of fiscal support”. I concur with
that assessment.
In any future crisis, it will be a matter
not of doing more but of doing it better,
and for that the European dimension
must step in. With EU safe assets and a
permanent fiscal capacity at the centre,
the bloc’s policy responses would be at
but she’s so different from the personali-
ty-driven social media phenomenon
rising around her.”
After getting her law degree, Khan
became a professor at Columbia and
also worked with the Open Markets
Institute, an anti-monopoly think-tank
in Washington. On Capitol Hill, she
‘Now she’s in charge,
and she’s to be feared.
She’s got the hammer
and all she sees are nails’
helped craft the House judiciary anti-
trust subcommittee’s probe into Big
Tech. Many Republicans are still wary.
“Her views on antitrust enforcement
are also wildly out of step with a prudent
approach to the law,” said Mike Lee, the
Utah Senator, in March.
But Khan’s standing soared in Demo-
cratic circles, reaching beyond tradi-
least as powerful as the current national
ones, but would be more sustainable,
automatic and timely.
The other part of the EU’s recovery
plan concerns resilience. The aim is to
enhance potential growth through pub-
lic investments backed by structural
reforms. Whilst most of the macroeco-
nomic stabilisation effort was left to
What the eurozone
really needs are
safe assets and a
centralised fiscal capacity
national initiatives, the resilience plan
will draw heavily on jointly financed
European money, like the 10-year,
€20bn bond issue launched this week
by the European Commission.
The plan is skewed towards those
countries most in need. They include
less well-off member states for which
EU regional aid funds have long formed
tional Big Tech critics such as Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders to include
more mainstream politicians like Biden.
Even so, while she was expected to gain
a place on the FTC as a commissioner,
few predicted that she would be chosen
to actually lead the agency.
“She has really managed to soar high
so quickly. And I would attribute it to
the fact that she’s just been incredibly
visionary”, says Kate Judge, a professor
at Columbia University law school.
Sarah Miller, executive director of the
American Economic Liberties Project,
calls Khan the “Simone Biles” of anti-
trust, referring to the record-breaking
US Olympic gymnast. “Demonstrating
that America has this massive concen-
tration crisis . . . played a part in making
folks in way more traditional Demo-
cratic circles realise that a full turning of
the page was necessary . . . And that she
was the obvious one to help lead that.”
james.politi@ft.com
lauren.fedor@ft.com
a sizeable share of their gross domestic
product. But one of the two biggest ben-
eficiaries will be Italy, which has so far
been a net contributor to the EU budget.
A quarter of a century of economic
underperformance has caused Italy to
slide into the EU’s bottom half in terms
of per capita GDP.
Italy and Spain, the other big benefici-
ary, will bear an enormous responsibil-
ity as the EU’s recovery plan gets under
way. The funds need to be put to work
effectively. Concrete reforms must
become visible to European govern-
ments and voters in other countries for
the EU to consider future steps towards
integration.
There is, of course, no excuse for the
failure of some countries to have imple-
mented structural reforms and made
good use of public investments in the
past. However, tight fiscal constraints
made it difficult at times for some
governments to co-finance projects
benefiting from EU structural funds
and to maintain a decent level of
expenditure on public investments. This
Shein leaves Boohoo and
Zara on fast fashion’s shelf
S
hein is a remarkable com-
pany. The Chinese fast fash-
ion brand (pronounced
She-In after its original name,
Sheinside) has contrived to
conquer the world so rapidly that many
people have not noticed, aside from its
millions of bargain-conscious, social
media aware, Generation Z fans.
Its low profile comes in handy, given
the criticism rivals have faced for selling
cheap clothes sewn by low-paid work-
ers. Boohoo, the UK brand that also
appeals to teenagers and shoppers in
their early twenties, was facing an inves-
tor rebellion yesterday over a labour
abuse scandal, with some suppliers hav-
ing paid far below the minimum wage.
Shein has done its best to remain pri-
vate, despite having overtaken Amazon
as the most downloaded shopping app
in the US last month. TikTok and
YouTube fans parade their “Shein
hauls” of £8.49 floral dresses and £15.25
chunky mules, yet the company
appears “generic, storyless and nation-
less”, as one analysis put it. Its app pro-
vides few clues to its national origin.
Anonymity is getting harder, given
that it is reported to have sold $10bn of
clothing last year as the pandemic
encouraged online orders. Several com-
panies and designers, including AirWair
International, the maker of Dr Martens
boots, have taken legal action against
Shein for allegedly copying designs and
infringing trademarks. “They’re infa-
mous for what they do,” one told the FT.
This feels like a throwback to the past,
when Chinese companies were known
for cheaply imitating western brands,
and Shein is certainly cheap. But it is
also innovative: it has refined the fast
fashion model pioneered by Hennes &
Mauritz and Zara’s owner Inditex, in
which clothes move from design to pro-
duction in as little as three weeks.
Shein has accelerated into what Mat-
thew Brennan, author of a book on Tik-
Tok, calls “real-time retail”. It often
designs and makes new clothes in less
than a week, flooding its apps and online
stores in 220 countries with new designs
(4,981 “daily new” products were listed
on Shein’s UK site on Thursday).
Its founder Chris Xu (also known as
Yangtian Xu) started out in search
engine marketing before selling wed-
ding dresses and other clothes online,
and Shein is natively digital in a way that
older rivals such as Zara, which was
founded in 1975 and has 2,000 stores,
are not. It uses TikTok influencers and
celebrities such as Katy Perry to make
its bargains glamorous.
Shein’s cleverest trick is to plug its dig-
ital marketing funnel straight into its
supply chain. It has grouped a network
of factories and suppliers, all using its
software, around a hub in Guangzhou
Top reads at FT.com/opinion
3 It’s too soon to worry about post-Covid
labour shortages
Fears of wage inflation and demanding
staff are misplaced, writes Sarah O’Connor
7
exacerbated their growth problems.
Moreover, misguided responses to pre-
vious crises and an unfavourable mix of
fiscal and monetary policies were not
conducive to achieving the political and
social consensus needed for deep-seated,
supply-side structural reforms. Instead,
populist, anti-establishment move-
ments grew in size, resulting in a rollback
of some of the reform progress achieved
in the past.
There is no doubt that fiscal discipline
across the EU must be restored at some
point. In the larger picture, however, the
overriding goal is to reform Europe’s
economies and prepare them for future
challenges. This will require an
improved fiscal framework and the
right balance between budgetary poli-
cies, economic strategies and ECB mon-
etary measures. Europe’s task is not to
come up with a bigger response but a
better one.
The writer is visiting professor in practice at
the London School of Economics and a for-
mer director-general of the Italian Treasury
and can adjust its production rapidly
according to what sells, or even attracts
clicks. It produces small batches of
thousands of designs, then ramps up the
popular ones.
It has been made possible by the
internet but is reminiscent of an older
Asian innovation — Toyota’s postwar
“lean manufacturing” system, which
the Japanese carmaker invented to
eliminate waste by moving parts to pro-
duction lines only when needed (or
“just in time”). Shein has extended its
own information chain from factories in
the Pearl River Delta to shoppers on
their global apps.
Curbing waste sounds ecological, and
there are obvious benefits to making
only dresses that women want, rather
than producing masses for store shelves
and having to dump the excess. Eventu-
ally, fast fashion could even become
bespoke, with a piece of clothing being
made only after someone buys it online.
Cider, a rival to Shein in which the US
venture capital fund Andreessen
Horowitz has invested, calls itself “a glo-
bally minded, social-first fashion
brand” that sees “a collective future
where we can reduce waste and make
zero inventory a reality”. If Shein sheds
its reticence to go public (it says it has no
short-term plan for an initial public
offering), it will need a similar pitch.
This is only half the story, though.
Even if little is wasted in production,
real-time fashion encourages excess, as
the shopper discards one piece of cloth-
ing to buy another. A group of environ-
TikTok and YouTube
fans parade their hauls
of £8.49 floral dresses and
£15.25 chunky mules
mental scientists called last year for “an
urgent transition back to ‘slow’ fashion”
by “decreasing clothing purchases and
increasing garment lifetimes”. Shein is
pulling the other way.
Shein’s shoppers are not too bothered
yet. Although surveys find that Genera-
tion Z says it is committed to ethical
consumption, it also likes affordable
self-expression. That is encouraged by
the company’s secrecy; it is easier not to
worry about the origins of your clothes
while they remain obscure.
Like other fast growth companies
before, Shein can probably clean up
some of its early transgressions. It has to
avoid copying designs (it insists that it
“takes swift actions” against suppliers
that infringe intellectual property). It
needs to eliminate the blunders caused
by cultural insensitivity, such as selling
a swastika necklace last year.
But one day, it will also have to cease
being what one environmental ratings
group calls “as opaque as a brand can
get” and accept similar scrutiny to
Boohoo of its supply chain and labour
practices. Only then will the full story of
real-time retail be known.
john.gapper@ft.com
3 Western unity is more important than
frozen sausages
US diplomacy may be needed to lower
UK-EU tensions, writes Gideon Rachman
8 ★
Non-starter Lordstown truck venture falls
far short after grandiose buildup — ANALYSIS, PAGE 10
Paytm sets sights on $3bn in
float billed as India’s largest
3 Target valuation is $29bn 3 Stiff competition faced 3 Tech peers plan moves
Paytm, which is backed by Ant and SoftBank, this month lost its crown as the country’s most valuable start-up to edtech business Byju’s — Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters
STEPHANIE FINDLAY — NEW DELHI
Indian payments group Paytm has
called a shareholders’ meeting next
month to approve an initial public offer-
ing that is being billed as the country’s
largest, with plans to raise up to $3bn.
The group, which is backed by
China’s Ant Group and Japan’s SoftBank,
has appointed JPMorgan, Morgan
Stanley, Goldman Sachs and India’s
ICICI Securities to lead the issue, accord-
ing to people with knowledge of the
company.
The offering will target a valuation for
Paytm of $29bn.
With operations running from digital
payments to banking, Paytm was val-
ued at $16bn in its last funding round in
2019 and has long been a success story
for India’s booming technology sector.
But it was dethroned as India’s most
valuable start-up this month by educa-
tion technology company Byju’s.
It is also facing stiff competition in
online payments from Western rivals
‘Voltswagen’ April Fool was in
step with social media drive to
challenge Tesla’s EV dominance
JOE MILLER — FRANKFURT
It was an April Fool’s joke that went
wrong. In an embarrassing apology,
Volkswagen was forced to confirm in
late March that its US rebranding to
“Voltswagen” to embrace an all-electric
future was a stunt.
Yet the botched announcement,
which prompted a Securities and
Exchange Commission probe after coin-
ciding with a surge in the group’s US
shares, was in tune with a social media
strategy set in motion at the carmaker’s
German headquarters.
Last summer, VW chief executive
Herbert Diess told staff that he wanted
to be more vocal online. He felt that the
group, which is investing more than
€35bn in electric technology, needed to
wrestle back attention from the likes of
Elon Musk, according to people close to
senior management.
“Maybe we need a big boom,” is how
such as Google Pay and PhonePe, a serv-
ice provided by Walmart’s Indian ecom-
merce platform Flipkart.
Five years ago, Paytm “ruled India. It
was in the driver’s seat”, said Neil Shah,
an analyst at technology research firm
Counterpoint.
“But it is still bleeding money.
This is the right time to do an IPO
because competition is rising fast and
preference for Paytm is declining. The
IPO could make the difference for them
to compete.”
As a generation of Indian tech start-
ups mature, several other unicorns are
contemplating listing this year.
Food delivery company Zomato filed
its draft prospectus in April, seeking to
capitalise on a sharp increase in online
deliveries in India during the coronavi-
rus pandemic.
Insurance aggregator Policybazaar
and beauty ecommerce site Nykaa have
also said they are considering listings, as
is Walmart’s Flipkart.
Under its co-founder and chief execu-
VW chief Diess looks to copy Musk’s online playbook
one person familiar with the strategy
described the approach, which involved
Diess taking to LinkedIn and then Twit-
ter with ever more provocative posts.
Diess is also active on China’s Weibo
where, in terms of followers, he is hot on
the heels of the Tesla founder, who has
used social media for years to promote
himself and his company.
VW launched ID.3, its first dedicated
electric car, last year and sold almost
232,000 battery-powered vehicles in
2020, becoming Europe’s largest elec-
tric vehicle company in the process.
By the end of the decade, it wants 70
per cent of its sales in Europe to be emis-
sions-free.
Despite such ambitions, the German
company is worth less than a third of
Tesla, which is building a factory just
150 miles from VW Group’s base in
Wolfsburg.
In an unusual move for Germany’s
staid corporate class, Diess has engaged
in a series of stunts to get VW noticed.
The Bavarian donned a Batman mask
while demonstrating one of the group’s
cars in a LinkedIn post, posed for a selfie
with Musk when he visited VW to test
the ID. 3, and after joining Twitter at the
FTWeekend
tive Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm was
one of the first to target digital pay-
ments, and today has about 150m
monthly active users.
But Paytm has struggled to become
profitable, even though it has narrowed
its losses for two consecutive years.
Last year, Paytm reported a loss of
Rs17bn ($230m) compared with
Rs29bn the previous year.
“We are seeing many of these start-
ups looking at an Indian listing,
partly because of global liquidity
being high,” said Gokul Rajan, a capital
markets lawyer at Cyril Amarchand
Mangaldas.
He said many companies regarded
domestic listings, which are regulated
Zomato’s draft prospectus
was filed in April; Nyka,
Policybazaar and Flipkart
are considering listings
Automobiles. Electric shift
start of the year, playfully taunted the
Tesla executive, who had tried to recruit
Diess when he was a BMW manager.
The VW boss has also sparred online
with climate activists and politicians
over the best way to achieve carbon neu-
tral transport.
The importance of this strategy is
underlined by a weekly social media
planning meeting, which is chaired by
Herbert Diess wore a Batman mask in one of many stunts to get VW noticed
Enemy within Days of lucrative legalised
insider trading are numbered — JOHN DIZARD, PAGE 12
by the Securities and Exchange Board of
India, as “the most viable option” com-
pared with overseas offerings or special
purpose acquisition companies.
“Sebi regulations allow non-profita-
ble companies to IPO, and Indian uni-
corns are moving a little closer towards
the US market with valuations being
based on their potential rather than his-
torical results,” he said.
Sharma was embroiled in a blackmail
scandal in 2018 after he accused his
public relations head of trying to extort
$2.7m.
The chief executive has been a critic of
the “arbitrary powers and clout” of Sili-
con Valley companies in India, and sup-
ported a ban by New Delhi on Chinese
apps, even though his biggest investor is
Chinese.
He once tweeted that it was “time for
the best Indian entrepreneurs to come
forward and build the best by Indians,
for Indians!”
Additional reporting by Hudson Lockett in
Hong Kong
Diess and can last for two hours, one
person said. The analytics of previous
posts are pored over and potential “viral
content” for the days ahead is discussed.
Some say the tactic has helped get VW
more recognition.
“Diess got some attention, because
[Daimler boss Ola] Kallenius and
[BMW’s Oliver] Zipse are not going out
there,” said Michael Muders, a portfolio
Toshiba chair promises
inquiry and culture fix
LEO LEWIS AND KANA INAGAKI — TOKYO
Toshiba’s chair has pledged an inquiry
into “unacceptable events” at the com-
pany as he prepares to defend his posi-
tion next week at the annual meeting.
In an open letter to shareholders pub-
lished after a week of tensions between
investors and management, Osamu
Nagayama expressed regret for the ero-
sion of trust in the Japanese conglomer-
ate and laid out urgent measures to
improve governance.
His letter follows the release of an
independent report, demanded by
activist investors, which concluded that
the 2020 annual meeting had not been
conducted fairly, and it alleged collusion
between the company and government
to suppress activist shareholders.
“In order to stop recurrence, we will
conduct an inquiry, with third-party
participation, into why the unaccepta-
ble events occurred, put new preventive
measures into place and establish a
robust compliance culture,” Nagayama
said in the letter published yesterday.
Toshiba would search for new inde-
pendent board members and hasten
efforts to find a successor to Satoshi Tsu-
nakawa, who has served as interim chief
executive since the abrupt resignation
of Nobuaki Kurumatani in April.
Nagayama’s letter follows an online
meeting he and Tsunakawa held with
about 80 shareholders. “My priority is
Banks
HSBC takes $3bn hit in sale of
French retail arm to Cerberus
DAVID KEOHANE — PARIS
STEPHEN MORRIS — LONDON
HSBC is taking a $3bn hit to exit its
French retail banking network after
selling the business to US private
equity group Cerberus for a token €1.
Cerberus is buying HSBC’s 244
branches in France, with 800,000 cus-
tomers, through its subsidiary MyMon-
eyGroup, a consumer lending business.
The deal is the latest step in HSBC’s
plan to increase its focus on Asia while
slashing costs in the west, including
35,000 jobs in Europe and the US. The
bank last month sold its 150-branch US
retail network.
The transaction with Cerberus will
see HSBC book a pre-tax loss of roughly
$2.3bn alongside a $700m charge relat-
ing to impairment of goodwill, the bank
said yesterday.
For Cerberus, the deal is its next bet
on European banking. The New York
buyout firm is one of the largest share-
holders in Germany’s Deutsche Bank
and Commerzbank and has the biggest
holding in Hamburg Commercial Bank.
Eric Shehadeh, chief executive of
manager at Union Investment, a top
seven VW shareholder. “You need a lot
of money to master the transition,” he
added. “This is part of the game plan.”
Key to this plan is the ability to attract
the attention of fund managers in the
US, who are much more focused on
VW’s younger competitors. In pursuit of
this goal, VW recently started doing its
quarterly press calls in English.
“After Dieselgate there was no interest
from American investors,” said a person
close to VW’s executive board. More
than half of Diess’s Twitter followers are
from the US, the person added.
With GM and Ford making headlines
for announcing dates when they will
stop selling combustion engine cars, VW
is attempting to stress that it has an edge
on its traditional competitors, in the
form of dedicated electric platforms,
one of which is licensed to Ford.
This technology “gives VW a lead over
peers,” said Daniel Schwarz, an analyst
at Stifel. “Now we have the European
Green Deal and VW’s strategy looks
even more promising.”
Along with other events, such as a
“Power Day” focused on battery tech-
nology designed to create a buzz online,
19 June/20 June 2021
to provide Toshiba with the governance
and leadership that you deserve,” he
wrote. “I pledge to you that I will con-
tinue to be an agent of positive change,
not a protector of the status quo.”
Although Nagayama, a veteran of
Sony and Chugai Pharmaceutical,
joined Toshiba’s board after the events
exposed in the report, large investors
and proxy advisory services have called
for a vote against his reappointment at
the June 25 meeting.
They argue that he was chair when
Osamu Nagayama
received a mixed
response from
investors to his
letter that pledged
governance fixes
Toshiba conducted an internal inquiry
into the allegations of unfairness that
found no significant problems and was
decried by big investors as a whitewash.
Last Sunday Toshiba said it was
removing two of its nominations from
its slate of directors up for election next
week — a rare move in corporate Japan.
On Thursday, Effissimo, the Singa-
pore-based fund and Toshiba’s largest
shareholder with a stake of 9.9 per cent,
labelled the board “ineffective”. But
some investors argue that Nagayama’s
actions since the report had shown the
leadership the company needed.
MyMoneyGroup, said it planned to res-
urrect the Crédit Commercial de France
brand, which HSBC bought in 2000.
“The CCF brand is a game-changer and
to rejuvenate the French brand is totally
within our strategy,” he said.
At the time HSBC took control, CCF
boasted high-end customers, as well as a
handful of regional banks. Over the past
two decades, HSBC sold off CCF’s
regional banks, for €2.1bn, its head-
quarters on the Champs-Elysées for
€400m and folded some of its opera-
tions into those of the wider group.
Critics say HSBC neglected the brand
and failed to invest enough in the busi-
ness, prompting Cerberus to demand
investment from HSBC during the sale
negotiations that have been continuing
since late last year.
Cerberus, which created MyMoney-
Group after buying General Electric’s
French consumer credit business, will
also spend €200m “overhauling digital
architecture” at CCF. The plan is to
return the business, which had a pre-tax
loss of €236m last year, to profit over the
next three years. Once profitable, it
could be sold, said Shehadeh.
VW’s online offensive has coincided
with a sharp rise in the manufacturer’s
stock. For a short while this spring, the
Beetle-maker once again wore the
crown of Germany’s most valuable pub-
lic company, despite no significant shift
in its ambitious electric plans, and
almost regained the ground lost since
the diesel emissions scandal in 2015.
Critically, it is unclear if Diess’s tweets
are helping. Although VW’s shares have
more than doubled since hitting 10-year
lows in March last year, Daimler’s stock
has tripled over the same period,
despite its reserved Swedish chief exec-
utive staying off Twitter.
“I use LinkedIn, because we have
found out that that’s a very good tool to
attract talent to our company,” Kallen-
ius told the FT, “and I’m sticking with
that for now.”
If the share rally — boosted in part by
a boom in car demand — is to keep
going, German carmakers will probably
have to do more than deploy hashtags.
“The easy money in the market has
probably been made,” said Union’s
Muders. “The question is what are the
margins in the electric vehicle business.
That will be the focus of the market.”
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 9

COMPANIES. WEEK IN REVIEW

The great return

A
lot hinges on the pace and An alternative guide to the future is reckons its success will endure. “What ‘Many Zoom, for instance, rose 750 per cent
extent of the great found in the stock market. While the we are seeing is return to office, but from January 2020 to its peak later
migration back to the S&P 500 stays close to an all-time high, also continuation of work from companies that year — were certainly thanks to

to the office is far office: from the solvency of

city-centre sandwich
sellers to the health of senior
some of last year’s pandemic winners
have faded, lending weight to the
theory that the new pattern of working
anywhere . . . and we continue
carrying that flag,” said chief executive
Vladimir Shmunis last month. But
are
redesigning
lockdown. But subsequent losses are
sometimes because of idiosyncratic
problems — safety problems with

from a done deal management morale.

Severely hurt by the realisation that
their presence is irrelevant to
workforce productivity, many chief
executives are urging staff to return.
However, previously quiescent
employees, such as at Apple, are
resisting mandates to spend even three
days a week in the office.
It is fiendishly difficult to gauge how
this will play out. Vaccination and case
rate statistics, access card swipes and
mobility data offer clues. But beware of
The Top Line false signals. iPhone data show that
French cities have led the world in
might be less durable than once
thought.
Zoom Video was the big beneficiary
as workers and students swapped face-
to-face interaction for endless screen
time. Now the company has switched
focus to installing videoconferencing
suites, “Zoom Rooms”, in offices.
“Many companies are redesigning
the workplace to enhance the hybrid
work experience,” said Eric Yuan,
Zoom chief executive, during a
conference call this month. Investors
are unpersuaded: shares in Zoom are
down a third from their peak.
RingCentral’s shares are down almost
40 per cent from their peak.
Teladoc boomed when the sick
became uncomfortable about rubbing
shoulders with each other in a doctor’s
waiting room. “My guess is we’ll
continue to see more of a trend toward
at-home diagnostics,” said Teladoc
chief Jason Gorevic a few weeks ago.
But investors guess the momentum will
not continue: its shares are down 45
per cent from their peak.
Other pandemic winners — such as
Chewy, Ocado and Peloton — are also
down a third or more from their highs.
the
workplace
Peloton treadmills, for example — and
sometimes because of fears that Big
Tech will muscle into new remote
to enhance working markets.
Not every winner has lost its shine.
the hybrid “We believe that once customers come
work to the platform, they’re not going to go
back to pen and paper,” Cynthia
experience’ Gaylor, chief financial officer of
DocuSign, whose electronic signatures
remain in demand, said last week.
Box and Dropbox, the cloud software
providers, are also close to their peaks,
as is Slack, the messaging app that has
helped employees work together from

Tom recovery in use of public transport

from just before the onset of Covid-19:
RingCentral, responsible for relieving
3.5m people, including Financial Times
But this is unlikely to herald a full
reversal in the trend for homeworking,
home — and now plot resistance to the
office return.

Braithwaite in reality this is the result of strikes in

January 2020.
staff, of their trusty landlines in
exchange for a web-based app, also
shopping and exercise.
The gigantic gains on the way up — tom.braithwaite@ft.com

BEST OF
Hindenburg’s ‘world-class digger’ takes on the Spacs BUSINESS
Nikola, Lordstown and DraftKings
Corporate
person in
the news
are among the businesses to have
been targeted by Nathan Anderson, PwC hiring spree
founder of Hindenburg — Johnny Milano

Nathan Anderson
Head of Hindenburg Research
Nathan Anderson has achieved
enough notoriety digging into alleged
corporate fraud that he knows he
may be persona non grata at New
York parties.
“I don’t lead with, ‘Hello, my name
is Nate and I’m a short seller’,” the
Hindenburg Research founder says.
“That’s a pretty good way to get
ejected from any party.”
Anderson has made a name for
himself taking on some of the most
popular businesses to go public in the
blank-cheque company bonanza,
including electric truck start-ups
Nikola and Lordstown Motors.
This week he dropped a bombshell
on the already struggling market for
special purpose acquisition
companies by targeting DraftKings,
the sport betting business regarded as
the catalyst of the boom. Shares
initially fell more than 11 per cent but
have since largely recovered.
Spacs are having a record year with
more than $100bn raised so far, says
Refinitiv, but for Anderson the
repeated targeting of the sector is
unintentional. “We don’t really set
out and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to look
at Spacs today,’” he says. His team
“kind of just follow” apparent fraud.
Anderson, 37, who has built a team
at Hindenburg with five full-time
employees and some contractors, has
staked his livelihood on research he
says serves an important role. “Not
every stock is deserving of going up
to the moon,” he says.
Affable and at times self-
deprecating, Anderson grew up in a
small Connecticut town and studied
business at the University of
Connecticut. Wanting “a more
diverse set of life experiences”, he did
‘We come in a stint studying in Jerusalem where he
volunteered for an ambulance service,
and try to an experience that still informs his
illuminate approach to short selling.
“As an ambulance medic, you’re
some of trying your best to heal things that are
these broken,” he says. At Hindenburg, “we
come in and try to illuminate some of
problems these problems that might be lurking
that might under the surface at some of these
companies, in some of these
be lurking industries, and see if we can make
under the things better”.
Back in the US, Anderson took a
surface’ consulting job with financial software
group FactSet managing client
accounts for investment managers,
where he realised “the processes
across these firms were virtually the
same, and not particularly incisive”.
Roles at broker-dealer firms in
Washington and New York followed,
including doing due diligence on hedge
funds and investment opportunities.
He began noticing potential pyramid
schemes and, “fuelled by . . .
fascination and horror”, began
researching them on his own time.
His first big break came as he
Financials. Dark pools
sought to hone his investigative skills.
Anderson contacted Harry
Markopolos, the investigator known
for flagging Bernard Madoff’s scheme,
and they teamed up on a case against
Platinum Partners, the hedge fund
eventually charged over a $1bn fraud.
Anderson and Markopolos have not
previously been identified as sounding
the alarm on the case, in which seven
executives were indicted criminally
and several pleaded guilty. “He’s a
world-class digger,” says Markopolos,
whom Anderson considers a mentor.
“If there are facts, he will find them.
And all too often he’ll discover that
there are skeletons in the closet.”
At times having to “labour to keep
the lights on”, Anderson bolstered his
shoestring budget by selling portions
of his cases to members of a small
group of like-minded researchers in
return for a share of any payout. He
initially went after small companies
but has hit his stride. “Nikola was his
breakthrough in size and in notoriety,”
says Markopolos. “He’s on a roll, and
companies fear him.”
Anderson’s emergence comes at a
difficult time for short sellers, which
have been brutalised by the longest
bull market in history. Even
heavyweights such as Jim Chanos and
David Einhorn have struggled in a
market that has headed relentlessly
upwards; others, including Bill
Ackman, have stopped betting against
companies altogether.
This year has been fraught, with the
emergence of the Reddit trading army
who band together to boost shorted
stocks and for whom short sellers are
the enemy. Anderson has been the
target of countless posts on day trader
forums. “Finance before memes was a
lot less interesting”, he says.
A favourite is a video depicting
Chamath Palihapitiya, the Spac
sponsor who took Clover Health
public, as King Kong, and Hindenburg,
which published critical research of
the firm, as Godzilla. King Kong “beats
the living tar out of Godzilla, and we
were like, that’s really well done”.
Other finance professionals, even on
the buyside, say they welcome his
research.
Tony Kypreos, an investment
advisory firm founder who first met
Anderson eight years ago, says there
are relatively few people doing
comparable work. Anderson “is doing
a very noble service, because if you’re
showing that public companies or
private funds are putting out data that
are incorrect, it’s a big deal”, he said.
Companies targeted by Hindenburg
have disputed or played down his
allegations, some claiming his reports
are a publicity stunt.
Anderson insists he is not
completely sour on blank-cheque
vehicles. “I’m still keeping my mind
open to the fact that there could be a
good Spac out there. I just haven’t seen
it yet.” Ortenca Aliaj and Sara Germano
Lordstown stalls page 10
3 PwC, the audit and consulting group, is to boost its
global headcount by more than a third, or 100,000
people, as part of a $12bn investment over the next
five years designed to capture a booming market for
environmental, social and governance advice.
3 Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman has told New
York-based employees that he wanted them back at
their desks by early September. “If you can go into a
restaurant in New
York City, you can
come into the office,
and we want you in
the office,” he told a
conference.
3 Wimbledon slashed
prize money for this
year’s winners of the
men’s and women’s
singles titles, as tennis continues to grapple
with the fallout from the pandemic. This year’s prize
of £1.7m is 28 per cent lower than two years ago,
when Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep, pictured,
triumphed.
3 Greg Weinberger, Credit Suisse’s top dealmaker in
the US, has quit the Swiss bank after 25 years as it bat-
tles to retain talent following a series of scandals. He
will join Morgan Stanley later this year.
3 Sir Tim Berners-Lee is to hold a charitable auction
for his original source code for the web in the form of
a “non-fungible token”, as digital collectibles con-
tinue to fetch millions of dollars.
‘If you can go to a restaurant in New
York City, you can come into the
office, and we want you in the office’
Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman
3 Careers for some women in the financial
industry are being held back by “mediocre” male
middle managers who are adept at playing
internal politics, according to a report by Women
in Banking and Finance and the London School of
Economics.

UK plans tweaks to lure back EU share-trading flows 3 Harry Stebbings, a 24-year-old law degree dropout
from south-west London who as a teenager started a
podcast about tech investing, raised $140m for his
20VC fund to back start-ups.

Boosting off-exchange venues
considered amid push to redress
balance on €8bn-a-day business
PHILIP STAFFORD — LONDON
Britain wants to change its rules around
share trading to adapt to life after
Brexit, in an effort to entice EU share
deals back to the City of London.
EU share trading quickly fled the UK
after the full terms of the country’s
departure from the bloc kicked in at the
start of this year, with cities such as
Amsterdam and Paris picking up the
slack for the €8bn-a-day business.
The EU did not recognise UK stock
exchanges as having standards equiva-
lent to its own, which meant that its
institutions were barred from using
London-based venues. To redress the
balance, the UK Treasury has said that it
would like to boost off-exchange trading
venues, known as dark pools. Other pro-
posals under consideration include eas-
ing the minimum pricing increments,
known as tick sizes, on lightly regulated
private venues run by banks and high-
frequency traders, according to people
involved in the discussions.
The government will launch a full
consultation over the summer in a
review of the UK’s wholesale financial
markets. An announcement may come
as early as the start of July in Chancellor
Rishi Sunak’s annual speech in the City
of London, say people with knowledge
of the plans.
London has portrayed its reforms as
“ambitious”, while also ensuring that its
rule book is fair, competitive and of the
highest regulatory standards.
“The question is what the UK does
post-Brexit without equivalence,” said
Rebecca Healey, founder of Redlap Con-
sulting, a capital markets consultancy.
“There’s a political desire to find a
benefit and demonstrate that Brexit is a
good thing for the market. But running
two rules books is something people
don’t want. You have to be careful what
you tweak,” she said.
Changes to the vast pan-European
Mifid II package of market regulations
would be needed for the UK to achieve
its goals here, potentially opening up
another fissure between British and
European authorities over financial
services. But the prospect is also divid-
ing market participants in London
between those wanting more freedom to
trade where they want, and those wor-
ried that diverging rules will raise oper-
ational and technology costs and further
fragment the market.
Dark pool curbs have become one of
the touchstones for those arguing EU
standards do not fit UK markets. The
UK has long been at odds with the EU on
the venues, which let fund managers
trade large blocks of shares without dis-
turbing the price on the market. The UK
has seen them as a benefit to investors.
The EU, worried about the growth in
off-exchange trading, set caps in 2013 ‘Running
on the amount of business that could be
executed in dark pools, both in individ- two rules
ual stocks and on one venue. books is
In February more than 16 per cent of
trades in UK blue-chip stocks were con- something
ducted in a dark pool, a record and the people don’t
highest of all major indices in Europe,
say data from Rosenblatt Securities. want. You
Those figures may rise further after have to be
the final set of caps, last imposed when
the UK was part of the single market, careful
rolled off in early June and the regulator what you
said they would not be extended.
The Treasury also wants to kill an EU tweak’
rule called the “share trading obliga-
tion”, which determines where shares
can be traded and was designed to stop
banks from matching their customers’
deals on their internal trading desks,
EU share trading fled London after the UK left the bloc
bypassing the exchange and saving on
fees.
“The UK could create an environment
that results in UK venues regaining mar-
ket share in EU stocks,” said Anish
Puaar, market structure analyst at
Rosenblatt Securities in London.
But alongside deleting unwanted EU
rules lies the issue of what replaces
them, if anything.
A 2017 paper by the Financial Con-
duct Authority found dark trading
began to damage liquidity on the UK
market once it reached more than 15 per
cent of the total value traded.
Data from BMLL, a UK group, have
highlighted the difficulty that policy-
makers face. The amount of dark trad-
ing in blue-chip French and German
stocks in the UK has risen from 29 per
cent in January to half the monthly vol-
ume in June, it found.
The gains came after the FCA in
March made it easier to trade EU shares
in London, cutting the trade size thresh-
old that qualifies for a UK dark pool to
just €15,000. That compares with
€650,000 in the EU.
But Elliot Banks, head of product
development at BMLL, said the shift to
dark pools was more likely because of
wider spreads — the difference between
the price quoted to purchase a share and
the level to sell — on UK exchanges.
The findings underscore that in spite
of the political rhetoric, brokers remain
highly sensitive to cost and pricing
across different markets.
3 Incoming ByteDance chief executive Liang
Rubo has told staff that the Chinese owner of short-
video apps TikTok and Douyin had increased its rev-
enues 111 per cent last year to $34bn.
3 Warner Music has agreed to buy David Guetta’s
recorded-music catalogue, striking a deal with the
53-year-old French DJ and producer behind hits such
as “Titanium” that is worth more than $100m.
111% £0
Increase in Value of The Sun
revenues last year after writedown
for TikTok owner by media baron
ByteDance Rupert Murdoch
3 JPMorgan Chase has agreed to buy Nutmeg, the
UK digital wealth management platform, for an
undisclosed sum in a deal that will net the US lender
billions of pounds in assets.
3 OnlyFans, the online platform where sex workers
and influencers sell subscription content, is explor-
ing a share sale to new investors after its user base
grew from fewer than 20m to more than 120m.
3 Wise, the fintech company previously known as
TransferWise, announced its intention to go public
in London through a landmark direct listing.
3 Rupert Murdoch has written down the value of The
Sun to zero, acknowledging that the UK tabloid
brand has become a worthless asset as it reported a
pre-tax loss in the year to June 2020 of £201m.
10
Ohio valley’s job hopes set back after
Lordstown Motors’ start-up stalls
The battery-powered Endurance truck venture has fallen far short of its grandiose billing
CLAIRE BUSHEY — CHICAGO
ORTENCA ALIAJ — NEW YORK
The mayor of Lordstown, Ohio, is wait-
ing to see what happens next with the
high-profile electric truck start-up that
promised to revitalise the village. So are
the company’s investors.
Lordstown Motors promised to bring
400 jobs to the Mahoning Valley and a
chance to transform this part of north-
east Ohio into what some call “Voltage
Valley”.
Instead, top executives have resigned
following a warning that the company
might run out of money and Lordstown
now threatens to become one of the big-
gest disappointments among the elec-
tric vehicle start-ups that rushed to go
public via special purpose acquisition
companies over the past year.
The Mahoning Valley knows disap-
pointment. The village of 3,200 people
is about 17 miles from Youngstown,
where residents still speak of “Black
Monday”, the day in September 1977
when Youngstown Sheet & Tube
announced the closure of the larger of
its two steel mills with the loss of 5,000
jobs.
Donald Trump held a 2017 rally in
Youngstown telling Ohioans not to
move away, because “we’re going to get
those jobs coming back, and we’re going
to fill up those factories”.
‘We’re going to get those
jobs coming back, and
we’re going to fill up
those factories’
The plant where Lordstown Motors
said it would make its flagship pick-up,
the Endurance, formerly made the
Chevrolet Cruze by General Motors,
employing 12,000 at its height. GM
closed it in 2019 and, amid haranguing
from the then president, agreed to sell it
to the start-up despite uncertainty over
its financing plans.
“We’re survivors here in the Mahon-
ing Valley,” said Arno Hill, Lordstown’s
mayor. “We’re the land of broken prom-
ises.”
Lordstown Motors is not the first elec-
tric vehicle start-up to have disap-
pointed investors within months of
being taken public by a Spac. Nikola,
which plans to make industrial trucks,
admitted its founder made wholly or
partly inaccurate statements, and the
company is now under US Department
of Justice investigation. Shares in other
start-ups have fallen as investor eupho-
ria has given way to realism on the diffi-
culties of hitting ambitious production
and sales goals.
Companies going public via a Spac
have more freedom to make bold sales
forecasts than companies that pursue a
traditional initial public offering, a dif-
ference that regulators have flagged as a
worry.
Lordstown took advantage. Power-
Point presentations used to attract
investors in August and September
painted a rosy picture of the company’s
prospects. It said it expected $1.7bn in
revenue by 2022 and more than three
times that by 2024, largely from the
Endurance, which is priced at $52,500
and targeted at commercial fleet opera-
tors rather than luxury buyers.
★ FTWeekend
COMPANIES & MARKETS
Non-starter: Significantly, the start-up touted its
Steve Burns, “strong” balance sheet. It would have
who has quit as $675m in cash after going public, includ-
Lordstown’s ing money raised from institutional
chief executive, investors and cash already held by Dia-
stands before mondPeak Acquisition, the Spac set up
an Endurance by David Hamamoto, a former Gold-
pick-up truck man Sachs real estate banker. It said it
Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty
expected “no additional capital require-
ments” until it started selling vehicles.
Behind the scenes, it was tussling with
regulators over where to put the aster-
isks to that rosy outlook.
In September, the Securities and
Exchange Commission ordered it to
mention more prominently that an
independent auditor, assessing its losses
to date, found “substantial doubt about
the company’s ability to continue as a
going concern”.
That report, found on page 288 of
Lordstown’s preliminary proxy state-
ment, was referenced on page 51 of the
Mainly downhill now
Lordstown shares ($)
Short seller questions truck orders
CEO and
CFO resign
DiamondPeak-Lordstown deal announced
Jul 2020 2021
Source: S&P Capital IQ
‘We’re final version ahead of a vote of Dia-
mondPeak shareholders.
survivors “While Lordstown believes the pro-
here in the ceeds of the business combination [with
DiamondPeak] will provide sufficient
Mahoning funds to alleviate this doubt, additional
Valley. funding may be required in the future
for a variety of reasons,” the company
We’re the said in the final proxy.
land of The fine print of the proxy has proven
a more reliable guide than some of the
broken figures in the Lordstown PowerPoints.
promises’ The prospect of disappointment was
first raised in March when Hindenburg
Research, the short seller, published a
report saying the company’s 100,000
pre-orders were “largely fictitious and
used as a prop to raise capital”. The SEC
opened an inquiry.
In May, the company hinted it
planned to raise more capital and by last
week Lordstown was warning that the
company could fail within a year.
The $587m in cash and cash equiva-
lents it had at the end of the first quarter
“are not sufficient to fund commercial-
scale production”, according to a June 8
35 regulatory filing. “Management is cur-
rently evaluating various funding alter-
30 natives.”
The company did not respond to mes-
25 sages seeking comment for this article,
but it has made a series of public com-
20 ments this week.
On Monday, when Steve Burns, chief
15 executive, and his chief financial officer
resigned, a special committee estab-
10 lished by Lordstown’s board revealed
that the company had inaccurately
5
described pre-orders for the electric
Jun pick-up truck. A large number came
from “influencers” with no intention of
buying trucks or from entities without
the funds to complete the purchase, it
said.
On Tuesday, executives told reporters
the company had enough cash to last
until May 2022, and it still plans to begin
limited production of the Endurance in
September. Lordstown had “binding”
purchase orders for the first two years of
production, said Rich Schmidt, com-
pany president
On Thursday, the company clarified
in an SEC filing that while these pre-or-
ders “provide us with a significant indi-
cator of demand”, they were not firm.
Mayor Hill said the village has
excluded Lordstown Motors from its
budgeting plans. “You don’t pin your
finances on something you don’t have
yet,” he said.
His hopes for an electric future for the
Mahoning Valley are pinned more
firmly on established players such as
GM and LG Chem, which announced a
joint venture in May 2020 to build a
$2.3bn plant in Lordstown to make bat-
tery cells. The plant went up “at warp
speed”, Hill said, and has already started
hiring. It is expected to employ 1,100.
Jobs lost when GM closed the Cruze
factory cannot be replaced at once, Hill
said, “but we’re working on it”.
Lordstown’s travails could give also
pause to investors who, seeking the next
Tesla, have ploughed money into EV
start-ups in the past year.
“It’s a fourth Industrial Revolution
playing out, but a rising tide doesn’t lift
all boats,” said Dan Ives, Wedbush ana-
lyst. With Lordstown Motors, “there’s
more questions than answers at this
point”, he added.
19 June/20 June 2021
Travel & leisure
Starbucks’
European unit
hands $183m
to US parent
ALICE HANCOCK — LONDON
Starbucks’ European business paid
$183m in dividends to its US parent
company despite incurring large losses
as the coffee market suffered its first
dip in growth in two decades during the
coronavirus pandemic.
Pre-tax profit fell almost 40 per cent to
$104m in the year to September 2020,
according to company calculations that
aggregated the accounts of its franchise
businesses across continental Europe
and the Middle East, as lockdowns
forced stores to close and reduced foot-
fall on city streets.
In the UK, where Starbucks runs a
mix of company-managed and licensed
stores, it suffered a £41m pre-tax loss,
compared with a loss of £6.6m in 2019.
Its UK revenues fell a third to £243.3m.
The group paid $3.1m in tax from its
European businesses and a $183m divi-
dend to its US parent, provoking criti-
cism that it was still not being transpar-
ent about its tax affairs, despite several
previous investigations.
The dividend was not declared as paid
out in its accounts because it is not
required under standard accounting
practices, Starbucks said.
“The UK business has always been
lossmaking and continues to be loss-
making . . . The question is why are
they running a lossmaking operation in
the UK and have a European arm that
reports profits that are tax-free?” said
George Turner, executive director of
TaxWatch UK.
‘The accounts offer no
clear insight as to what
is going on. And that
is the problem’
Richard Murphy, director of Tax
Research, said: “The accounts offer no
clear insight as to what is going on. And
that is the problem.”
The group has seven businesses for
which it reports accounts in the UK. The
profit it reports for its Emea division
flows through to Starbucks Corporation
in the US as a dividend, which means it
is not subject to tax.
Starbucks, which declined to com-
ment, has drawn scrutiny for its tax
affairs because of its complex corporate
structure, which it is simplifying. In
2012, the coffee chain came under fire
from UK politicians after it emerged
that it had paid only £8.6m in UK corpo-
ration tax over 14 years.
Starbucks has since moved its head-
quarters from Amsterdam to London
and paid more in UK taxes.
Jeffrey Young, chief executive of Alle-
gra World Coffee Portal, the industry
research firm, said the pandemic had
caused the first dip in the growth of the
out-of-home coffee market in more
than 20 years, and it had been “really
rough” for big chains that relied on high
streets and office-heavy locations.
Allegra did not expect the sector to
return to its pre-Covid-19 strength until
2024 because of the increased trend for
remote working.
Alex Rayner, general manager of Star-
bucks UK, said that the pandemic had
hit company profits “dramatically” and
added that the chain had to adapt to cus-
tomers “who want delivery, drive-
through stores and convenience”.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Cross asset. Policy pressures Fixed income

EU clears
Reflation trades pummelled banks barred
after Fed shift forces reset from recovery
fund deals
TOMMY STUBBINGTON

Eight banks barred from taking part in

Commodities and value stocks
hit while dollar gains as central
bank signals earlier rate hike
ROBIN WIGGLESWORTH, TOMMY
STUBBINGTON, COLBY SMITH
AND NEIL HUME
The “reflation trade” that has
dominated financial markets since the
emergence of coronavirus vaccines last
year has been pummelled after the US
Federal Reserve unexpectedly signalled
a shift in its stance on inflation.
Commodity prices have tumbled
while long-dated US government bond
prices raced higher after Fed officials
this week reacted to unexpectedly
strong inflation data by moving forward
their forecasts for when it might start
raising interest rates.
The dollar was headed for its best
week since last September on Friday.
The Fed’s shift marks a major setback
for investors who this year have rushed
to buy securities that might benefit
from faster inflation, betting that the
combination of exceptionally easy
monetary and fiscal policy and a global
economy emerging from its Covid-19
lockdown would cause prices to spike.
The pivot from central bank officials
has raised doubts about how much
inflationary pressure the Fed is really
willing to tolerate. The central bank also
signalled that it would soon start
discussing when it would taper its
$120bn-a-month bond purchases.
Michael Pond, head of global infla-
tion-linked research at Barclays, said:
“If any time the Fed gets a whiff of
inflation and they come in and slap it
back down, why would any investor
worry about long-term inflation being
too high? The more the Fed is concerned
about too high inflation, the less the
market should be concerned.”
US stock markets dropped yesterday
with the S&P 500 lower by roughly 1 per
cent, despite precious metals rebound-
ing slightly from the previous day’s
losses and bond yields little changed.
Long-dated US bond yields tumble
30-year Treasury yield (%)
Jan 2021
Source: Refinitiv
The declines followed comments
from James Bullard, president of the St
Louis Fed, about the prospects of an
even earlier interest rate increase than
current projections suggest.
In an interview with CNBC, he
forecast lift-off in late 2022 in the face of
higher than anticipated inflation.
The dollar rose further yesterday with
the US Dollar index measuring the buck
against major currencies gaining about
1.9 per cent over the week.
This dragged sterling 0.8 per cent
lower to $1.38 — its lowest point in
nearly two months — and brought this
week’s losses to 2 per cent. Other major
currencies also came under strain with
the euro dropping to $1.187.
Krishna Guha, vice-chair of Evercore
ISI, said Thursday’s violent moves had
come as some investors were forced to
liquidate reflation trades when markets
moved against them.
Raw materials, seen by many
investors as a hedge against inflation,
took the brunt of the selling this week.
The Bloomberg Commodity index has
fallen over 3 per cent so far this week,
heading for its worst week since the
start of the pandemic.
Copper, used in everything from
fridge freezers to wind turbines, was
down roughly 8 per cent on the
week while lumber, which has enjoyed
an extraordinary rally on the back of a
booming US house market, dropped 15
2.6
2.4
2.2
2.0
1.8
Jun
1.6
per cent. Commodities were also
weighed down by a strong US dollar,
which makes greenback-denominated
raw materials more expensive for
holders of currencies.
Metals took a hit from China’s deci-
sion to release some of its strategic
reserves of metals to help rein in prices.
“The recent dollar strength has led
to a mechanical sell-off in emerging
market-produced commodities . . . yet
our foreign exchange strategists view
the impact of the Fed meeting as a tran-
sient tailwind,” said Jeff Currie, head of
commodities research at Goldman
Sachs. “They continue to forecast broad
US dollar weakness, driven by the cur-
rency’s high valuation and a broadening
global economic recovery.”
So-called US value stocks — often
cheaper, out-of-favour companies that
are more sensitive to the pace of
economic growth — fell another 1.3 per
cent on Thursday to extend the initial
drop they suffered on Wednesday, the
day of the Fed’s announcement. MSCI’s
index of global value stocks had already
fallen 1.2 per cent on Thursday.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller US
companies declined over 1 per cent
yesterday — the biggest reversal in more
than a month — while the price of an
ounce of gold slipped to a two-month
low of $1,773 on Thursday, before
picking up slightly yesterday.
Other assets have benefited, however.
The way down: The fading chances that the Fed will let
Wall Street inflation get out of hand helped trigger a
stocks were hit rally in long-term US Treasuries and
after the latest other securities that benefit from
Federal Reserve disinflationary pressures, such as highly
policy signals rated corporate bonds and many big
Richard Drew/AP
technology stocks.
The yield on 30-year US Treasuries
plunged to its lowest level since
February and was at 2.03 per cent
yesterday, down from 2.21 per cent
ahead of the Fed meeting.
Two-year Treasuries, which had
barely budged this year and are more
sensitive to monetary policy changes,
jumped to 0.27 per cent — up from 0.16
per cent at the start of the week.
The scale of the shift in the world’s
largest bond market is a sign that some
investors are starting to question the
Fed’s commitment to its new more
flexible inflation-targeting regime,
according to Guha.
Since last year, the US central bank
has said it will let inflation run above its
2 per cent target to balance out periods
of low inflation.
Since Wednesday’s Fed meeting, how-
ever, market expectations of inflation
extended their recent declines.
The 10-year US break-even, a closely
followed gauge of expectations over the
next decade, traded at 2.23 per cent
yesterday, down from 2.39 per cent.
Despite the post-Fed moves, some
investors are keeping the faith with the
reflation trade.
Mark Dowding, chief investment
officer of BlueBay Asset Management,
said the Fed’s plans to taper its asset
purchases would eventually weigh on
‘The more bond prices and force yields higher,
adding that the central bank had simply
the Fed is reacted to stronger than expected
concerned inflation data over the past two months
rather than making a fundamental
about high change to its policy.
inflation, “The average inflation targeting
approach remains intact, as does strong
the less the economic growth,” he said. “This has
market been frustrating but it’s been one of
those moments as an investor when we
should be’ have to stick to our guns.”
bond sales for the EU’s €800bn recovery
fund have been cleared to handle future
transactions after promising “integrity”
and providing evidence of “remedial
measures” following historical breaches
of antitrust rules.
The EU launched its largest
borrowing spree this week with a
€20bn bond sale but 10 banks were
frozen out of working on the deal
because of their previous involvement
in market-rigging scandals.
Eight of those lenders are now free
to handle future bond syndications
under the programme, the European
Commission said.
They are Bank of America, Barclays,
Citigroup, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche
Bank, JPMorgan, Nomura and
UniCredit, according to a person famil-
iar with the matter.
NatWest and Natixis will continue to
be excluded for the time being because
they have not yet provided relevant
information to the EU, the person said.
The two banks declined to comment.
“The eight banks have provided
information that allow the commission
to conclude that their further exclusion
from participation in syndicated
transactions in EU bond issuances is not
warranted,” the commission said
‘The banks have provided
information that allow the
commission to conclude
exclusion is not warranted’
in a statement. The decision had been
taken after a “thorough analysis taking
into consideration the remedial meas-
ures applied by the concerned institu-
tions”.
The “remedial measures” included
evidence of how the banks police the
activities of traders in chat rooms,
as well as a document known as a
“declaration on honour” stating
adherence to a range of EU standards,
bankers said.
Banks excluded from EU deals ran
the risk of missing out on a significant
new source of fees in European bond
markets, as the recovery fund
transforms Brussels into one of the
region’s biggest borrowers. The
commission paid out €20m in fees on
Tuesday’s inaugural transaction.
Bank of America, Natixis, Nomura,
NatWest and UniCredit had been
prevented from taking part in EU syndi-
cations because of a commission
antitrust ruling last month that they
participated in a bond trading cartel
during the eurozone debt crisis a decade
ago.
Citigroup, JPMorgan and Barclays, in
addition to NatWest, were barred
following a finding two years ago that
Our global they were involved in manipulating
team gives you currency markets between 2007 and
market-moving 2013.
news and views, Deutsche Bank and Crédit Agricole
24 hours a day were also excluded because of an April
ft.com/markets ruling that they had been involved in a
different bond trading cartel.

Equities Fixed income

Meme stock popularity of GameStop Investors rush to stash cash following

and AMC creates ETF vulnerabilities
STEVE JOHNSON
Popular meme stocks GameStop and
AMC Entertainment have become
some of the largest holdings in
exchange traded funds run by major
investment firms such as BlackRock,
State Street Global Advisors and
Invesco.
While investors in these ETFs have so
far benefited from the meme stock rally,
the outsize exposures also leave funds
vulnerable to losses if it ends.
Since the start of 2021, amateur
investors congregating on online
message boards have driven shares in
the lossmaking video game retailer and
the cinema chain to dizzying heights.
But the funds are passive index
vehicles that follow preset rules with no
option but to allow a stock to account for
an ever-larger share of their portfolio,
pending the next scheduled rebalancing
date.
“They have to follow the rule book
and rebalance on a set schedule,” said
Todd Rosenbluth, head of ETF and
mutual fund research at CFRA
Research. “There is risk, because it can
be some time before an ETF gets
rebalanced. Investors can get hurt if
they don’t look at what is in the portfolio
before they buy.”
The two companies are the largest
holdings in BlackRock’s $17.5bn iShares
Russell 2000 Value exchange traded
fund (IWN) with a combined weight of
2.1 per cent, despite the ETF holding
1,495 companies in total.
GameStop accounts for 13.8 per cent
of the First Trust Nasdaq Retail ETF
(FTXD. At Invesco, its S&P SmallCap
GameStop’s stock trades at 381 times
its underlying earnings
Value with Momentum ETF (XSVM)
has an 8.8 per cent weighting to
GameStop, well ahead of the 3.8 per cent
of its next largest position.
In January, State Street Global
Advisors’ SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT),
had 19.9 per cent of its assets in
GameStop, comfortably ahead of the
combined 11.8 per cent weighting of the
rest of its top 10 holdings.
In addition, BlackRock’s IWN fund
and Invesco’s XSVM fund are both
supposed to track value stocks, which
typically trade at a lower price that may
not match the company’s prospects,
potentially allowing investors to benefit
from inefficiencies in the market.
But GameStop trades at 381 times
underlying earnings while AMC’s
earnings are forecast to be negative in
the coming 12 months.
“We probably have seen unusual
outcomes in some ETFs, particularly
narrower funds,” said Kenneth Lamont,
senior fund analyst for passive strate-
gies at Morningstar. “There are some
forces in the market which are unusual
— the forces that are driving up
GameStop and AMC . . . Ultimately pas-
sive is just reflecting what is out there.”
moves to prevent negative US rates
COLBY SMITH — NEW YORK
Investors stashed a record amount of
cash in an overnight facility at the
Federal Reserve yesterday after the
central bank started paying interest on
the money to prevent negative rates
taking hold in the US financial markets.
The change, announced after its
monetary policy meeting on
Wednesday, came in response to
concern from money market funds
and banks that have struggled to find
positive-yielding places to invest.
Nearly 70 market participants parked
$756bn at the Fed via its reverse
repurchase programme, according to
data from the New York branch of the
central bank.
That is roughly $172bn higher than
the previous record earlier in the week
and $235bn more than on Wednesday
when only 53 groups tapped the facility.
“The sharp increase in usage demon-
strates just how starved investors are for
yield” in short-term debt, said Gen-
nadiy Goldberg at TD Securities.
The Fed said it was boosting the RRP
rate to 0.05 per cent from zero to sup-
port “the smooth functioning of short-
term funding markets”, one of two
technical adjustments it made on
Wednesday. It also raised the interest it
pays on excess reserves, which are
deposited at the Fed by banks, from 0.1
per cent to 0.15 per cent.
Partly as a result of monetary and
fiscal stimulus for the US economy, cash
has been pouring into money market
funds that invest in short-term govern-
‘The sharp increase in
usage demonstrates
just how starved
investors are for yield’
ment securities. The surge in demand
for those securities has at times pushed
yields below zero this year and threat-
ened the viability of the $4tn industry.
The rate at which investors swap
Treasuries and other high-quality
collateral for cash in the repo market
has also dipped negative.
Wednesday’s adjustments helped to
lift those rates from their ultra-low
levels. The federal funds rate, the main
policy rate used by the Fed, also rose to
0.08 per cent, closer to the middle of the
central bank’s 0 to 0.25 per cent target
range, having fallen earlier this year to
as low as 0.04 per cent.
Jay Powell, Fed chair, expressed little
concern with the mounting usage of
the RRP facility at his post-meeting
press conference, indicating that it was
working as intended. “We think the
reverse repo facility is doing what it’s
supposed to do, which is to provide a
floor under money market rates and
keep the federal funds rate well within
its range.”
Scott Skyrm, a repo trader at Curva-
ture Securities, said the rate adjust-
ments announced on Wednesday would
help at the margin but RRP demand was
likely to remain elevated. The Fed’s
commitment to buying $120bn of gov-
ernment debt each month to stimulate
the economy continues to exacerbate
the mismatch between the amount of
cash looking for a home and the number
of feasible securities to buy, he said.
John Canavan at Oxford Economics
said: “This is not likely to be the end of
the increase and there is a good chance
that the flood of front-end cash pushes
RRP demand over $1tn at some point.”
12 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Oil bulls dancing The day in the markets

in the dark as What you need to know
uncertainty reigns 3 US stocks slide as Dow Jones heads for
Dow Jones heading for worst week since January
worst week in four months
3 Dollar strengthens against peers in Dow Jones Industrial Average (weekly % change)

David Sheppard biggest jump since September

3 Record-breaking European shares end
week lower
4

On Wall Street The dollar strengthened, gold fell and

stock markets slid after the US central 2

W
bank brought forward its projections for
ith oil prices climbing 100m b/d global market. But since last given the big physical traders such as the first post-pandemic interest rate rise.
well above the $70-a- spring, the oil market has had to learn to Vitol and Trafigura made a fortune The Dollar index, which measures the
barrel level they struck embrace huge swings. during last year’s coronavirus-induced greenback against peers, rose 0.4 per 0
before the pandemic, Demand last year fell by 10m b/d downturn, the direction of travel is less cent yesterday, taking its weekly gain to
the animal spirits of globally. It’s coming back fast now but important than the volatility to their 1.9 per cent, the currency’s biggest jump
commodity sector investors should be traders are adjusting to talking in incre- bottom line. since September last year. This came
roaring. ments of 1m b/d or more, multiples But for investors in oil companies? after the Federal Reserve projected on -2
Oil traders are certainly excited with higher than the usual monthly changes. The uncertainty is paralysing. When Wednesday that interest rates would rise
executives and hedge fund managers Compounding the issue is the long- JPMorgan surveyed its clients last in 2023 from record low levels, ahead of
predicting that a return to the $100-a- term outlook. Demand, most traders month, it found at least as much an earlier forecast of 2024.
barrel era may not be so far away. Brent, and analysts agree, will peak at some trepidation as interest. “Because of the hawkish surprise of -4
the international benchmark, reached point thanks to the growing use of While investors might accept that a rate rise expectations having been
$74 a barrel this week while US crude electric vehicles and intervention by return to higher prices is a real brought forward, you’ve seen a pretty Jan 2021 Jun
touched $72. governments to turn their citizens away possibility, they are not sold on how long aggressive move in the dollar,” said Keith
Source: Refinitiv
Under-investment has restrained from oil. the move will last, with many expecting Balmer, multi-asset portfolio manager at
supply in the sector in advance of peak Peak demand could be in five years or a surge rather than a sustained rally. BMO Global Asset Management. “Most of
demand. Crude traders point to 15, and if you ask a trader candidly One of the best things that could the market was bearish on the dollar growth this year to a median 7 per cent, sterling 0.8 per cent weaker at $1.380,
expectations of a post-pandemic boom happen for climate change is a sharp oil ahead of this meeting,” he added. up from 6.5 per cent in March. taking its weekly decline to more than 2
in travel and the wider economy that price increase that incentivises the Gold, which is priced in dollars and But shares in companies that benefited per cent.
should stoke demand for the black stuff, Peak demand could be in move away from fossil fuels. often moves inversely to the US currency, from stronger economic growth fell Core US government debt rallied as
whatever the long-term goals of politi- five years or 15. If you ask a They also have one eye on US shale. traded at $1,773 an ounce, down more because investors feared that rate rises investors viewed the earlier projections of
cians to build back better — and greener. The biggest publicly listed producers in than 5 per cent for the week for its worst would reduce GDP in coming years, said a US rate rise as a signal of the central
But the fund and investment manag- trader, they’ll say there’s the US shale industry are, for the performance since March 2020. Kevin Thozet, portfolio adviser at bank’s willingness to control inflation. The
ers who trade in oil companies rather no way of really knowing moment, showing admirable restraint. On Wall Street at lunchtime, the S&P Carmignac. There was now, he said, “a yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury
than oil prices still appear to be in a deep By finally focusing on boosting 500 index was down 1 per cent, the tech- more favourable relative outlook for bond slid 5 basis points to 1.46 per cent.
slumber, at least compared with their profitability and returning cash to focused Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.5 those companies which are less “The bond market narrative has been
counterparts in oil futures or physical they’ll say there’s no way of really investors rather than going on a capital- per cent and the Dow Jones Industrial dependent on economic growth”. changing on a whim,” said Tatjana Greil-
markets for cargoes. knowing. intensive drilling spree, traders can no Average sank 1.3 per cent, taking its drop The Stoxx Europe 600 index, which hit Castro, co-head of public markets at
Scratch the surface of the bullish That means we could either be longer bank on a significant surge in US for the week to more than 3 per cent. an all-time high this week, closed down credit investor Muzinich. “I think the story
optimism among those trading in oil heading for a supply crunch — as Big Oil output to meet demand growth. Fed officials on Wednesday also raised 1.6 per cent, while London’s FTSE sank 1.9 keeps changing because we just don’t
itself and it soon becomes clear why companies scale back investments — or But can this newfound discipline forecasts for US gross domestic product per cent. The strengthening dollar left know yet.” Naomi Rovnick
those fund managers that prefer trading a glut within a matter of years. really survive a sustained period of
in companies, from “Big Oil” to You can see the uncertainty in oil prices above $70 a barrel, let alone
shale upstarts, do not quite share their contracts for delivery far in the future, $100? The jury is very much out. Markets update
optimism. which are generally trading at a steep For equity investors, who need to take
The problem is that the oil market is, discount to those for delivery today. a longer term view of possible returns,
by its own standards, flying largely For traders dealing in the underlying the uncertainty is particularly toxic.
blind. In normal, pre-pandemic times, commodity, the uncertainty is That could be an opportunity for those US Eurozone Japan UK China Brazil
the industry had become pretty good at manageable. who think predictions of the end of the Stocks S&P 500 Eurofirst 300 Nikkei 225 FTSE100 Shanghai Comp Bovespa
predicting where demand and supply It’s an industry that tends to thrive on oil age are premature. Level 4183.46 1744.89 28964.08 7017.47 3525.10 127909.48
would roughly be in any given month. volatility and every participant knows But it also could partly explain why % change on day -0.91 -1.61 -0.19 -1.90 -0.01 -0.12
Debates tended to focus on whether the market can be turned on its head by some investors have been pushing Currency $ index (DXY) $ per € Yen per $ $ per £ Rmb per $ Real per $
demand or supply would be a few a war or an economic crisis, such as in companies from BP to ExxonMobil to Level 92.192 1.186 110.240 1.381 6.441 5.035
hundred thousand barrels a day higher 2008 when oil went from $147 a barrel think hard about a future where they % change on day 0.330 -0.670 0.014 -1.004 0.194 0.246
or lower. While that could be enough to to $30 in a few short months. pump less oil. Govt. bonds 10-year Treasury 10-year Bund 10-year JGB 10-year Gilt 10-year bond 10-year bond
set the tone for rising or falling prices, it The prospect of a return to $100-a- Yield 1.461 -0.204 0.055 0.752 3.180 9.179
was really a drop in the ocean of a barrel crude might be enticing but, david.sheppard@ft.com Basis point change on day -2.630 4.000 -0.570 -2.500 -1.000 29.500
World index, Commods FTSE All-World Oil - Brent Oil - WTI Gold Silver Metals (LMEX)
Level 467.17 73.45 71.56 1778.70 26.60 4053.40

Days appear numbered for lucrative

% change on day -0.93 0.62 0.92 -4.41 -4.02 -3.30
Yesterday's close apart from: Currencies = 16:00 GMT; S&P, Bovespa, All World, Oil = 17:00 GMT; Gold, Silver = London pm fix. Bond data supplied by Tullett Prebon.

Main equity markets

legalised insider trading in the US 4320
S&P 500 index
1800
Eurofirst 300 index
7200
FTSE 100 index

written plan, based on value, timing, It is possible, even likely, that an 4240 1760 7040
number of shares, and so on. insider’s pre-filed plan might become
The stock sales under these plans general knowledge only after their 4160 1720
would then be disclosed to the SEC and stock sale has already been executed 6880
then the general public. by his broker. Mostly the insiders 4080 1680
At the time, this seemed like a appear to be getting out before bad
| | | | | | | | |
reasonable way to ensure market news is disclosed. 4000 || | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1640 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6720 | | | | | | | | | | |

transparency while allowing insiders to Daniel Taylor, a Wharton School Apr 2021 Jun Apr 2021 Jun Apr 2021 Jun

I
sell shares to make tax payments, buy associate professor and director of the Biggest movers
t seems the great trading edge houses, or cover school tuition. Plans + Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab, has
% US Eurozone UK
enjoyed by corporate insiders is disclosure + aligned interests = good. co-authored a series of studies on data
Lennar 4.85 Brenntag 1.31 Fresnillo 2.26
knowing when to sell. That makes In practice, Rule 10b5-1 has turned combed from the 10b5-1 filings. He
Nvidia 2.33 Kone 1.03 Pershing Square Holdings Ltd 0.78
sense. There are many brokers out to be a Get Out of Jail Free card for says “the sellers’ outperformance (in
Ups

and business-TV guests with opportunistic timing of stock sales timing trades) comes from avoidance Dr Horton 2.23 Wartsila 0.64 Auto Trader 0.45
stock buying tips but few who will urge using insider information. It is also of risk”. According to one of his studies, H&r Block 2.15 Deutsche Boerse 0.62 Sainsbury (j) 0.31
you to sell now, before the bad news probably a good object lesson for why sales executed in the first 30 days of Alaska Air 2.09 Beiersdorf 0.58 Admiral 0.25
comes out. $4,000/hour lawyers are a better value plan adoption are associated with the %
But we are probably coming to the than $400/hour lawyers. stocks underperforming others in their Micron Technology -4.60 Aegon -5.38 Melrose Industries -5.67
end of a great couple of decades for You, the insider, must follow a plan, industry by 2.5 percentage points over Applied Materials -4.56 Kbc -5.09 Anglo American -5.07
Downs

legalised insider trading in America. detailed in a SEC Form 144, which you the following six months. Sales made Lam Research -4.40 Oci -4.70 Mondi -4.70
This boom really started with a 2002 adopt at a time when you are not in 30 to 60 days after a plan adoption Kla -4.31 Bnp Paribas -4.56 Whitbread -4.50
“reform”, the Securities and Exchange foreshadow 1.5 points of Alliance Data Systems -4.18 Stmicroelectronics -4.46 Tesco -4.07
Prices taken at 17:00 GMT Based on the constituents of the FTSE Eurofirst 300 Eurozone
Commission’s adoption of Rule 10b5-1. underperformance by the insiders’
This provided a means for senior
Rule 10b5-1 has turned out companies. The sell-off effect was
All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted.

executives or board members to sell to be a Get Out of Jail Free consistent over the 2016-20 period
their shares without making covered. The insider advantage
themselves vulnerable to charges of
card for opportunistic disappears if sales are made under
acting on “material non-public timing of stock sales plans that are at least 60 days old. Wall Street Europe London
information”. As Taylor (and others) see it, the
New SEC chief Gary Gensler has possession of material non-public policy lesson is clear: insiders should
called for reform of the rule, telling a information. That would include, for be required to wait for at least two Creative software company Adobe rose Acerinox slid on news that Nippon Steel Car dealership Inchcape drove higher
Wall Street Journal conference that it example, certain knowledge that the months after filing their plans publicly following what UBS described as a “top- had sold half of its stake in the Spanish following a bullish trading update.
led to “real cracks in our insider next earnings announcement will be before their stock sales can be to-bottom” beat for its fiscal second steel manufacturer. For the full year, the London-based
trading regime”. disappointing for public shareholders. executed. Oh, and those plans should quarter. About 21.4m ordinary shares were sold group said it expected to deliver pre-tax
The rule was issued, as is customary Ah, but while you have to establish the be filed in easily accessible electronic Revenue reached $3.84bn, which was at €10.20 per stock, a 5.7 per cent profit “significantly ahead of the
with major reforms, in the wake of a plan with, say, your broker or family form, so insiders’ lessened above consensus estimates of $3.73bn, discount on Thursday’s closing price. published market consensus” of £216m.
series of giant corporate scandals, in lawyer, you can modify or cancel the commitment to their companies while earnings per share hit $3.03 against Nippon Steel, which raised €218m from Inchcape noted “an uptick in demand
this case those that came to light after plan at will, in private. You are not becomes obvious before the bad news. UBS guidance of $2.81. the sale, retained a 7.9 per cent stake in and margin resilience” this year, leading
the dotcom crash of 2000-01. You required to inform the SEC or the The odds favour the SEC’s adoption The update prompted the bank to raise the Madrid group after the placement. to a performance that had “exceeded our
know, pump earnings, goose the stock, public that the plan is in place. of such changes. its target price for the San Jose group to Train group Alstom ended the day expectations”.
dump your shares. Never again. Even better, there is no minimum The next frontier, Taylor says, is to $625 a share from $577. marginally lower, having risen almost AJ Bell said: “It’s no wonder Inchcape is
To qualify for protection under number of transactions; you can use it limit insiders’ use of privileged News of a successful launch lifted TV 3 per cent following an announcement pointing to higher than expected profit,”
10b5-1, covered insiders could no to make one big sale. You can file your information about competitors, streaming platform Roku. that it had “won the largest train tender adding that “demand has been boosted
longer sell their companies’ shares at plan (when you are ready) on a paper suppliers, customers and the like. That In the two weeks following the addition in Danish rail history”. as we move out of lockdown and as
will. They have to enter into a (non- form rather than in an easily accessed “shadow trading” is probably a bigger of 30 original series from the company, it The agreement with Danish State people are reluctant to use public
binding) contract, or plan, that online filing. Until the pandemic, the rip-off than insider selling. said a “record number of unique Railways was valued at €2.6bn and transport to get around”.
instructs a third party to execute 10b5-1s were only available for a accounts” had streamed its channel. included the delivery of 100 Coradia Blue Prism, which creates software that
trades on their behalf according to a limited time in the SEC Reading Room. john.dizard@ft.com Gunmaker Smith & Wesson rallied after Stream regional trains. automates back-office clerical tasks, sank
reporting net sales $322.9m for its fiscal Reports of the contract win coincided after Berenberg warned that “concerns
fourth quarter, up 67.3 per cent on the with Citi upgrading the French company just keep compounding” for the group.

Businesses For Sale

same period a year earlier and exceeding to “buy” from “neutral”, saying: “Rail is Blue Prism released half-year results
the mean estimate of £259.8m from one of the greenest forms of transport, this week, which were called “weak” by
analysts polled by Refinitiv. and we expect a return of rail traffic post the broker. The company forecast full-
During the past fiscal year, the US pandemic and support from government year revenue “towards the lower end of
firearms market grew 42 per cent, said infrastructure stimulus to now drive . . . £170m-180m”, a range that Berenberg
chief executive Mark Smith, who added market growth,” said the broker. said was at risk of being missed.
that by “every financial and operating A day after soaring almost 49 per cent, The broker left its “hold”
Business for Sale, Business Opportunities, Business Services,
metric”, S&W had “delivered the most Danish biopharma group Orphazyme recommendation unchanged,
Business Wanted, Franchises successful year in the 169-year history of plummeted after the US Food and Drug acknowledging that Blue Prism had
Runs Daily the company”. Administration failed to approve its drug shown progress on profitability, but
..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... It also announced a $50m share for treating a rare genetic disorder and added that “none of our concerns about
Classified Business Advertising
repurchase programme and a 60 per cent instead requested “additional qualitative sales trends, competition, costs and
UK: +44 20 7873 4000 | Email: acs.emea@ft.com
rise in its quarterly dividend. Ray Douglas and quantitative evidence”. Ray Douglas product have abated”. Ray Douglas
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 13

MARKET DATA

WORLD MARKETS AT A GLANCE FT.COM/MARKETSDATA

Change during previous day’s trading (%)
S&P 500 Nasdaq Composite Dow Jones Ind FTSE 100 FTSE Eurofirst 300 Nikkei Hang Seng FTSE All World $ $ per € $ per £ ¥ per $ £ per € Oil Brent $ Sep Gold $

-0.91% -0.75% -1.14% -1.90% -1.61% -0.19% -0.93% -0.670% -1.004% -0.93% -4.41%
0.85% 0.014% 0.350%
Stock Market movements over last 30 days, with the FTSE All-World in the same currency as a comparison
AMERICAS EUROPE ASIA
May 19 - - Index All World May 19 - Jun 18 Index All World May 19 - Jun 18 Index All World May 19 - Jun 18 Index All World May 19 - Jun 18 Index All World May 19 - Jun 18 Index All World

S&P 500 New York S&P/TSX COMP Toronto FTSE 100 London Xetra Dax Frankfurt Nikkei 225 Tokyo Kospi Seoul
3,267.93
20,110.96 28,964.08
4,183.46 15,448.04
4,159.12 7,017.47 3,162.28
19,417.03 6,950.20 15,113.56 28,098.255
Day -0.91% Month 1.33% Year 34.26% Day -0.16% Month 3.08% Year 29.90% Day -1.90% Month -0.35% Year 12.62% Day -1.78% Month -1.56% Year NaN% Day -0.19% Month 4.10% Year 28.99% Day 0.09% Month 4.26% Year 52.63%

Nasdaq Composite New York IPC Mexico City FTSE Eurofirst 300 Europe Ibex 35 Madrid Hang Seng Hong Kong FTSE Straits Times Singapore
14,055.42
1,744.89
49,907.366 49,911.97 9,124.30 28,801.27 3,144.16
13,299.74 9,030.60 28,450.299 3,104.21
1,703.73
Day -0.75% Month 5.63% Year 41.33% Day -0.58% Month 0.26% Year 32.64% Day -1.61% Month 2.17% Year 23.03% Day -1.80% Month -1.67% Year 22.20% Day 0.85% Month 2.02% Year 17.49% Day 0.19% Month 1.97% Year 17.63%

Dow Jones Industrial New York Bovespa São Paulo CAC 40 Paris FTSE MIB Milan Shanghai Composite Shanghai BSE Sensex Mumbai

127,909.48 6,569.16 52,344.45

25,218.16
33,896.04
4 3,525.10
33,437.33 122,636.30
0 6,343.58 24,702.11 3,510.96 49,564.866
Day -1.14% Month -1.84% Year 28.20% Day -0.12% Month 3.97% Year 33.01% Day -1.46% Month 3.39% Year 32.48% Day -1.93% Month 1.49% Year 29.59% Day -0.01% Month 0.21% Year 20.07% Day 0.04% Month 5.57% Year 56.22%

&RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV &RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV &RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV &RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV &RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV &RXQWU\ ,QGH[ /DWHVW 3UHYLRXV
$UJHQWLQD 0HUYDO   &\SUXV &6( 0 3 *HQ   ,WDO\ )76( ,WDOLD $OO6KDUH   3KLOLSSLQHV 0DQLOD &RPS   7DLZDQ :HLJKWHG 3U   &URVV%RUGHU '- *OREDO 7LWDQV   
$XVWUDOLD $OO 2UGLQDULHV   &]HFK 5HSXEOLF3;   )76( ,WDOLD 0LG &DS   3RODQG :LJ   7KDLODQG %DQJNRN 6(7   (XUR 6WR[[  (XU  
6 3$6;    'HQPDUN 20;& &RSHQDKJHQ    )76( 0,%   3RUWXJDO 36,    7XUNH\ %,67    (XURQH[W  ,'  
6 3$6;  5HV   (J\SW (*;    -DSDQ QG 6HFWLRQ   36, *HQHUDO   8$( $EX 'KDEL *HQHUDO ,QGH[   )76( *RRG *OREDO   
$XVWULD $7;   (VWRQLD 20; 7DOOLQQ   1LNNHL    5RPDQLD %(7 ,QGH[   8. )7    )76( $OO :RUOG   
%HOJLXP %(/    )LQODQG 20; +HOVLQNL *HQHUDO   6 3 7RSL[    5XVVLD 0LFH[ ,QGH[   )76(    )76( (  
%(/ 0LG   )UDQFH &$&    7RSL[   57;   )76( *RRG 8.   )76( (XURWRS   
%UD]LO ,%RYHVSD   6%)    -RUGDQ $PPDQ 6(   6DXGL$UDELD 7$'$:8/ $OO 6KDUH ,QGH[   )76( $OO 6KDUH   )76( *OREDO    
&DQDGD 6 376;    *HUPDQ\ 0'$;   .HQ\D 16(    6LQJDSRUH )76( 6WUDLWV 7LPHV   )76( WHFK0$5.    )76( *ROG 0LQ   
6 376; &RPS   7HF'$;   .XZDLW .6; 0DUNHW ,QGH[   6ORYDNLD 6$;   86$ '- &RPSRVLWH   )76( /DWLEH[ 7RS (XU  
6 376; 'LY 0HW 0LQ   ;(75$ 'D[   /DWYLD 20; 5LJD   6ORYHQLD 6%, 723   '- ,QGXVWULDO   )76( 0XOWLQDWLRQDOV   
&KLOH 6 3&/; ,*3$ *HQ   *UHHFH $WKHQV *HQ   /LWKXDQLD 20; 9LOQLXV   6RXWK $IULFD )76(-6( $OO 6KDUH   '- 7UDQVSRUW   )76( :RUOG   
&KLQD )76( $   )76($6(    /X[HPERXUJ /X[;   )76(-6( 5HV    '- 8WLOLWLHV   )76(XURILUVW  (XU  
)76( %   +RQJ .RQJ +DQJ 6HQJ   0DOD\VLD )76( %XUVD ./&,   )76(-6( 7RS    1DVGDT    )76(XURILUVW  (XU  
6KDQJKDL $   +6 &KLQD (QWHUSULVH   0H[LFR ,3&   6RXWK .RUHD .RVSL   1DVGDT &PS   06&, $&:, )U   
6KDQJKDL %   +6&& 5HG &KLS   0RURFFR 0$6,   .RVSL    1<6( &RPS   06&, $OO :RUOG   
6KDQJKDL &RPS   +XQJDU\ %X[   1HWKHUODQGV $(;   6SDLQ ,%(;    6 3    06&, (XURSH (XU  
6KHQ]KHQ $   ,QGLD %6( 6HQVH[   $(; $OO 6KDUH   6UL /DQND &6( $OO 6KDUH   :LOVKLUH    06&, 3DFLILF   
6KHQ]KHQ %   1LIW\    1HZ =HDODQG 1=;    6ZHGHQ 20; 6WRFNKROP    9HQH]XHOD ,%&   6 3 (XUR (XU  
&RORPELD &2/&$3   ,QGRQHVLD -DNDUWD &RPS   1LJHULD 6( $OO 6KDUH   20; 6WRFNKROP $6   9LHWQDP 91,   6 3 (XURSH  (XU  
&URDWLD &52%(;   ,UHODQG ,6(4 2YHUDOO   1RUZD\ 2VOR $OO 6KDUH   6ZLW]HUODQG 60, ,QGH[   6 3 *OREDO    
,VUDHO 7HO $YLY    3DNLVWDQ .6(    6WR[[  (XU  
F &ORVHG X 8QDYDOLDEOH á &RUUHFWLRQ 6XEMHFW WR RIILFLDO UHFDOFXODWLRQ )RU PRUH LQGH[ FRYHUDJH SOHDVH VHH ZZZIWFRPZRUOGLQGLFHV $ IXOOHU YHUVLRQ RI WKLV WDEOH LV DYDLODEOH RQ WKH IWFRP UHVHDUFK GDWD DUFKLYH

STOCK MARKET: BIGGEST MOVERS UK MARKET WINNERS AND LOSERS

$0(5,&$ /21'21 (852 0$5.(76 72.<2 -XQ  &KJ &KJ -XQ  &KJ &KJ -XQ  &KJ &KJ -XQ  &KJ &KJ
$&7,9( 672&.6 VWRFN FORVH 'D\
V $&7,9( 672&.6 VWRFN FORVH 'D\
V $&7,9( 672&.6 VWRFN FORVH 'D\
V $&7,9( 672&.6 VWRFN FORVH 'D\
V )76(  SULFHS ZHHN \WG )76(  SULFHS ZHHN \WG )76( 6PDOO&DS SULFHS ZHHN \WG ,QGXVWU\ 6HFWRUV SULFHS ZHHN \WG
WUDGHG P
V SULFH FKDQJH WUDGHG P
V SULFH FKDQJH WUDGHG P
V SULFH FKDQJH WUDGHG P
V SULFH FKDQJH :LQQHUV :LQQHUV :LQQHUV :LQQHUV
$PD]RQFRP    *OHQFRUH    $VPO +ROGLQJ    (LVDL &R    $GPLUDO    2[IRUG ,QVWUXPHQWV    .LQ $QG &DUWD    *DV :DWHU 0XOWLXWLOLWLHV   
1YLGLD    8QLOHYHU    $OOLDQ] 6H 1D 2Q    7R\RWD 0RWRU    %W    8OWUD (OHFWURQLFV +ROGLQJV    +RVWHOZRUOG    *HQHUDO )LQDQFLDO   
$SSOH    $VWUD]HQHFD    6DS 6H 2Q    6RIWEDQN     /RQGRQ 6WRFN ([FKDQJH    7UDLQOLQH    0RWRUSRLQW    1RQOLIH ,QVXUDQFH   
0LFURVRIW    5LR 7LQWR    ,QWHVD 6DQSDROR    )DVW 5HWDLOLQJ &R    6DLQVEXU\ M    $VFHQWLDO    0HGLFD    %HYHUDJHV   
)DFHERRN    %S    %QS 3DULEDV $FWD    0LWVXELVKL 8IM )LQ    6DJH    $LUWHO $IULFD    ,QW 3HUVRQDO )LQDQFH    3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV %LRWHFK   
-SPRUJDQ &KDVH &R    9RGDIRQH    6DQWDQGHU    6RQ\    3HUVKLQJ 6TXDUH +ROGLQJV /WG    $OOLDQ] 7HFKQRORJ\ 7UXVW    7UHDWW    6RIWZDUH &RPSXWHU 6HUYLFHV   
$GYDQFHG 0LFUR 'HYLFHV    5R\DO 'XWFK 6KHOO    /YPK    1LSSRQ <XVHQ .DEXVKLNL .DLVKD    ,QWHUWHN    9ROXWLRQ    5P    6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV   
$OSKDEHW    $QJOR $PHULFDQ    'DLPOHU $J 1D 2Q    7RN\R (OHFWURQ    $YHYD    &KU\VDOLV ,QYHVWPHQWV    )R[WRQV    0RELOH 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV   
$OSKDEHW    *OD[RVPLWKNOLQH    5R\DO 'XWFK 6KHOOD    6XPLWRPR 0LWVXL )LQ    $XWR 7UDGHU    6LULXV 5HDO (VWDWH /G    /VO 3URSHUW\ 6HUYLFHV    5HDO (VWDWH ,QYHVWPHQW 6HUYLF   
$GREH    5R\DO 'XWFK 6KHOO    8QLFUHGLW    .RPDWVX    ([SHULDQ    6\QFRQD    5SV    )RRG 'UXJ 5HWDLOHUV   
.LQJILVKHU    (VVHQWUD    *FS $VVHW %DFNHG RPH )XQG    0HGLD   
%,**(67 029(56 &ORVH 'D\
V 'D\
V %,**(67 029(56 &ORVH 'D\
V 'D\
V %,**(67 029(56 &ORVH 'D\
V 'D\
V %,**(67 029(56 &ORVH 'D\
V 'D\
V
*OD[RVPLWKNOLQH    2[IRUG %LRPHGLFD    3SKH +RWHO    ,QGXVWULDO 7UDQVSRUWDWLRQ   
SULFH FKDQJH FKQJ SULFH FKDQJH FKQJ SULFH FKDQJH FKQJ SULFH FKDQJH FKQJ
8SV 8SV 8SV 8SV /RVHUV /RVHUV /RVHUV /RVHUV
/HQQDU    &KU\VDOLV ,QYHVWPHQWV    %UHQQWDJ 6H 1D 2Q    (LVDL &R    $QJOR $PHULFDQ    'U 0DUWHQV    (VNHQ    ,QGXVWULDO 0HWDOV   
1YLGLD    6LULXV 5HDO (VWDWH /G    *HWLQJH $E 6HU %    0    *OHQFRUH    3URYLGHQW )LQ    7HG %DNHU    0LQLQJ   
'U +RUWRQ    KFDSH    .RQH    6XPFR    $QWRIDJDVWD    +RFKVFKLOG 0LQLQJ    6XSHUGU\    $XWRPRELOHV 3DUWV   
+ U %ORFN    8N &RPPHUFLDO 3URSHUW\ 5HLW    :BBUWVLOBB    .RQDPL    ,QWHUPHGLDWH &DSLWDO    +DPPHUVRQ    6FKURGHU 8N 3XEOLF 3ULYDWH 7UXVW    3HUVRQDO *RRGV   
$ODVND $LU    ,FJ (QWHUSULVH 7UXVW    'HXWVFKH %RHUVH 1D 2Q    &\EHUDJHQW    0HOURVH ,QGXVWULHV    )HUUH[SR    &DUG )DFWRU\    &RQVWUXFWLRQ 0DWHULDOV   
%KS    %ODFNURFN :RUOG 0LQLQJ 7UXVW    (OHFWUD 3ULYDWH (TXLW\    )RRG 3URGXFHUV   
'RZQV 'RZQV 'RZQV 'RZQV
/DQG 6HFXULWLHV    0LWLH    $UWHPLV $OSKD 7UXVW    *HQHUDO ,QGXVWULDOV   
0LFURQ 7HFKQRORJ\    0HOURVH ,QGXVWULHV    +HQNHO $JFRNJDD 9]R    1LSSRQ <XVHQ .DEXVKLNL .DLVKD   
(YUD]    ,EVWRFN    0FND\ 6HFXULWLHV    %DQNV   
$SSOLHG 0DWHULDOV    3URYLGHQW )LQ    $HJRQ    .DZDVDNL .LVHQ .DLVKD   
6PLWK GV    :HWKHUVSRRQ  -G    6LJ    +RXVHKROG *RRGV   
/DP 5HVHDUFK    5HVWDXUDQW    .EF    1LSSRQ 6KHHW *ODVV    
3RO\PHWDO ,QW    &DSLWD    %ORRPVEXU\ 3XEOLVKLQJ    /LIH ,QVXUDQFH   
.OD    (QHUJHDQ    2FL    'DLLFKL /LIH +ROGLQJV   
6WDQGDUG &KDUWHUHG    (QHUJHDQ    %RRW KHQU\    *HQHUDO 5HWDLOHUV   
$OOLDQFH 'DWD 6\VWHPV    $QJOR $PHULFDQ    %QS 3DULEDV $FWD    0LWVXL 2VNOLQHV   
5LR 7LQWR    :RRG MRKQ    2Q 7KH %HDFK    +HDOWK &DUH (TXLS 6HUYLFHV   
%DVHG RQ WKH FRQVWLWXHQWV RI WKH 6 3 %DVHG RQ WKH FRQVWLWXHQWV RI WKH )76(  LQGH[ %DVHG RQ WKH FRQVWLWXHQWV RI WKH )76(XURILUVW  (XUR]RQH LQGH[ %DVHG RQ WKH FRQVWLWXHQWV RI WKH 1LNNHL  LQGH[
%DVHG RQ ODVW ZHHN
V SHUIRUPDQFH †3ULFH DW VXVSHQVLRQ

CURRENCIES
'2//$5 (852 3281' '2//$5 (852 3281' '2//$5 (852 3281' '2//$5 (852 3281'
&ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V
-XQ  &XUUHQF\ 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH -XQ  &XUUHQF\ 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH -XQ  &XUUHQF\ 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH -XQ  &XUUHQF\ 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH 0LG &KDQJH
$UJHQWLQD $UJHQWLQH 3HVR       ,QGRQHVLD ,QGRQHVLDQ 5XSLDK       3RODQG 3ROLVK =ORW\       7KUHH 0RQWK      
$XVWUDOLD $XVWUDOLDQ 'ROODU       ,VUDHO ,VUDHOL 6KHNHO       5RPDQLD 5RPDQLDQ /HX       2QH <HDU      
%DKUDLQ %DKUDLQLQ 'LQDU       -DSDQ -DSDQHVH <HQ       5XVVLD 5XVVLDQ 5XEOH       8QLWHG 6WDWHV 8QLWHG 6WDWHV 'ROODU      
%ROLYLD %ROLYLDQ %ROLYLDQR       2QH 0RQWK       6DXGL $UDELD 6DXGL 5L\DO       2QH 0RQWK      
%UD]LO %UD]LOLDQ 5HDO       7KUHH 0RQWK       6LQJDSRUH 6LQJDSRUH 'ROODU       7KUHH 0RQWK      
&DQDGD &DQDGLDQ 'ROODU       2QH <HDU       6RXWK $IULFD 6RXWK $IULFDQ 5DQG       2QH <HDU      
&KLOH &KLOHDQ 3HVR       .HQ\D .HQ\DQ 6KLOOLQJ       6RXWK .RUHD 6RXWK .RUHDQ :RQ       9LHWQDP 9LHWQDPHVH 'RQJ      
&KLQD &KLQHVH <XDQ       .XZDLW .XZDLWL 'LQDU       6ZHGHQ 6ZHGLVK .URQD       (XURSHDQ 8QLRQ (XUR      
&RORPELD &RORPELDQ 3HVR       0DOD\VLD 0DOD\VLDQ 5LQJJLW       6ZLW]HUODQG 6ZLVV )UDQF       2QH 0RQWK      
&RVWD 5LFD &RVWD 5LFDQ &RORQ       0H[LFR 0H[LFDQ 3HVR       7DLZDQ 1HZ 7DLZDQ 'ROODU       7KUHH 0RQWK      
&]HFK 5HSXEOLF &]HFK .RUXQD       1HZ =HDODQG 1HZ =HDODQG 'ROODU       7KDLODQG 7KDL %DKW       2QH <HDU      
'HQPDUN 'DQLVK .URQH       1LJHULD 1LJHULDQ 1DLUD       7XQLVLD 7XQLVLDQ 'LQDU      
(J\SW (J\SWLDQ 3RXQG       1RUZD\ 1RUZHJLDQ .URQH       7XUNH\ 7XUNLVK /LUD      
+RQJ .RQJ +RQJ .RQJ 'ROODU       3DNLVWDQ 3DNLVWDQL 5XSHH       8QLWHG $UDE (PLUDWHV 8$( 'LUKDP      
+XQJDU\ +XQJDULDQ )RULQW       3HUX 3HUXYLDQ 1XHYR 6RO       8QLWHG .LQJGRP 3RXQG 6WHUOLQJ      
,QGLD ,QGLDQ 5XSHH       3KLOLSSLQHV 3KLOLSSLQH 3HVR       2QH 0RQWK      
5DWHV DUH GHULYHG IURP :0 5HXWHUV 6SRW 5DWHV DQG 0RUQLQJ6WDU ODWHVW UDWHV DW WLPH RI SURGXFWLRQ 6RPH YDOXHV DUH URXQGHG &XUUHQF\ UHGHQRPLQDWHG E\  7KH H[FKDQJH UDWHV SULQWHG LQ WKLV WDEOH DUH DOVR DYDLODEOH DW ZZZ)7FRPPDUNHWVGDWD
UK SERIES
FTSE ACTUARIES SHARE INDICES www.ft.com/equities FT 30 INDEX FTSE SECTORS: LEADERS & LAGGARDS FTSE 100 SUMMARY
3URGXFHG LQ FRQMXQFWLRQ ZLWK WKH ,QVWLWXWH DQG )DFXOW\ RI $FWXDULHV -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  <U $JR +LJK /RZ <HDU WR GDWH SHUFHQWDJH FKDQJHV &ORVLQJ 'D\
V &ORVLQJ 'D\
V
e 6WUOJ 'D\
V (XUR e 6WUOJ e 6WUOJ <HDU 'LY 3( ;' 7RWDO )7          )L[HG /LQH 7HOHFRPPV  3KDUPDFH %LRWHFK  *HQHUDO 5HWDLOHUV  )76(  3ULFH &KDQJH )76(  3ULFH &KDQJH
-XQ  FKJH ,QGH[ -XQ  -XQ  DJR \LHOG &RYHU UDWLR DGM 5HWXUQ )7  'LY <LHOG         ,QGXVWULDO 0HWDOV  +HDOWK &DUH  0RELOH 7HOHFRPPV  , *URXS 3/&   /DQG 6HFXULWLHV *URXS 3/&  
)76(              3( 5DWLR QHW         ,QGXVWULDO 7UDQVSRUW  ,QGXVWULDOV  )RRG 3URGXFHUV  $GPLUDO *URXS 3/&   /HJDO *HQHUDO *URXS 3/&  
)76(              )7  VLQFH FRPSLODWLRQ  KLJK  ORZ %DVH 'DWH  %HYHUDJHV  %DVLF 0DWHULDOV  $HURVSDFH 'HIHQVH  $QJOR $PHULFDQ 3/&   /OR\GV %DQNLQJ *URXS 3/&  
)76(  H[ ,QY &R             )7  KRXUO\ FKDQJHV )76( 6PDOO&DS ,QGH[  5HDO (VW ,QYHVW 7U  &RQVXPHU *RRGV  $QWRIDJDVWD 3/&   /RQGRQ 6WRFN ([FKDQJH *URXS 3/&  
)76(                       +LJK /RZ 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV  (OHFWURQLF (OHF (T  (TXLW\ ,QYHVW ,QVWU  $VKWHDG *URXS 3/&   0 * 3/&  
)76(  H[ ,QYHVWPHQW 7UXVWV                        %DQNV  +HDOWK &DUH (T 6UY  )LQDQFLDO 6HUYLFHV  $VVRFLDWHG %ULWLVK )RRGV 3/&   0HOURVH ,QGXVWULHV 3/&  
)76(  +LJKHU <LHOG             )7 FRQVWLWXHQWV DQG UHFHQW DGGLWLRQVGHOHWLRQV FDQ EH IRXQG DW ZZZIWFRPIW &RQVWUXFW 0DWHULDO  /LIH ,QVXUDQFH  7REDFFR  $VWUD]HQHFD 3/&   0RQGL 3/&  
)76(  /RZHU <LHOG             &KHPLFDOV  121 ),1$1&,$/6 ,QGH[  $XWRPRELOHV 3DUWV  $XWR 7UDGHU *URXS 3/&   1DWLRQDO *ULG 3/&  
)76( 6PDOO&DS            
)76( 6PDOO&DS H[ ,QY &R             FX: EFFECTIVE INDICES 2LO *DV 3URGXFHUV
2LO *DV


5HDO (VW ,QYHVW 6H
*DV :DWHU 0XOWL


(OHFWULFLW\
+RXVHKROG *RRGV +R


$YDVW 3/&   1DWZHVW *URXS 3/&  
$YHYD *URXS 3/&   1H[W 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH            
-XQ  -XQ  0QWK $JR -XQ  -XQ  0QWK $JR 6RIWZDUH &RPS 6HUY  0LQLQJ  7HFK +DUGZDUH (T  $YLYD 3/&   2FDGR *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH H[ ,QY &R             ,QGXVWULDO (QJ  )76(  ,QGH[  /HLVXUH *RRGV  % 0 (XURSHDQ 9DOXH 5HWDLO 6$   3HDUVRQ 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH H[ 0XOWLQDWLRQDOV             8.    6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV  )76( $OO^+<`6KDUH ,QGH[  3HUVRQDO *RRGV  %DH 6\VWHPV 3/&   3HUVKLQJ 6TXDUH +ROGLQJV /7'  
)76( )OHGJOLQJ             6RXUFH %DQN RI (QJODQG 1HZ 6WHUOLQJ (5, EDVH -DQ   2WKHU LQGLFHV EDVH DYHUDJH   0HGLD  )76(  ,QGH[  1RQOLIH ,QVXUDQFH  %DUFOD\V 3/&   3HUVLPPRQ 3/&  
)76( )OHGJOLQJ H[ ,QY &R             ,QGH[ UHEDVHG  IRU IXUWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ DERXW (5,V VHH ZZZEDQNRIHQJODQGFRXN 7UDYHO /HLVXUH  &RQVXPHU 6HUYLFHV  )RRG 'UXJ 5HWDLOHU  %DUUDWW 'HYHORSPHQWV 3/&   3KRHQL[ *URXS +ROGLQJV 3/&  
)76( $OO6PDOO             7HFKQRORJ\  )LQDQFLDOV  2LO (TXLSPHQW 6HUY  %HUNHOH\ *URXS +ROGLQJV 7KH 3/&   3RO\PHWDO ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 3/&  
)76( $OO6PDOO H[ ,QY &R             8WLOLWLHV  2LO *DV 3URGXFHUV  %KS *URXS 3/&   3UXGHQWLDO 3/&  
)76( $,0 $OO6KDUH            
%3 3/&   5HFNLWW %HQFNLVHU *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 7HFKQRORJ\            
)76( $OO6KDUH 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV             FTSE GLOBAL EQUITY INDEX SERIES %ULWLVK $PHULFDQ 7REDFFR 3/&
%ULWLVK /DQG &RPSDQ\ 3/&




5HO[ 3/&
5HQLVKDZ 3/&




)76( $OO6KDUH +HDOWK &DUH             -XQ  1R RI 86  'D\ 0WK <7' 7RWDO
<7' *U 'LY -XQ  1R RI 86  'D\ 0WK <7' 7RWDO <7' *U 'LY %W *URXS 3/&   5HQWRNLO ,QLWLDO 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH )LQDQFLDOV             5HJLRQV FRXQWULHV VWRFNV LQGLFHV    UHWQ
 <LHOG 6HFWRUV VWRFNV LQGLFHV    UHWQ  <LHOG %XQ]O 3/&   5LJKWPRYH 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 5HDO (VWDWH            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS     
 
 2LO (TXLSPHQW 6HUYLFHV         %XUEHUU\ *URXS 3/&   5LR 7LQWR 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH &RQVXPHU 'LVFUHWLRQDU\            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS     
 
 %DVLF 0DWHULDOV         &RFD&ROD +EF $*   5ROOV5R\FH +ROGLQJV 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH &RQVXPHU 6WDSOHV           
)76( *OREDO /DUJH &DS     
 
 &KHPLFDOV         &RPSDVV *URXS 3/&   5R\DO 'XWFK 6KHOO 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDOV            
)76( *OREDO 0LG &DS     
 
 )RUHVWU\ 3DSHU         &UK 3/&   5R\DO 'XWFK 6KHOO 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH %DVLF 0DWHULDOV            
)76( *OREDO 6PDOO &DS     
 
 ,QGXVWULDO 0HWDOV 0LQLQJ         &URGD ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 3/&   5R\DO 0DLO 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH (QHUJ\            
)76( $OO:RUOG     
 
 0LQLQJ         'FF 3/&   6DJH *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 8WLOLWLHV            
)76( :RUOG     
 
 ,QGXVWULDOV         'LDJHR 3/&   6DLQVEXU\ - 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 6RIWZDUH DQG &RPSXWHU 6HUYLFHV            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS H[ 81,7(' .,1*'20 ,Q     
 
 &RQVWUXFWLRQ 0DWHULDOV         (QWDLQ 3/&   6FKURGHUV 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 7HFKQRORJ\ +DUGZDUH DQG (TXLSPHQW            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS H[ 86$     
 
 $HURVSDFH 'HIHQVH         (YUD] 3/&   6FRWWLVK 0RUWJDJH ,QYHVWPHQW 7UXVW 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV (TXLSPHQW            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS H[ -$3$1     
 
 *HQHUDO ,QGXVWULDOV         ([SHULDQ 3/&   6HJUR 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV 6HUYLFH 3URYLGHUV            
)76( *OREDO $OO &DS H[ (XUR]RQH     
 
 (OHFWURQLF (OHFWULFDO (TXLSPHQW         )HUJXVRQ 3/&   6HYHUQ 7UHQW 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH +HDOWK &DUH 3URYLGHUV            
)76( 'HYHORSHG     
 
 ,QGXVWULDO (QJLQHHULQJ         )OXWWHU (QWHUWDLQPHQW 3/&   6PLWK 1HSKHZ 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 0HGLFDO (TXLSPHQW DQG 6HUYLFHV            
)76( 'HYHORSHG $OO &DS     
 
 ,QGXVWULDO 7UDQVSRUWDWLRQ         )UHVQLOOR 3/&   6PLWK 'V 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV DQG %LRWHFKQRORJ\           
)76( 'HYHORSHG /DUJH &DS     
 
 6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV         *OD[RVPLWKNOLQH 3/&   6PLWKV *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH %DQNV            
)76( 'HYHORSHG (XURSH /DUJH &DS     
 
 &RQVXPHU *RRGV         *OHQFRUH 3/&   6PXUILW .DSSD *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH )LQDQFH DQG &UHGLW 6HUYLFHV           
)76( 'HYHORSHG (XURSH 0LG &DS     
 
 $XWRPRELOHV 3DUWV         +DOPD 3/&   6SLUD[6DUFR (QJLQHHULQJ 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QYHVWPHQW %DQNLQJ DQG %URNHUDJH 6HUYLFHV           
)76( 'HY (XURSH 6PDOO &DS     
 
 %HYHUDJHV         +DUJUHDYHV /DQVGRZQ 3/&   6VH 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH &ORVHG (QG ,QYHVWPHQWV           
)76( 1RUWK $PHULFD /DUJH &DS     
 
 )RRG 3URGXFHUV         +LNPD 3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV 3/&   6W -DPHV
V 3ODFH 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH /LIH ,QVXUDQFH            
)76( 1RUWK $PHULFD 0LG &DS     
 
 +RXVHKROG *RRGV +RPH &RQVWUXFWLRQ         +6%& +ROGLQJV 3/&   6WDQGDUG &KDUWHUHG 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 1RQOLIH ,QVXUDQFH            
)76( 1RUWK $PHULFD 6PDOO &DS     
 
 /HLVXUH *RRGV         ,PSHULDO %UDQGV 3/&   6WDQGDUG /LIH $EHUGHHQ 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 5HDO (VWDWH ,QYHVWPHQW DQG 6HUYLFHV            
)76( 1RUWK $PHULFD     
 
 3HUVRQDO *RRGV         ,QIRUPD 3/&   7D\ORU :LPSH\ 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 5HDO (VWDWH ,QYHVWPHQW 7UXVWV            
)76( 'HYHORSHG H[ 1RUWK $PHULFD     
 
 7REDFFR         ,QWHUFRQWLQHQWDO +RWHOV *URXS 3/&   7HVFR 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH $XWRPRELOHV DQG 3DUWV            
)76( -DSDQ /DUJH &DS     
 
 +HDOWK &DUH         ,QWHUPHGLDWH &DSLWDO *URXS 3/&   8QLOHYHU 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH &RQVXPHU 6HUYLFHV            
)76( -DSDQ 0LG &DS     
 
 +HDOWK &DUH (TXLSPHQW 6HUYLFHV         ,QWHUQDWLRQDO &RQVROLGDWHG $LUOLQHV *URXS 6$   8QLWHG 8WLOLWLHV *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH +RXVHKROG *RRGV DQG +RPH &RQVWUXFWLRQ           
)76( *OREDO ZL -$3$1 6PDOO &DS     
 
 3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV %LRWHFKQRORJ\         ,QWHUWHN *URXS 3/&   9RGDIRQH *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH /HLVXUH *RRGV            
)76( -DSDQ     
 
 &RQVXPHU 6HUYLFHV         -G 6SRUWV )DVKLRQ 3/&   :HLU *URXS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 3HUVRQDO *RRGV            
)76( $VLD 3DFLILF /DUJH &DS H[ -DSDQ     
 
 )RRG 'UXJ 5HWDLOHUV         -RKQVRQ 0DWWKH\ 3/&   :KLWEUHDG 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 0HGLD            
)76( $VLD 3DFLILF 0LG &DS H[ -DSDQ     
 
 *HQHUDO 5HWDLOHUV         -XVW (DW 7DNHDZD\&RP 19   :SS 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 5HWDLOHUV            
)76( $VLD 3DFLILF 6PDOO &DS H[ -DSDQ     
 
 0HGLD         .LQJILVKHU 3/&  
)76( $OO6KDUH 7UDYHO DQG /HLVXUH            
)76( $VLD 3DFLILF ([ -DSDQ     
 
 7UDYHO /HLVXUH        
)76( $OO6KDUH %HYHUDJHV            
)76( (PHUJLQJ $OO &DS     
 
 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQ        
)76( $OO6KDUH )RRG 3URGXFHUV      
)76( $OO6KDUH 7REDFFR      
 
 
 
 




)76( (PHUJLQJ /DUJH &DS     
 
 )L[HG /LQH 7HOHFRPPXQLDWLRQV         UK STOCK MARKET TRADING DATA
)76( (PHUJLQJ 0LG &DS     
 
 0RELOH 7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV        
)76( $OO6KDUH &RQVWUXFWLRQ DQG 0DWHULDOV            -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  -XQ  <U $JR
)76( (PHUJLQJ 6PDOO &DS     
 
 8WLOLWLHV        
 2UGHU %RRN 7XUQRYHU P      
)76( (PHUJLQJ (XURSH     
 
 (OHFWULFLW\        
)76( $OO6KDUH $HURVSDFH DQG 'HIHQVH             2UGHU %RRN %DUJDLQV      
)76( /DWLQ $PHULFD $OO &DS     
 
 *DV :DWHU 0XOWLXWLOLWLHV        
)76( $OO6KDUH (OHFWURQLF DQG (OHFWULFDO (TXLSPHQW            2UGHU %RRN 6KDUHV 7UDGHG P      
)76( 0LGGOH (DVW DQG $IULFD $OO &DS     
 
 )LQDQFLDOV        
)76( $OO6KDUH *HQHUDO ,QGXVWULDOV             7RWDO (TXLW\ 7XUQRYHU eP      
)76( *OREDO ZL 81,7(' .,1*'20 $OO &DS ,Q     
 
 %DQNV        
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDO (QJLQHHULQJ            7RWDO 0NW %DUJDLQV      
)76( *OREDO ZL 86$ $OO &DS     
 
 1RQOLIH ,QVXUDQFH        
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDO 6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV            7RWDO 6KDUHV 7UDGHG P      
)76( (XURSH $OO &DS     
 
 /LIH ,QVXUDQFH        
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDO 7UDQVSRUWDWLRQ            
)76( (XUR]RQH $OO &DS     
 
 )LQDQFLDO 6HUYLFHV         † ([FOXGLQJ LQWUDPDUNHW DQG RYHUVHDV WXUQRYHU 8. RQO\ WRWDO DW SP ‡ 8. SOXV LQWUDPDUNHW WXUQRYHU X 8QDYDOLDEOH
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDO 0DWHULDOV            F 0DUNHW FORVHG
)76( ('+(&5LVN (IILFLHQW $OO:RUOG     
 
 7HFKQRORJ\        
)76( $OO6KDUH ,QGXVWULDO 0HWDOV DQG 0LQLQJ            
)76( ('+(&5LVN (IILFLHQW 'HYHORSHG (XURSH     
 
 6RIWZDUH &RPSXWHU 6HUYLFHV        
)76( $OO6KDUH 3UHFLRXV 0HWDOV DQG 0LQLQJ           
2LO *DV     
 
 7HFKQRORJ\ +DUGZDUH (TXLSPHQW        
)76( $OO6KDUH &KHPLFDOV             $OO GDWD SURYLGHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU XQOHVV RWKHUZLVH QRWHG $OO HOHPHQWV OLVWHG DUH LQGLFDWLYH DQG EHOLHYHG
2LO *DV 3URGXFHUV     
 
 $OWHUQDWLYH (QHUJ\        
)76( $OO6KDUH 2LO *DV DQG &RDO             DFFXUDWH DW WKH WLPH RI SXEOLFDWLRQ 1R RIIHU LV PDGH E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU RU WKH )7 7KH )7 GRHV QRW ZDUUDQW QRU
5HDO (VWDWH ,QYHVWPHQW 6HUYLFHV        
)76( 6HFWRU ,QGLFHV 5HDO (VWDWH ,QYHVWPHQW 7UXVWV         JXDUDQWHH WKDW WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ LV UHOLDEOH RU FRPSOHWH 7KH )7 GRHV QRW DFFHSW UHVSRQVLELOLW\ DQG ZLOO QRW EH
1RQ )LQDQFLDOV             )76( *OREDO /DUJH &DS         OLDEOH IRU DQ\ ORVV DULVLQJ IURP WKH UHOLDQFH RQ RU XVH RI WKH OLVWHG LQIRUPDWLRQ
7KH )76( *OREDO (TXLW\ 6HULHV ODXQFKHG LQ  FRQWDLQV WKH )76( *OREDO 6PDOO &DS ,QGLFHV DQG EURDGHU )76( *OREDO $OO &DS ,QGLFHV ODUJHPLGVPDOO FDS DV ZHOO DV WKH HQKDQFHG )76( $OO:RUOG LQGH[ 6HULHV ODUJH )RU DOO TXHULHV HPDLO IWUHDGHUHQTXLULHV#PRUQLQJVWDUFRP
+RXUO\ PRYHPHQWV          +LJKGD\ /RZGD\ PLG FDS  SOHDVH VHH KWWSVUHVHDUFKIWVHUXVVHOOFRP3URGXFWVLQGLFHV+RPHLQGH[ILOWHUJHLV"LQGH[1DPH *(,6$& FXUUHQF\ 86' UWQ &$3 VHJPHQW JOREDOGHYHORSHGÙHPHUJLQJ 7KH WUDGH QDPHV )XQGDPHQWDO ,QGH[p
)76(             DQG 5$),p DUH UHJLVWHUHG WUDGHPDUNV DQG WKH SDWHQWHG DQG SDWHQWSHQGLQJ SURSULHWDU\ LQWHOOHFWXDO SURSHUW\ RI 5HVHDUFK $IILOLDWHV //& 86 3DWHQW 1RV     3DWHQW 3HQGLQJ 3XEO 'DWD SURYLGHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU _ ZZZPRUQLQJVWDUFRXN
)76(             1RV 86$ 86$ 86$ 86 $ :2  :2  $ :2  (31  DQG +. ß('+(&™ß LV D WUDGH PDUN
)76( 6PDOO&DS            RI ('+(& %XVLQHVV 6FKRRO $V RI -DQXDU\ QG  )76( LV EDVLQJ LWV VHFWRU LQGLFHV RQ WKH ,QGXVWULDO &ODVVLILFDWLRQ %HQFKPDUN  SOHDVH VHH ZZZIWVHFRPLFE )RU FRQVWLWXHQW FKDQJHV DQG RWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ DERXW )76(
)76( $OO6KDUH            SOHDVH VHH ZZZIWVHFRP k )76( ,QWHUQDWLRQDO /LPLWHG  $OO 5LJKWV UHVHUYHG ß)76(pß LV D WUDGH PDUN RI WKH /RQGRQ 6WRFN ([FKDQJH *URXS FRPSDQLHV DQG LV XVHG E\ )76( ,QWHUQDWLRQDO /LPLWHG XQGHU OLFHQFH
7LPH RI )76(  'D\
V KLJK 'D\
V /RZ )76(   +LJK  /RZ 
7LPH RI )76( $OO6KDUH 'D\
V KLJK 'D\
V /RZ )76(   +LJK  /RZ 
)XUWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ LV DYDLODEOH RQ KWWSZZZIWVHFRP k )76( ,QWHUQDWLRQDO /LPLWHG  $OO 5LJKWV UHVHUYHG ß)76(pß LV D WUDGH PDUN RI WKH
/RQGRQ 6WRFN ([FKDQJH *URXS FRPSDQLHV DQG LV XVHG E\ )76( ,QWHUQDWLRQDO /LPLWHG XQGHU OLFHQFH á 6HFWRU 3( UDWLRV JUHDWHU WKDQ  DUH QRW VKRZQ
)RU FKDQJHV WR )76( )OHGJOLQJ ,QGH[ FRQVWLWXHQWV SOHDVH UHIHU WR ZZZIWVHFRPLQGH[FKDQJHV â 9DOXHV DUH QHJDWLYH

UK RIGHTS OFFERS UK COMPANY RESULTS UK RECENT EQUITY ISSUES

$PRXQW /DWHVW &RPSDQ\ 7XUQRYHU 3UHWD[ (36S 'LYS 3D\ GD\ 7RWDO ,VVXH ,VVXH 6WRFN &ORVH 0NW
,VVXH SDLG UHQXQ FORVLQJ %UDYHKHDUW ,QYHVWPHQW *URXS 3UH    /        GDWH SULFHS 6HFWRU FRGH 6WRFN SULFHS  +LJK /RZ &DS eP
SULFH XS GDWH +LJK /RZ 6WRFN 3ULFH S RU '3 3RODQG 3UH   / / / /        0$'( 0DGHFRP *URXS 3/&     
7KHUH DUH FXUUHQWO\ QR ULJKWV RIIHUV E\ DQ\ FRPSDQLHV OLVWHG RQ WKH /6( ,QVSHFV *URXS 3UH   /  /         $,0 $5(& $UHFRU 7KHUDSHXWLFV 3/&     
0RQNV ,QYHVWPHQW 7UXVW 7KH 3UH            &'/ ,PSHULDO ; 3/&     
0RQWDQDUR (XURSHDQ 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV 7UXVW 3UH  /  /        $)3 $IULFDQ 3LRQHHU 3/&     
7HOHFRP 3OXV 3UH              $63 $IULFDQ 3LRQHHU 3/&     
  $63 $IULFDQ 3LRQHHU 3/&     
  $,0 %(// %HOOXVFXUD 3/&     
  $,0 75/6 7UHOOXV +HDOWK 3/&     
  $,0 '10 'LDQRPL 3/&     
  $,0 .,7: .LWZDYH *URXS 3/&     
  2&73 2[IRUG &DQQDELQRLG 7HFKQRORJLHV +ROGLQJV 3/&     
  &,= %RXOG 2SSRUWXQLWLHV 3/&     
  $:( $OSKDZDYH ,3 *URXS 3/&     
  $,0 */$1 *ODQWXV +ROGLQJV 3/&     
Figures in £m. Earnings shown basic. Figures in light text are for corresponding period year earlier. §Placing price. *Intoduction. ‡When issued. Annual report/prospectus available at www.ft.com/ir
For more information on dividend payments visit www.ft.com/marketsdata For a full explanation of all the other symbols please refer to London Share Service notes.
14 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

MARKET DATA

FT500: THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES

 :HHN  :HHN  :HHN  :HHN  :HHN  :HHN
6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P 6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P 6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P 6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P 6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P 6WRFN 3ULFH 'D\ &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( 0&DS P
$XVWUDOLD $ )LQODQG é &QW-S5Z\        1RUGHD %N        %ODFN5RFN        0RQGHOH],QW       
$1=        1RNLD        'HQVR       6(%        %RHLQJ        0RQVDQWR       
%+3%LOOWQ        6DPSR$        (DVW-S5Z\        6YQVND+Q        %RRNLQJ +ROGLQJV        0RUJDQ6WO\       
&PZ%N$X        )UDQFH é )DQXF♦        6ZHGEDQN        %ULV0\6T        1HWIOL[       
&6/        $LUEXV *USH        )DVW5HWDLO        7HOLD &R        &DS2QH        1H[W(UD(       
1DW$XV%N        $LU/LTXLGH        )XML +Y\ ,QG        9ROYR        &DUGLQDO+OWK        1LNH       
7HOVWUD        $;$        +LWDFKL        6ZLW]HUODQG 6)U &DUQLYDO        1RUIRON6       
:HVIDUPHUV        %13 3DULE        +RQGD0WU        $%%        &DWHUSLOODU        1RUWKURS       
:HVWSF♦        &KULVWLDQ'LRU        -DSDQ7RE        &UHG6XLVVH        &KDUOHV6FK        1;3       
:RROZRUWKV        &UHG $JU        .'',        1HVWOH        &KDUWHU &RPPV        2FFLG 3HW       
%HOJLXP é 'DQRQH        .H\HQFH        1RYDUWLV        &KHYURQ &RUS        2UDFOH       
$Q%VK,Q%Y       (')        0LWVE&S        5LFKHPRQW        &KXEE        3HSVLFR       
.%& *US        (QJLH 6$        0LWVXE(VW        5RFKH        &LJQD♦        3HUULJR♦       
(VVLORU/X[RWWLFD♦        0LWVXELVKL(OH        6ZLVV 5H        &LVFR        3IL]HU       
%UD]LO 5
+HUPHV ,QWO        0LWVXL)XG        6ZLVVFRP        &LWLJURXS        3KLOOLSV       
$PEHY       
/2UHDO        0LW8)-)LQ        8%6        &0( *US        3KLO0RUULV       
%UDGHVFR       
/90+        0L]XKR )LQ        =XULFK )LQ        &RFD&ROD♦        31&)LQ       
&LHOR       
2UDQJH        0XUDWD 0IJ        &RJQL]DQW        33* ,QGV       
,WDX+OG)LQ        7DLZDQ 17
3HUQRG5LF        1LSSRQ 7 7        &ROJW3OP        3URFW*PEO       
3HWUREUDV        &KXQJKZD 7HOHFRP       
5HQDXOW        1LSSRQ77        &RPFDVW        3UXGQWO       
9DOH        )RUPRVD 3HW&KHP       
6DIUDQ        1LVVDQ 0W        &RQRF3KLO        3XEO6WRU♦       
&DQDGD & +RQ+DL3UF       
6DQRIL        1RPXUD        &RUQLQJ♦        4XDOFRPP♦       
%DXVFK +OWK        0HGLD7HN       
6DQW *EQ        1SSQ 6WO        &RVWFR        5D\WKHRQ       
%&(        7DLZDQ6HP♦       
6FKQHLGHU        3DQDVRQLF        &URZQ&VWO        5HJHQ 3KDUP       
%N0RQWUO        6HYHQ ,        7KDLODQG 7+% &6;        6 3 *OREDO       
6RF*HQ       
%N1YD6        6KQ(WVX&K♦        377 ([SORU        &96        6DOHVIRUFH       
7RWDO       
%URRNILHOG       6RIWEDQN        8QLWHG $UDE (PLUDWHV 'KV 'DQDKHU        6FKOPEUJ♦       
8QLEDLO5       
&DQDG3F5        6RQ\        (PLUWHVWHOH        'HHUH        6HPSUD (QHUJ\       
9LQFL       
&DQ,PS        6XPLWRPR)        'HOWD        6KUZLQ:LOO       
9LYHQGL        8QLWHG .LQJGRP S
&DQ1DW5V       7DNHGD 3K        'HYRQ (QHUJ\        6LPRQ3URS       
*HUPDQ\ é $VF%U)G♦       
&DQ1DW5\♦        7RNLR0DULQH        'LVF)LQ6HUY        6RXWK&SU       
$OOLDQ]        $VWUD=HQ       
(QEULGJH        7R\RWD        'LVQH\        6WDUEXFNV       
%$6)        $YLYD       
*W:HV/LI        'RPLQ5HV        6WDWH6W       
%D\HU        0H[LFR 0H[ %DUFOD\V       
,PS2LO♦        'XNH(QHU        6WU\NHU       
%0:        $PHU0YO        %3       
0DQXOLIH        'X3RQW        6\FKURQ\ )LQ       
&RQWLQHQWDO        )(06$ 8%'       %U$P7RE       
1XWULHQ        (DWRQ        70RELOH86       
'DLPOHU        :DO0UW0H[        %7       
5\O%N&        H%D\        7DUJHW       
'HXW %DQN        1HWKHUODQGV é &RPSDVV       
6XQFRU (Q♦        (FRODE        7( &RQQHFW       
'HXW 7ONP        $60/ +OG        'LDJHR       
7KP5HXW        (PHUVRQ        7HVOD 0WUV       
'HXWV3RVW        +HLQHNHQ        *OD[R6PK♦       
7QWR'RP        (2* 5HV        7H[DV,QVWU       
(21        ,1*        *OHQFRUH       
7UQ&DQ        (TXLW\5HV73        7KH7UYHOHUV♦       
)UHVHQLXV 0HG        8QLOHYHU        +6%&       
&KLQD +. ,PSHULDO %UDQGV        ([HORQ        7KUPR)VKU       
)UHVHQLXV 6(        1RUZD\ .U
$JULF%N&K♦        /O\GV%NJ        ([[RQ0E        7-; &RV       
+HQNHO.JD$        '1%       
%N &KLQD♦        1DWO *ULG        )DFHERRN        7UXLVW )LQDQFLDO &RUS       
/LQGH        (TXLQRU       
%NRI&RPP        1DWZHVW *URXS        )HGH[        8QLRQ3DF       
0XHQFK5NY        7HOHQRU       
%2( 7HFK        3UXGHQWLDO        )RUG0WU        836 %       
6$3       
&K &RPV &RQV♦        4DWDU 45 5HFNLWW%        )UDQNOLQ        86%DQFRUS       
6LHPHQV       
&K (YUEUJKW        4DWDU1W%N        5(/;        *HQ'\Q        8WG+OWKFUH       
9RONVZJQ       
&K 5DLO &RQV        5XVVLD 58% 5LR7LQWR        *HQ(OHFWULF       9DOHUR(QJ\      
&K 5DLO *S        +RQJ .RQJ +. *HQ0LOOV        9HUL]RQ       
*]SUP QHIW        5ROOV5R\FH       
&K&RQVW%N        $,$        *HQ0RWRUV        9HUWH[3KDUP       
/XNRLO        5\O'6KO$       
&KLQD 9DQNH        %2& +ROG        *LOHDG6FL♦        9) &S      
0PF1UOVN1FNO        6WDQG&K       
&KLQD&LWLF        &K 26/QG ,QY        *ROGP6FKV♦        9LDFRP&%6       
1RYDWHN        7HVFR♦       
&KLQD/LIH        &KQJ.QJ        +DOOLEXUWRQ        9LVD ,QF       
5RVQHIW        9RGDIRQH       
&KLQD0%DQN        &LWLF /WG♦        +&$ +ROG♦        :DOJUHHQ       
6EHUEDQN        :33♦       
&KLQD0RE        &LWLF 6HFV        +HZ3DFN        :DO0DUW6WR       
6XUJXWQHIWHJDV        8QLWHG 6WDWHV RI $PHULFD 
&KLQD3F,QV♦■        &. +XWFKLVRQ        +LOWRQ:ZGH        :HOOV)DUJR       
&122&♦        6DXGL $UDELD 65 VW& )R[ $       
&K0LQVKHQJ♦        +RPH'HS        :LOOLDPV &RV♦       
+DQJ6HQJ        $O5DMKL%QN        0       
&K0UFK6HFV        +RQ\ZHOO        <XP%UQGV       
+. ([F &OU        1DWQOFRPEQN        $EERWW/E       
&KQD 8WG &RPV        +XPDQD,QF        9HQH]XHOD 9()
075♦        6DXGL%DVLF       $EEYLH       
&K6KHQ(J\        ,%0        %FR GH 9Q]OD       
6DQGV&K        6DXGL7HOHF        $FFHQWXUH       
&K6KSEOGQJ        ,OOLQRLV7RRO        %FR 3URYQFO      
6+. 3URSV        6LQJDSRUH 6 $GREH       
&K6W&RQ(QJ        ,OOXPLQD        0UFQWO 6UYFV       
7HQFHQW        '%6♦        $(3       
&K8QF+.        ,QWFQWO ([FK       
-DUGQ0W 86        $HWQD       
&11& ,QWO        ,QGLD 5V ,QWHO        &ORVLQJ SULFHV DQG KLJKV ORZV DUH LQ WUDGHG FXUUHQF\ ZLWK YDULDWLRQV IRU WKDW
2&%&♦        $IODF       
&65        %KDUWLDUWO        ,QWXLW        FRXQWU\ LQGLFDWHG E\ VWRFN PDUNHW FDSLWDOLVDWLRQ LV LQ 86' +LJKV ORZV DUH
6LQJ7HO        $LU3URG       
'DTLQ        +')& %N        -RKQ -RKQ        EDVHG RQ LQWUDGD\ WUDGLQJ RYHU D UROOLQJ  ZHHN SHULRG
82%♦        $OH[LRQ       
*XRVHQ6HF        +LQG 8QLOHYU        -RKQVRQ&Q        ♦ H[GLYLGHQG
$OOVWDWH       
+DLWRQJ6HFV        +VQJ'HY)LQ        6RXWK $IULFD 5 -30UJQ&K       
$OSKDEHW        ■ H[FDSLWDO UHGLVWULEXWLRQ
+QJ]K +LN9'7        ,&,&, %N        )LUVWUDQG        .LPE&ODUN♦       
$OWULD         SULFH DW WLPH RI VXVSHQVLRQ
+XQQJ 3ZU        ,QIRV\V♦        071 *US        .LQGHU0       
$PD]RQ      
,0 %DRWRX 6WO        ,7&        1DVSHUV 1        .UDIW +HLQ]♦       
$PHU$LU       
,Q &P%N&K        / 7        6RXWK .RUHD .5: .URJHU       
$PHU([SU       
,QGVWUO%N        2LO1DW*DV        +\XQG0RELV        / %UDQGV       
$PHU,QW*US       
.ZHLFKRZ        5HOLDQFH,Q        .RUHD(OH3ZU        /DV9HJDV6G       
$PHU7RZHU       
0LGHD        6%, 1HZ$        6. +\QL[       /LEHUW\*EO       
$PJHQ       
1HZ &K /LIH ,QV        6XQ3KUP,QGV        6PVXQJ(O        /LOO\ (       
$QWKHP♦       
3HWUR&KLQD        7DWD &RQV        6SDLQ é /LQGH       
$RQ &S       
3LQJ$Q,QV        ,VUDHO ,/6 %%9$        /RFNKHHG♦       
$SSOH       
3QJ$Q%QN        7HYD3KD        %FR6DQWGU        /RZHV       
$SWLY       
3ZU &RQV &RUS        &DL[D%QN        /\RQGHOO       
,WDO\ é $UFKHU'DQ       
6DLF0WU        ,EHUGUROD        0DUDWKRQ 3WO       
(QHO        $7 7       
6KHQZDQ+RQJ        0DUVK 0       
(1,        ,QGLWH[        $XWRP'DWD♦       
6KJ3GJ%N        5HSVRO        0DVWHU&DUG       
*HQHUDOL        $YDJR 7HFK       
6LQRSHF &RUS♦        7HOHIRQLFD        0F'RQDOG
V       
,QW63DROR        %DNHU+X       
6LQRSHF 2LO        0F.HVVRQ♦       
8QLFUHG        6ZHGHQ 6.U %DQN$P♦       
'HQPDUN NU 0HGWURQLF       
-DSDQ g $WODV&SFR%        %D[WHU♦       
'DQVNH%N        0HUFN       
$VWHOODV3K        (ULFVVRQ        %HFWRQ'LFN♦       
0ROOHU0UVN        0HWOLIH       
%ULGJHVWQH       + 0        %HUNVK+DW      
1RYR%        0LFURVRIW      
&DQRQ        ,QYHVWRU        %LRJHQ       
0QVWU %YUJ       
%N1<0HOQ       

FT 500: TOP 20 FT 500: BOTTOM 20 BONDS: HIGH YIELD & EMERGING MARKET BONDS: GLOBAL INVESTMENT GRADE
&ORVH 3UHY 'D\ :HHN 0RQWK &ORVH 3UHY 'D\ :HHN 0RQWK 'D\
V 0WK
V 6SUHDG 'D\
V 0WK
V 6SUHDG
SULFH SULFH FKDQJH FKDQJH  FKDQJH FKDQJH  FKDQJH  SULFH SULFH FKDQJH FKDQJH  FKDQJH FKDQJH  FKDQJH  5HG 5DWLQJV %LG %LG FKJH FKJH YV 5HG 5DWLQJV %LG %LG FKJH FKJH YV
6DLF0WU        &LWLJURXS        -XQ  GDWH &RXSRQ 6 0 ) SULFH \LHOG \LHOG \LHOG 86 -XQ  GDWH &RXSRQ 6 0 ) SULFH \LHOG \LHOG \LHOG 86
0LGHD        6RXWK&SU        +LJK <LHOG 86 86
.H\HQFH        /XNRLO        +&$ ,QF   %% %D %%      )OHHW%RVWRQ )LQDQFLDO &RUS   %%% %DD $     
:HVIDUPHUV        %DNHU+X        +LJK <LHOG (XUR 7KH *ROGPDQ 6DFKV *URXS ,QF   %%% $ $     
,QIRV\V        &RUQLQJ        $OGHVD )LQDQFLDO 6HUYLFHV 6$     %      1DWLRQV%DQN &RUS   %%% %DD $     
$PD]RQ        *OHQFRUH        *7( //&   %%% %DD $     
'DQDKHU        6FKOPEUJ        (PHUJLQJ 86 8QLWHG 8WLOLWLHV 3/&   %%% %DD $     
+LQG 8QLOHYU        $PHU,QW*US        3HUX   %%% $ %%%      %DUFOD\V %DQN SOF   $ $ $     
%7        )UDQNOLQ        &RORPELD    %DD %%%     
%UD]LO    %D %%      (XUR
7KUPR)VKU        0HWOLIH        (OHFWULFLWH GH )UDQFH (')   $ $ $     
3HWUR&KLQD        (TXLQRU        3RODQG    $ $     
0H[LFR    %DD %%%      7KH *ROGPDQ 6DFKV *URXS ,QF   %%% $ $     
)DQXF        ,QGVWUO%N        7KH *ROGPDQ 6DFKV *URXS ,QF   %%% $ $     
$GREH        2UDFOH        7XUNH\    %D %%     
7XUNH\    % %%      )LQODQG   $$ $D $$     
-DUGQ0W 86        $RQ &S       
3HUX   %%% $ %%%      <HQ
0XUDWD 0IJ        7UXLVW )LQDQFLDO &RUS       
5XVVLD    %DD %%%      0H[LFR    %DD %%%     
&6/        :HOOV)DUJR       
.RUHD(OH3ZU        1XWULHQ        %UD]LO    %D %%      e 6WHUOLQJ
6KQ(WVX&K        +DOOLEXUWRQ        (PHUJLQJ (XUR LQQRJ\ )LQ %9   %%% %DD $     
&KQD 8WG &RPV        &LWLF /WG        %UD]LO   %% %D %%      LQQRJ\ )LQ %9   %%% %DD $     
6XUJXWQHIWHJDV        86%DQFRUS        0H[LFR   %%% $ %%%      ,QWHUDFWLYH 'DWD 3ULFLQJ DQG 5HIHUHQFH 'DWD //& DQ ,&( 'DWD 6HUYLFHV FRPSDQ\ 86  GHQRPLQDWHG ERQGV 1< FORVH DOO RWKHU /RQGRQ
0H[LFR    %DD %%%      FORVH 6  6WDQGDUG 3RRUÜV 0  0RRG\ÜV )  )LWFK
%DVHG RQ WKH )7 *OREDO  FRPSDQLHV LQ ORFDO FXUUHQF\ %DVHG RQ WKH )7 *OREDO  FRPSDQLHV LQ ORFDO FXUUHQF\
%XOJDULD   %%% %DD %%%     
,QWHUDFWLYH 'DWD 3ULFLQJ DQG 5HIHUHQFH 'DWD //& DQ ,&( 'DWD 6HUYLFHV FRPSDQ\ 86  GHQRPLQDWHG ERQGV 1< FORVH DOO
RWKHU /RQGRQ FORVH 6  6WDQGDUG 3RRUÜV 0  0RRG\ÜV )  )LWFK

INTEREST RATES: OFFICIAL BOND INDICES VOLATILITY INDICES GILTS: UK CASH MARKET
-XQ  5DWH &XUUHQW 6LQFH /DVW 0QWK $JR <HDU $JR 'D\
V 0RQWK
V <HDU 5HWXUQ 5HWXUQ -XQ  'D\ &KQJ 3UHY  ZN KLJK  ZN ORZ 5HG &KDQJH LQ <LHOG  :HHN $PQW
86 )HG )XQGV      ,QGH[ FKDQJH FKDQJH FKDQJH  PRQWK  \HDU 9,;      -XQ  3ULFH e <LHOG 'D\ :HHN 0RQWK <HDU +LJK /RZ eP
86 3ULPH      0DUNLW ,%R[[ 9;'      7U SF
         
86 'LVFRXQW      $%) 3DQ$VLD XQKHGJHG       9;1      7U SF
         
(XUR 5HSR      &RUSRUDWHV e       9'$;      7U SF
         
8. 5HSR      &RUSRUDWHV       † &%2( 9,; 6 3  LQGH[ 2SWLRQV 9RODWLOLW\ 9;' '-,$ ,QGH[ 2SWLRQV 9RODWLOLW\ 9;1 1$6'$4 ,QGH[ 2SWLRQV 9RODWLOLW\ 7U SF
         
-DSDQ 2
QLJKW &DOO      &RUSRUDWHVé       ‡ 'HXWVFKH %RUVH 9'$; '$; ,QGH[ 2SWLRQV 9RODWLOLW\ 7U SF
         
6ZLW]HUODQG /LERU 7DUJHW      (XUR]RQH 6RYé       7U SF
         
*LOWV e       BONDS: BENCHMARK GOVERNMENT 7U SF
         
INTEREST RATES: MARKET *OREDO ,QIODWLRQ/NG       5HG %LG %LG 'D\ FKJ :N FKJ 0RQWK <HDU 7U SF
         
2YHU &KDQJH 2QH 7KUHH 6L[ 2QH 0DUNLW L%R[[ e 1RQ*LOWV       'DWH &RXSRQ 3ULFH <LHOG \LHOG \LHOG FKJ \OG FKJ \OG 7U SF
         
-XQ  /LERU -XQ  QLJKW 'D\ :HHN 0RQWK PRQWK PRQWK PRQWK \HDU 2YHUDOO        $XVWUDOLD         7U SF
         
86 /LERU         2YHUDOO e               7U SF
         
(XUR /LERU         2YHUDOOé       $XVWULD         7U SF
         
e /LERU         7UHDVXULHV                7U SF
         
6ZLVV )U /LERU      )76( %HOJLXP         *LOWV EHQFKPDUNV QRQUXPS XQGDWHG VWRFNV &ORVLQJ PLGSULFH LQ SRXQGV SHU e QRPLQDO RI VWRFN
<HQ /LERU      6WHUOLQJ &RUSRUDWH e       &DQDGD        
(XUR (XULERU      (XUR &RUSRUDWH é               GILTS: UK FTSE ACTUARIES INDICES
6WHUOLQJ &'V     (XUR (PHUJLQJ 0NWV é       'HQPDUN        
86 &'V     (XUR]RQH *RYW %RQG               3ULFH ,QGLFHV 'D\
V 7RWDO 5HWXUQ 5HWXUQ
(XUR &'V     )L[HG &RXSRQ -XQ  FKJ  5HWXUQ  PRQWK  \HDU <LHOG
&5(',7 ,1',&(6 'D\
V :HHN
V 0RQWK
V 6HULHV 6HULHV )LQODQG        
         8S WR  <HDUV      
6KRUW  'D\V 2QH 7KUHH 6L[ 2QH ,QGH[ FKDQJH FKDQJH FKDQJH KLJK ORZ     <HDUV      
-XQ  WHUP QRWLFH PRQWK PRQWK PRQWK \HDU 0DUNLW L7UD[[ )UDQFH        
    <HDUV      
(XUR             &URVVRYHU <              
    <HDUV      
6WHUOLQJ         (XURSH <       *HUPDQ\       
 2YHU  <HDUV      
86 'ROODU             -DSDQ <              
 $OO VWRFNV      
-DSDQHVH <HQ             6HQLRU )LQDQFLDOV <              
/LERU UDWHV FRPH IURP ,&( VHH ZZZWKHLFHFRP DQG DUH IL[HG DW DP 8. WLPH 2WKHU GDWD VRXUFHV 86  (XUR &'V         'D\
V 0RQWK <HDU
V 7RWDO 5HWXUQ 5HWXUQ
0DUNLW &'; *UHHFH        
7XOOHWW 3UHERQ 6'5 86 'LVFRXQW ,0) (21,$ (&% 6ZLVV /LERU 61% (8521,$ 521,$ 621,$ :0%$ ,QGH[ /LQNHG -XQ  FKJ  FKJ  FKJ  5HWXUQ  PRQWK  \HDU
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV <      
,UHODQG         8S WR  <HDUV       
1WK $PHU +LJK <OG <      
        2YHU  \HDUV       
1WK $PHU ,QY *UDGH <      
          \HDUV       
:HEVLWHV PDUNLWFRP IWVHFRP $OO LQGLFHV VKRZQ DUH XQKHGJHG &XUUHQFLHV DUH VKRZQ LQ EUDFNHWV DIWHU WKH LQGH[ QDPHV
,WDO\          2YHU  \HDUV       
         $OO VWRFNV       
       
COMMODITIES www.ft.com/commodities BONDS: INDEX-LINKED         <LHOG ,QGLFHV -XQ  -XQ  <U DJR -XQ  -XQ  <U DJR
-DSDQ          <UV     <UV   
(QHUJ\ 3ULFH &KDQJH $JULFXOWXUDO &DWWOH )XWXUHV 3ULFH &KDQJH 3ULFH <LHOG 0RQWK 9DOXH 1R RI
         <UV     <UV   
&UXGH 2LO† -XQ   &RUQ♦ -XO   -XQ  -XQ  3UHY UHWXUQ VWRFN 0DUNHW VWRFNV
         <UV   
%UHQW &UXGH 2LO‡   :KHDW♦ -XO   &DQ 
       
       
5%2% *DVROLQH† -XQ   6R\EHDQV♦ -XO   )U 
       
1HWKHUODQGV         LQIODWLRQ  LQIODWLRQ 
+HDWLQJ 2LO†   6R\EHDQV 0HDO♦ -XO   6ZH 
       
        5HDO \LHOG -XQ  'XU \UV 3UHYLRXV <U DJR -XQ  'XU \UV 3UHYLRXV <U DJR
1DWXUDO *DV† -XQ   &RFRD ,&( /LIIH? -XO   8. 
       
(WKDQRO♦   &RFRD ,&( 86♥ -XO   1HZ =HDODQG         8S WR  \UV        
8. 
       
8UDQLXP†   &RIIHH5REXVWD? -XO           2YHU  \UV        
8. 
       
&DUERQ (PLVVLRQV‡   &RIIHH $UDELFD♥ -XO            \UV        
86 
       
:KLWH 6XJDU?   1RUZD\         2YHU  \UV        
'LHVHO†   86 
       
6XJDU ♥           $OO VWRFNV        
%DVH 0HWDOV ♠ /0(  0RQWKV 5HSUHVHQWDWLYH VWRFNV IURP HDFK PDMRU PDUNHW 6RXUFH 0HULOO /\QFK *OREDO %RQG ,QGLFHV á /RFDO FXUUHQFLHV â 7RWDO PDUNHW
$OXPLQLXP   &RWWRQ♥ -XO   3RUWXJDO         6HH )76( ZHEVLWH IRU PRUH GHWDLOV ZZZIWVHFRPSURGXFWVLQGLFHVJLOWV
YDOXH ,Q OLQH ZLWK PDUNHW FRQYHQWLRQ IRU 8. *LOWV LQIODWLRQ IDFWRU LV DSSOLHG WR SULFH IRU RWKHU PDUNHWV LW LV DSSOLHG WR SDU
$OXPLQLXP $OOR\   2UDQJH -XLFH♥ -XO           k 7UDGHZHE 0DUNHWV //& $OO ULJKWV UHVHUYHG 7KH 7UDGHZHE )76(
DPRXQW
&RSSHU   3DOP 2LO♣   6SDLQ         *LOW &ORVLQJ 3ULFHV LQIRUPDWLRQ FRQWDLQHG KHUHLQ LV SURSULHWDU\ WR
/HDG   /LYH &DWWOH♣ -XQ   BONDS: TEN YEAR GOVT SPREADS         7UDGHZHE PD\ QRW EH FRSLHG RU UHGLVWULEXWHG LV QRW ZDUUDQWHG WR EH
1LFNHO   )HHGHU &DWWOH♣ 0D\   6ZHGHQ         DFFXUDWH FRPSOHWH RU WLPHO\ DQG GRHV QRW FRQVWLWXWH LQYHVWPHQW DGYLFH
7LQ   /HDQ +RJV♣ -XO   6SUHDG 6SUHDG 6SUHDG 6SUHDG         7UDGHZHE LV QRW UHVSRQVLEOH IRU DQ\ ORVV RU GDPDJH WKDW PLJKW UHVXOW IURP WKH XVH RI WKLV LQIRUPDWLRQ
=LQF   %LG YV YV %LG YV YV        
 &KJ  &KJ <LHOG %XQG 7%RQGV <LHOG %XQG 7%RQGV 6ZLW]HUODQG        $OO GDWD SURYLGHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU XQOHVV RWKHUZLVH QRWHG $OO HOHPHQWV OLVWHG DUH LQGLFDWLYH DQG EHOLHYHG DFFXUDWH
3UHFLRXV 0HWDOV 30 /RQGRQ )L[
*ROG   -XQ  0RQWK <HDU         DW WKH WLPH RI SXEOLFDWLRQ 1R RIIHU LV PDGH E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU LWV VXSSOLHUV RU WKH )7 1HLWKHU WKH )7 QRU
$XVWUDOLD    1HWKHUODQGV   
6LOYHU 86 FHQWV   6 3 *6&, 6SW    8QLWHG .LQJGRP        0RUQLQJVWDUÜV VXSSOLHUV ZDUUDQW RU JXDUDQWHH WKDW WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ LV UHOLDEOH RU FRPSOHWH 1HLWKHU WKH )7 QRU
$XVWULD    1HZ =HDODQG   
3ODWLQXP   '- 8%6 6SRW    &DQDGD    1RUZD\            0RUQLQJVWDUÜV VXSSOLHUV DFFHSW UHVSRQVLELOLW\ DQG ZLOO QRW EH OLDEOH IRU DQ\ ORVV DULVLQJ IURP WKH UHOLDQFH RQ WKH
3DOODGLXP   75&& &5% 75    'HQPDUN    3RUWXJDO            XVH RI WKH OLVWHG LQIRUPDWLRQ )RU DOO TXHULHV HPDLO IWUHDGHUHQTXLULHV#PRUQLQJVWDUFRP
%XON &RPPRGLWLHV /(%$ (8$ &DUERQ    )LQODQG    6SDLQ           
,URQ 2UH   /(%$ 8. 3RZHU    *HUPDQ\    6ZHGHQ    8QLWHG 6WDWHV         'DWD SURYLGHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU _ ZZZPRUQLQJVWDUFRXN
*OREDO&2$/ 5% ,QGH[   ,UHODQG    6ZLW]HUODQG           
%DOWLF 'U\ ,QGH[   ,WDO\    8QLWHG .LQJGRP           
Sources: † NYMEX, ‡ ECX/ICE, ♦ CBOT, ? ICE Liffe, ♥ ICE Futures, ♣ CME, ♠ LME/London Metal Exchange.* Latest prices, $ -DSDQ    8QLWHG 6WDWHV           
unless otherwise stated. ,QWHUDFWLYH 'DWD 3ULFLQJ DQG 5HIHUHQFH 'DWD //& DQ ,&( 'DWD 6HUYLFHV FRPSDQ\ ,QWHUDFWLYH 'DWD 3ULFLQJ DQG 5HIHUHQFH 'DWD //& DQ ,&( 'DWD 6HUYLFHV FRPSDQ\
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 15

FINANCIAL TIMES SHARE SERVICE

Main Market
 :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO
3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V
$HURVSDFH 'HIHQFH %UHZ'OSK        3KLOLSV é        ,79        +DPPHUVQ        )HUJXVRQ       
&W\/RQ,QY        3=&XVQV        3HDUVRQ        +LEHUQLD é        +D\V       
$YRQ 5XEEHU       
%$( 6\V        &ORVH%UV        5HFNLWW%?        /DQG6HFV        +RPHVYH       
'%$* é        5HGURZ       
0(',$ /RQGRQ0WUF        +RZGHQ-Q\       
&KHPULQJ       
+DUJU /DQV        6XSHUGU\ 3OF        5HDFK 3/&        0F.D\6HF        ,QWHUWHN       
0HJJLWW       
5ROOV5R\FH?        ,QGYDUGQ 6.U        7D\ORU:P        0HGLD 3DODFH &DS        .LQ DQG &DUWD       
,&*        7HG%DNHU        5(/; 3/&?        3ULP\+WK        0HDUV*S       
$XWRPRELOHV 3DUWV ,QYHVWHF        9LVWU\ *URXS        6(*52        0HQ]LHV-       
5LJKWPRYH 3/&       
)RUG0WU ?        -XSLWHU        6KDIWEU\        0LWLH       
,QGXVWULDO (QJLQHHULQJ 679 *US       
/LRQWUXVW        7KP5HXW &?        7RZQ &WU♦        5HQHZL       
%DQNV %RG\FRWH       
/6( *S        :33?♦        7ULWD[%%2;        5HQWRNLO       
$1= $?        &DVWLQJV       
0 * 3OF        :NVSDFH        5LFDUGR       
%FR6DQW        *RRGZLQ        0LQLQJ
3DUDJRQ        5HDO (VWDWH ,QY 6HUYLFHV 5EUW:OWV       
%QN*HRUJLD        +LOO 6P♦       
3URYLGQW        $QJOR$PHU        &DS &RXQW        536       
%DQN,UH *US é        ,0,       
5DWKEQ%U        $QJOR3DFLI        &/6        6,*       
%N1YD6 &?        0HOURVH,QG       
5HFRUG        $Q*ROG$ 5        *UDLQJHU        9S       
%DUFOD\V?        5HQROG       
6 8♦        $QWRIDJDVWD        +DUZRUWK *US       
&DQ,PS &?       
6FKURGHU        5+,0♦        %+3 *URXS       
7HFK  +DUGZDUH
+6%&?        5RWRUN        +HOLFDO        6SLUHQW&0       
19        (95$=♦        +. /DQG        
/O\GV%NJ?        6HYHUIG       
6KLUHV ,QFRPH        )UHVQLOOR        /RQ $VVF        7HFK  6RIWZDUH 6HUYLFHV
1:*?        7ULIDVW       
6WUG /LIH $EHU        *OHQFRUH?        0DFDX3US        &RPSXWFQW♦       
3HUP76% é        9LWHF       
73 ,&$3        +DUPRQ\ 5        0QWYLHZ        0LFUR)RF       
5\O%N& &?        :HLU         
:ONU&ULS        3HWURSYOVN      5DYHQ 3URSHUW\ *URXS /WG        1&& *US       
6HFXUH 7UXVW %DQN       
,QGXVWULDO *HQHUDO 3RO\PW,QWO        5DYHQ5 3UI        6DJH       
6WDQG&K?        )RRG %HYHUDJHV 5LR 7LQWR?       
3I        $QJOR(VW        &RDWV *URXS        6DIHVWUH        7ULDG*S       
-DUGQ0W ?        7UR\ 5HV $        6DYLOOV       
3I        $VF%U)G?♦        7HOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV
7QWR'RP &?        %DUU$*        0DFIUOQH        2LO *DV 6LULXV5(       
6PLWK '6        6PDUW-        %7?       
:HVWSF $?♦        %ULWYLF        %3?       
6PLWKV        6W0RGZHQ        7HOH3OXV       
&DUUV*URXS        &DLUQ(QJ        9RGDIRQH *S?       
%DVLF 5HVRXUFH ([ 0LQLQJ 6PXUI.DS        8,       
&RFD&ROD +%&        ([[RQ0E ?       
)HUUH[SR♦        9HVXYLXV        8QLWH *S        7REDFFR
&UDQVZN        *D]SURP 3-6& $'5        
0RQGL       
'HYUR♦        ,QGXVWULDO 7UDQVSRUWDWLRQ *HR3DUN         5HWDLOHUV %U$P7RE?       
&KHPLFDOV 'LDJHR?        %UDHPDU        +DUERXU (QHUJ\        $2 :RUOG        ,PSHULDO %U?       
&DUFOR        *UQFRUH        (XURWXQQO é        +HOOHQ3HW é        &DII\QV       
+LOWRQ)G♦        +XQWLQJ       
7UDYHO /HLVXUH
&URGD        )LVKHU -        'DLU\ )P        
.HUU\ é        ,PS2LO &?♦         +OGJ       
(OHPQWLV        2FHDQ:LO        'LJQLW\       
3UHP)GV        3-6& /XNRLO $'5         &DUQLYDO       
-RKQVQ 0WWKH\        5R\DO0DLO        'XQHOP       
5($        5\O'6KO$?        &RPSDVV?       
9LFWUH[        +DOIRUGV       
6WFN6SLULW        ,QVXUDQFH %        'DODWD +RWHO       
,QFKFDSH♦        HDV\-HW       
&RQVWUXFWLRQ 0DWHULDOV 7DWH /\O        $GPLUDO        6HSODW        -'6SRUWV)       
$OXPDVF        8QLOHYHU        $YLYD?        7UQ&DQ &?        )LUVW*US       
.LQJILVKHU♦        )OXWWHU (QWHUWDLQPHQW       
%RRW+        19        %HD]OH\        7XOORZ 2LO 3/&        0DUNV 6S       
&5+        &KHVQDU        :RRG *URXS -RKQ 3/&        )XOOHU $       
+HDOWK &DUH (TXLS 6HUYLFHV 0RUULVRQ :P♦        *R$KHDG       
*DOIUG7        'LUHFW /LQH        1H[W       
.LHU*S        &RQYD7HF        (FFOHV SUI♦        3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV %LRWHFK ,QW&RQ +WHOV *S       
2FDGR       
.LQJVS é        *16WUH NU        +DQVDUG        $VWUD=HQHFD?        ,QWO &RQV $LU       
0HGLFOLQLF        'HFKUD        6DJD        0DQGDU2        
0RUJ6GO        +LVFR[        6DLQVEXU\ -♦       
1RUFURV        6PLWK 1HSKHZ        /DQFDVKLUH        *HQXV        0DUVWRQV       
8'*+OWK&        *OD[R6PK?♦        6WXGLR 5HWDLO *URXS        1DWO ([S       
7\PDQ        /HJ *HQ        7HVFR?♦       
2OG 0XW        +LNPD3KP        33+( +WO       
(OHFWURQLF (OHFWULFDO (TXLS +RXVH /HLVXUH 3HUV *RRGV 2[IG %LR        5HVWDXUW       
%DUUWW'HY        3KRHQL[*US        6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV
'LDOLJKW        5LFKWHU*         $JJUHNR        5\DQDLU +ROGLQJV 3/&       
%HOOZD\♦        3UXGQWO?       
'LVFRYHULH 3/&        9HFWXU*S        $VKWG*S        78,       
%HUNHOH\        6W-PV3O       
+DOPD        %XQ]O♦        :KLWEUG       
0RUJDQ $G        %XUEHUU\ *S        /(,685( 5HDO (VWDWH
&DLUQ +RPHV        &DSLWD        8WLOLWLHV
2[IRUG,Q        3KRWR0H ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 3OF        5(,7V '&&       
5HQLVKDZ        &WU\6LGH        $VVXUD        &HQWULFD       
&UHVW 1LFKROVRQ        0HGLD 'H/D5XH        'UD[       
6SHFWULV♦        %LJ<HOOZ        'LSORPD       
77 (OHFW        *DPHV:N        LPSULQW        %ULW/DQG        1DWO *ULG?       
*OHHVRQ        $XWR 7UDGHU *URXS 3/&        ':) *URXS 3/&        3HQQRQ       
;3 3RZHU♦        &DS 5HJ        (OFWUFPS       
+HDGODP        'O\0DLO$        &LYLWDV 6+        6HYHUQ 7UHQW       
)LQDQFLDO *HQHUDO 0F%ULGH        +\YH *URXS        (VVHQWUD 3/&        66(       
'UZQW/GQ        ([SHULDQ       
L        3HUVLPQ        ,QIRUPD        *UHDW 3RUWODQG        8WG8WLOV       

AIM
 :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO  :HHN 9RO
3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V 3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 3( V
$HURVSDFH 'HIHQFH =\WURQLF        7ULVWHO        <RX*RY        &OLQLJHQ *URXS        1:)       
&RKRUW        5HQHXURQ        3HWDUGV       
)LQDQFLDO *HQHUDO +RXVH /HLVXUH 3HUV *RRGV 0LQLQJ 6DUHXP        5HQHZ       
9HORFLW\ &RPSRVLWHV 3/&       
$SSUHFLDWH *US        $LUHD        $0&        5HVWRUH       
%DQNV $UEXWKQRW        &KXUFKOO        $UNOH 5HVRXUFHV        5HDO (VWDWH 6PDUW 0HWHULQJ 6\VWHPV       
&DULEEHDQ ,QY        %3 0DUVK        )URQWLHU 'HYHORSPHQWV 3/&        %RWVZDQD'        ,QODQG+PV       
%XUIRUG &DSLWDO /WG        3RUWPHUQ        &HQW$VLD0        /RN
Q6WRU        7HFK  +DUGZDUH
%DVLF 5HVRXUFH ([ 0LQLQJ *UHVKDP +RXVH        6DQGHUVRQ 'HVLJQ *US        3QWKU6HF        $PLQR7HFK       
&URSSHU-        0DWWLROL:GV       
2LO *DV 6,5        ,4(       
1XPLV       
,QGXVWULDO (QJLQHHULQJ %RU6WKQ3HW        7HOLW &RPPXQLFDWLRQV 3/&       
&KHPLFDOV  *US        &ORQWDUI(Q        5HWDLOHUV
3RODU&DS       
'LUHFWD 3OXV 3/&       
3UHPLHU 0LWRQ *URXS        06 ,QWO        (JGRQ 5HV        $626        7HFK  6RIWZDUH 6HUYLFHV
9HUVDULHQ 3/&        3UHV 7HFK        +XUULFDQH (QHUJ\        %RRKRR *URXS 3/&        %R%OXH 3ULVP *URXS 3/&       
670 *URXS       
3HWUHO5HV        &96 *URXS 3/&        (FNRK       
&RQVWUXFWLRQ 0DWHULDOV )RRG %HYHUDJHV ,7 3KRHQL[ *OREDO        ,QJHQWD       
$FFV\V7FK       
&DPHOOLD        .H\ZRUGV 6WXGLRV        5RFNKRS       
6XSSRUW 6HUYLFHV 2[IRUG 0HWULFV       
$XNHWW        /HDUQLQJ7HFKQRORJLHV*URXS♦        %HJELHV       
)HYHUWUHH 'ULQNV        6RXQG (QHUJ\        :$1GLVFR       
)LQVEU\)G        8Q-DFN2LO        &KULVWLH       
(OHFWURQLF (OHFWULFDO (TXLS /(,685( 7UDYHO /HLVXUH
1LFKROV        8QLWHG 2 *        (PSUHV       
&HUHV3RZ        6XPR *URXS 3/&        *DWWDFD        JDPLQJUHDOPV       
&KHFNLW        +HDOWK &DUH (TXLS 6HUYLFHV 3KDUPDFHXWLFDOV %LRWHFK
0HGLD ,PSHOODP        -HW       
/3$       
$92        0LVVLRQ *URXS        $EFDP        -KQVQ6UY        0LQRDQ*S       
7KRUSH):       
&DUH7HFK        $OOFH3KDUP♦        /RQ6HF       

Investment Companies
&RQYHQWLRQDO ([ 3ULYDWH (TXLW\  :HHN 'LV %02 8. +,7 $        ,3 8.6PDOO    
   3RODU)LQV        &RQYHQWLRQDO  3URSHUW\ ,&V  :HHN 'LV
3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P %02 8. +,7 %        -30 $PHU    
   3RODU7HFK        3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P
L ,QIUD        %02 8. +,7 81,7        -30 $VLD    
   5,7 &DS        'LUHFW 3URSHUW\ )RU TXHULHV DERXW WKH )7 6KDUH 6HUYLFH SDJHV HPDLO
$EQ$VLDQ,Q        %UXQQHU        -30 &KLQD    
   5XIIHU ,QY 3U       
$(: 8. 5(,7        IWUHDGHUHQTXLULHV#PRUQLQJVWDUFRP
$EUGQ 'LY , *        &DOHGRQLD ,QY        -30(OFW 0&    
   6FKURGHU 7R5W       
%02 &RP3US        $OO GDWD LV DV RI FORVH RI WKH SUHYLRXV EXVLQHVV GD\ &RPSDQ\ FODVVLILFDWLRQV
$EQ(PJ0NWV♦        &DQ*HQ &        0*    
   6FKGU$VLD3       
%025HDO(        DUH EDVHG RQ WKH ,&% V\VWHP XVHG E\ )76( VHH ZZZLFEHQFKPDUNFRP )76(
$EQ-DS,QY        &LW\ /RQ        0,    
   6FKGU(XU5H(       
&XVWGQ5(,7         FRQVWLWXHQW VWRFNV DUH VKRZQ LQ EROG
$EQ/DW$P,Q        &461DW5V        -30 (PUJ    
   6FKGU ,QF       
*&3 6WXGHQW       
$EQ1HZ'Q        'XQ ,QF        -30 (XU*WK    
   6FKGU-DS        &ORVLQJ SULFHV DUH VKRZQ LQ SHQFH XQOHVV RWKHUZLVH LQGLFDWHG +LJKV ORZV
/RQJERZ       
$EQ1HZ,QGLD        (FRILQ*OREDO        -30 (XU,QF    
   6FKGU2ULHQW        DUH EDVHG RQ LQWUDGD\ WUDGLQJ RYHU D UROOLQJ  ZHHN SHULRG 3ULFHHDUQLQJV
6/,3URS,QF       
$EQ1HZ7KDL♦        (GLQ ,QY        -30 (X6P    
   6FKGU5HDO(VW        UDWLRV 3(5 DUH EDVHG RQ ODWHVW DQQXDO UHSRUWV DQG DFFRXQWV DQG DUH XSGDWHG
75 3URS       
$EQ6PO,Q&R        (GLQ ::G        -30 &ODYU    
   6FKGU8.0G        ZLWK LQWHULP ILJXUHV 3(5 LV FDOFXODWHG XVLQJ WKH FRPSDQ\ÜV GLOXWHG HDUQLQJV
7ULWD[ (XUR%(85 é       
$EQ6WG$VLD        (3 *OREDO        -30*EO&RUH5D    
   6FKGU8.3XE3ULY        IURP FRQWLQXLQJ RSHUDWLRQV <LHOGV DUH EDVHG RQ FORVLQJ SULFH DQG RQ GLYLGHQGV
7ULWD[ (XUR%*%3       
$6WG (TW ,QF        (XUR$VVHW        -30 *(,    
   6FRW$PHU        SDLG LQ WKH ODVW ILQDQFLDO \HDU DQG XSGDWHG ZLWK LQWHULP ILJXUHV <LHOGV DUH
8.&RP3US       
$EI 6PO        ) & ,QY 7UXVW        -30 *O *U ,QF    
   6FRWWLVK ,QY        VKRZQ LQ QHW WHUPV GLYLGHQGV RQ 8. FRPSDQLHV DUH QHW RI  WD[ QRQ8.
$EI 6SO ,QF        )LG$VLDQ        -30 ,QG    
   6FRWW0RUW        9&7V  :HHN 'LV FRPSDQLHV DUH JURVV RI WD[ +LJKV ORZV \LHOGV DQG 3(5 DUH DGMXVWHG WR UHIOHFW
$OOLDQFH♦        )LG&KL6S6        -30 -S&DS6P * ,    
   6FRWW2UWOO        3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P FDSLWDO FKDQJHV ZKHUH DSSURSULDWH
$OOLDQ]7HFK        )LG (XUR        -30 -DS    
   6PLWKVRQ        %DURQVPHDG QG 97        7UDGLQJ YROXPHV DUH HQG RI GD\ DJJUHJDWHG WRWDOV URXQGHG WR WKH QHDUHVW
$UW $OSKD        )LG -DS        -30 0LG    
   6WUDWHJLF(T        %6& 9&7         VKDUHV
$VLD 'UDJRQ        )LG 6SHF♦        -30 0OWL$V    
   7HPS %DU♦        9&7        1HW DVVHW YDOXH SHU VKDUH 1$9 DQG VSOLW DQDO\WLFV DUH SURYLGHG RQO\ DV D
$XURUD ,QY        )LQV* ,        -305XVVLDQ    
   7HPS(PHUJ        ,QF *WK9&7        JXLGH 'LVFRXQWV DQG SUHPLXPV DUH FDOFXODWHG XVLQJ WKH ODWHVW FXP IDLU QHW
$9, *OREDO 7UXVW        )VW3DFILF +. +.♦        -30 6POU    
   7HWUDJRQ         1WKQ  9&7        DVVHW YDOXH HVWLPDWH DQG FORVLQJ SULFH 'LVFRXQWV SUHPLXPV JURVV UHGHPSWLRQ
$9, -DS2SS        *HQ(PHU        -30 86 6PO    
   75,*        1WKQ  9&7        \LHOG *5< DQG KXUGOH UDWH +5 WR VKDUH SULFH 63 DQG +5 WR ZLSH RXW :2
$[LRP        *5,7#        .H\VWRQH,QY    
   75(XU*WK        1WKQ9HQW        DUH GLVSOD\HG DV D SHUFHQWDJH 1$9 DQG WHUPLQDO DVVHW YDOXH SHU VKDUH 7$9
%* (XUR        *ROGHQ3URV        /DZ 'HE    
   7UR\,QF *        3UR9HQ*,        LQ SHQFH
%* -DSDQ        +$1        /LQ7UDLQ e    
   8WLOLFR (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW        3UR9HQ9&7       
%* 6KLQ        +$1$        /RZODQG    
   8,/ ,QY        8QLFRUQ$,0        ? )7 *OREDO  FRPSDQ\
%DLOOLH *LIIRUG 8.        +HQ 'LY ,QF 7U        0DMHGLH    
   9(,/        ♦ WUDGLQJ H[GLYLGHQG
=HUR 'LYLGHQG 3UHIHUHQFH 6KDUHV  :HHN +5
%DQNHUV        +HQ(XUR)        0DQ /RQ    
   :LWDQ        WUDGLQJ H[FDSLWDO GLVWULEXWLRQ
+HQ(XUR        0DUZ\Q 9DO    
   :ZLGH+OWK        3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ 63 :2 7$9 
%% +HDOWKFDUH 7UXVW        # SULFH DW WLPH RI VXVSHQVLRQ IURP WUDGLQJ
+HQ)DU(V        0HUFDQW,7    
   $EI 6SO ,QF       
%+ *OREDO        &RQYHQWLRQDO  3ULYDWH (TXLW\  :HHN 'LV
+HQ+LJK        0UFK7VW    
   8,/ ='3        
86'         3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P 7KH SULFHV OLVWHG DUH LQGLFDWLYH DQG EHOLHYHG DFFXUDWH DW WKH WLPH RI SXEOLFDWLRQ
+HQ,QW ,QF        0LG :\QG    
   8,/ ='3        
%+ 0DFUR        1R RIIHU LV PDGH E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU RU WKH )7 7KH )7 GRHV QRW ZDUUDQW QRU
+HQ 2SS♦        0LWRQ *OREDO    
   %*86*52:7+        8,/ /LPLWHG  ='3       
86'         JXDUDQWHH WKDW WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ LV UHOLDEOH RU FRPSOHWH 7KH )7 GRHV QRW DFFHSW
+HQ6POU        0RQNV    
   %02 3YW(T        8,/ )LQDQFH  ='3V       
%LRWHFK*WK        UHVSRQVLELOLW\ DQG ZLOO QRW EH OLDEOH IRU DQ\ ORVV DULVLQJ IURP WKH UHOLDQFH RQ
+HUDOG        0RQWDQ6P    
   (OHFWUD       
%OFN5&RP        Investment Companies - AIM RU XVH RI WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ
+,&/ ,QIUD        0XU ,QF    
   +93(       
%OFN5)UQW       
+LJKEULGJH 7DFWLFDO        0XU ,QW    
   +J&DSLWDO        7KH )7 6KDUH 6HUYLFH LV D SDLGIRUSULQW OLVWLQJ VHUYLFH DQG PD\ QRW EH IXOO\
%OFN5*W(XU         :HHN 'LV
,PSD[ (QY        1HZ&LW\+<    
   ,&* (QW 7U        UHSUHVHQWDWLYH RI DOO /6(OLVWHG FRPSDQLHV 7KLV VHUYLFH LV DYDLODEOH WR DOO OLVWHG
%OFN5 , *        3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P
,QG ,7        1HZ 6WDU ,7    
   3DQWKHRQ,QWHUQDWLRQDO3OF 25'V        FRPSDQLHV VXEMHFW WR WKH (GLWRUÜV GLVFUHWLRQ )RU QHZ VDOHV HQTXLULHV SOHDVH
%OFN5FN/DW        %% %LRWHFK $* 6)U       
,*&        1RUWK$PHU    
   3ULQFVV3( é♦        HPDLO GDQLHOILVK#IWFRP RU FDOO    
%OFN5FN1U$P        &U\V$PEHU       
,QW%LRWHFK        1WK$W6PO    
   6WG/I3Y       
%OFN56POU        *UHVKDP +RXVH 6WUDWHJLF       
%OFN57KUPW        ,QWO 33        2U\[ ,QW    
   'LVFUHWLRQDU\ 8QLW )XQG 0QJUV  :HHN 'LV ,QIUD ,QGLD       
%OFN5:OG♦        ,QY $VLD7U        3DF$VVHW♦    
   ) 'DWD SURYLGHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU
%02 &S ,        ,QYHVFR %RQG ,QF        3DF+RU]Q    
   3ULFH &KJ +LJK /RZ <OG 1$9 RU 3P
%02*EO6POU        ,367 %DO5        3HUS,QF *U    
   5LJKW ,66       
%020JG7        ,367 *EO (T        3HU$VVHW    
   Guide to FT Share Service
%020JG7        ,367 0QJG        
,367 8. (T        3RODU+HDOWK       

ZZZPRUQLQJVWDUFRXN
16 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

MANAGED FUNDS SERVICE

SUMMARY FT.COM/FUNDS

:LQQHUV  ($$ )XQG -DSDQ /DUJH&DS (TXLW\ /RVHUV  ($$ )XQG -DSDQ /DUJH&DS (TXLW\ 0RUQLQJVWDU 6WDU 5DWLQJV *OREDO %URDG &DWHJRU\ *URXS  (TXLW\

\U 5HWXUQ \U 5HWXUQ \U 5HWXUQ \U \U \U 5HWXUQ \U 5HWXUQ \U 5HWXUQ \U \U 0RUQLQJVWDU 0RUQLQJVWDU 0RUQLQJVWDU 7RWDO 5HW <U 7RWDO 5HW <U 7RWDO 5HW <U
)XQG 1DPH )XQG 1DPH )XQG 1DPH %DVH &XUUHQF\ 0RUQLQJVWDU &DWHJRU\ %DVH &XUUHQF\
*%3 *%3 *%3 6KDUSH 5DWLR 6WG 'HY *%3 *%3 *%3 6KDUSH 5DWLR 6WG 'HY 5DWLQJ  <U 5DWLQJ  <U 5DWLQJ  <U *%3 *%3 *%3

/) 5XIIHU -DSDQHVH )XQG      6W -DPHV
V 3ODFH -DSDQ 8QLW 7UXVW )XQG      $OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW )XQG  &ODVV , (85 (XUR 33333 33333  6HFWRU (TXLW\ $OWHUQDWLYH (QHUJ\ 86 'ROODU   
)LGHOLW\ -DSDQ )XQG      ,QYHVFR -DSDQ )XQG 8.      (PHUJLQJ$VLD)XQG:$&&*%3 3RXQG 6WHUOLQJ 3333 3333  6HFWRU (TXLW\ $OWHUQDWLYH (QHUJ\ 86 'ROODU   
-30 -DSDQ )XQG      0DQ */* -DSDQ &RUH$OSKD )XQG      -DSDQ6PDOOHU&RV)XQG:$&&*%3 3RXQG 6WHUOLQJ 3333 3333 3333 6ZHGHQ 6PDOO0LG&DS (TXLW\ 6ZHGLVK .URQD   
7KUHDGQHHGOH -DSDQ )XQG      8QL*OREDO  (TXLWLHV -DSDQ      )LGHOLW\ (XURSHDQ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV : $FF 3RXQG 6WHUOLQJ 33 33 33 *OREDO 7HFKQRORJ\ %DKW   
75RZH3ULFH)XQGV2(,&-DSDQHVH(TXLW\)XQG      )UDQNOLQ -DSDQ )XQG      $SWXV *OREDO )LQDQFLDOV % $FF 3RXQG 6WHUOLQJ 33 33  %5,& (TXLW\ 0H[LFDQ 3HVR   

$GYHUWLVLQJ )HDWXUH 3HUIRUPDQFH :HLJKWLQJV  $V RI  7RS  +ROGLQJV  $V RI 

6HFWRU :HLJKWLQJ &DW $YJ +ROGLQJ 6HFWRU :HLJKWLQJ
%DVLF 0DWHULDOV  
-XQ   -XQ  )37 &RUS 7HFKQRORJ\ 
3UXVLN $VLD (PHUJLQJ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF &RPPXQLFDWLRQ 6HUYLFHV  
&RQVXPHU &\FOLFDO  
0RELOH :RUOG ,QYHVWPHQW &RUS 7HFKQRORJ\ 
&RQVXPHU 'HIHQVLYH  
(QHUJ\  
6HD /WG $'5 &RPPXQLFDWLRQ 6HUYLFHV 
)LQDQFLDO 6HUYLFHV  
+HDOWKFDUH  
,QIR (GJH ,QGLD /WG &RPPXQLFDWLRQ 6HUYLFHV 
,QGXVWULDOV  
5HDO (VWDWH  
5HOLDQFH ,QGXVWULHV /WG 6KV 'HPDWHULDOLVHG (QHUJ\ 
7HFKQRORJ\  
8WLOLWLHV  
9LQFRP 5HWDLO -6& 2UGLQDU\ 6KDUHV 5HDO (VWDWH 
3OHDVH UHPHPEHU WKDW SDVW SHUIRUPDQFH LV QRW QHFHVVDULO\ D JXLGH WR IXWXUH SHUIRUPDQFH &DVK (TXLYDOHQWV  
)LUP 1DPH &RUSRUDWH  
&LSXWUD 'HYHORSPHQW 7EN 5HDO (VWDWH 
3UXVLN ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW //3 'HULYDWLYH  
)XQG 1DPH *RYHUQPHQW  
6DLJRQ %HHU $OFRKRO %HYHUDJH &RUS &RQVXPHU 'HIHQVLYH 
3UXVLN $VLD (PHUJLQJ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF 0XQLFLSDO  
0RUQLQJVWDU &DWHJRU\ 6HFXULWL]HG  
/XFN\ &HPHQW /WG %DVLF 0DWHULDOV 
$VLD H[-DSDQ 6PDOO0LG&DS (TXLW\
0D[ $QQXDO &KDUJH
3DNXZRQ -DWL 7EN 5HDO (VWDWH 
 5LVN 0HDVXUHV  $V RI 
<U 5DWLQJ <U <U &DW $YH <U <U &DW $YH <U <U &DW $YH
33 $OSKD      
0RUQLQJVWDU 6XVWDLQDELOLW\ 5DWLQJ %HWD      
)XQG &DWHJRU\ ,QIRUPDWLRQ 5DWLR      
%LG 3ULFH  .,,' 2QJRLQJ &KDUJH  5 6TXDUHG      
2IIHU 3ULFH  'D\(QG 2QH <HDU 5HWXUQ  'D\  0RQWK  <HDU  6KDUSH 5DWLR      
  7RWDO 5HW <U  6WG 'HY      
,QIRUPDWLRQ UHSURGXFHG FRXUWHV\ RI 0RUQLQJVWDU :KLOH WKH )LQDQFLDO 7LPHV WDNHV HYHU\ FDUH WR HQVXUH WKDW WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ LV IDLWKIXOO\ UHSURGXFHG WKH LQIRUPDWLRQ LV QRW YHULILHG E\ WKH )LQDQFLDO 7LPHV DQG WKHUHIRUH LW DFFHSWV QR OLDELOLW\ IRU DQ\ ORVV ZKLFK PD\ DULVH UHODWLQJ WR WKH 0RUQLQJVWDU LQIRUPDWLRQ
k  0RUQLQJVWDU $OO 5LJKWV 5HVHUYHG 7KH LQIRUPDWLRQ FRQWDLQHG KHUHLQ  LV SURSULHWDU\ WR 0RUQLQJVWDU DQGRU LWV FRQWHQW SURYLGHUV  PD\ QRW EH FRSLHG RU GLVWULEXWHG DQG  LV QRW ZDUUDQWHG WR EH DFFXUDWH FRPSOHWH RU WLPHO\ 1HLWKHU 0RUQLQJVWDU QRU LWV FRQWHQW SURYLGHUV DUH UHVSRQVLEOH IRU DQ\ GDPDJHV RU ORVVHV DULVLQJ IURP DQ\ XVH RI WKLV LQIRUPDWLRQ 3DVW SHUIRUPDQFH LV QR JXDUDQWHH RI IXWXUH UHVXOWV

)XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U

6WHUOLQJ %RQG e       0XOWL $VVHW 2SHQ $GYHQW :$&&*%3 e      
%URRNV 0DFGRQDOG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 0XOWL 6WUDWHJ\ )XQG /LPLWHG 0XOWL $VVHW 2SHQ 'HIHQ :$&&*%3 e      
&DXWLRXV %DODQFHG 6WUDWHJ\ e       0XOWL $VVHW 2SHQ *URZWK )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
*URZWK 6WUDWHJ\ e       0XOWL $VVHW 2SHQ 6WUDWHJLF )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
+LJK *URZWK 6WUDWHJ\ e       2SHQ :RUOG )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
86 *URZWK 6WUDWHJ\        6WUDWHJLF %RQG )XQG <$&&*%3 e      
'HDOLQJ 'DLO\ ,QLWLDO FKDUJH XS WR  8. 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG :$&&*%3      
$EHUGHHQ 6WDQGDUG &DSLWDO  -(5  7KH $QWDUHV (XURSHDQ )XQG /LPLWHG
32 %R[  6W +HOLHU -HUVH\ -( 58   2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 8. 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV :$&&*%3 e      
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG $() /WG 8VG        ,QVWLWXWLRQDO 2(,& )XQGV
$EHUGHHQ 6WDQGDUG &DSLWDO 2IIVKRUH 6WUDWHJ\ )XQG /LPLWHG $PHULFD e      
$() /WG (XU é      
%ULGJH )XQG e       (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV e      
*OREDO (TXLW\ )XQG e       (XURSH H[8. )XQG $&&*%3 e      
*OREDO )L[HG ,QWHUHVW )XQG e       )LGHOLW\ 3UH5HWLUHPHQW %RQG )XQG e      
,QFRPH )XQG e       *OREDO )RFXV e      
6WHUOLQJ )L[HG ,QWHUHVW )XQG e       ,QGH[ /LQNHG %RQG *URVV e      
8. (TXLW\ )XQG e       -DSDQ e      
/RQJ %RQG *URVV e      
$ULVDLJ 3DUWQHUV &3 *OREDO $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW 3WH /WG (GHQ7UHH ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW /WG  8.  3DFLILF ([ -DSDQ e      
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV ZZZFSJOREDOFRPVJ 7HO    32 %R[  6ZLQGRQ 61 %*    6HOHFW (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV (TXLWLHV e      
$ULVDLJ $VLD &RQVXPHU )XQG &ODVV $ ([$OFRKRO VKDUHV        ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 0XWXDO )XQGV $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 6HOHFW *OREDO (TXLWLHV e      
$ULVDLJ $VLD &RQVXPHU )XQG /LPLWHG        &3 0XOWL6WUDWHJ\ )XQG        $PLW\ 8. &OV $ ,QF       6RXWK (DVW $VLD e      
$ULVDLJ *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV &RQVXPHU )XQG        $PLW\ 8. &OV % ,QF      
6WHUOLQJ &RUH 3OXV %RQG *U $FFXP e      
$ULVDLJ *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV &RQVXPHU 8&,76 é       +LJKHU ,QFRPH &OV $ ,QF      
8. e      
$ULVDLJ *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV &RQVXPHU 8&,76 67* e       +LJKHU ,QFRPH &OV % ,QF      
8. $JJUHJ %RQG *U $FFXP e      
$ULVDLJ /DWLQ $PHULFD &RQVXPHU )XQG        %URZQ $GYLVRU\ )XQGV SOF  ,5/  8. (TXLW\ *URZWK &OV $ ,QF      
6WHUOLQJ &RUSRUDWH %RQG  *URVV e      
KWWSZZZEURZQDGYLVRU\FRP 7HO    8. (TXLW\ *URZWK &OV % ,QF      
8. *LOW *URVV e      
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG $PLW\ %DODQFHG )RU &KDULWLHV $ ,QF      
86 6PDOO &DS %OHQG )XQG 86' %        6WHUOLQJ /RQJ &RUS %RQG  *URVV e      
$PLW\ (XURSHDQ )XQG &OV $ ,QF      
86 )OH[LEOH (TXLW\ )XQG 86' %        &3 &DSLWDO $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG $PLW\ (XURSHDQ )XQG &OV % ,QF      
*OREDO /HDGHUV )XQG 86' &        ZZZFSJEOFRP HPDLO IXQGVHUYLFHV#FSJEOFRP
,QWHUQDWLRQDO 0XWXDO )XQGV $PLW\ *OREDO (TXLW\ ,QF IRU &KDULWLHV $ ,QF      
/DWLQ $PHULFDQ )XQG 86' %        $PLW\ ,QWHUQDWLRQDO &OV $ ,QF      
&36 0DVWHU 3ULYDWH )XQG       
86 6XVWDLQDEOH *URZWK )XQG 86' &        $PLW\ ,QWHUQDWLRQDO &OV % ,QF      
&3 *OREDO $OSKD )XQG       
*OREDO /HDGHUV 6XVWDLQDEOH )XQG 86' &        $PLW\ 6WHUOLQJ %RQG )XQG $ ,QF      
86 (TXLW\ *URZWK )XQG 86' %        $PLW\ 6WHUOLQJ %RQG )XQG % ,QF      
$HJRQ $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW 8. ,&9&  8.  $PHULFDQ )XQG 86' %       
 /RFKVLGH &UHVFHQW (GLQEXUJK (+ 6$
   ZZZDHJRQDPFRP 86 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV )XQG 86' %       
$XWKRULVHG )XQGV 86 0LG&DS *URZWK )XQG 86' &       
'LYHUVLILHG 0RQWKO\ ,QF % $FF      
'LYHUVLILHG 0RQWKO\ ,QF % ,QF      
'LYHUVLILHG *URZWK % $FF e      
(WKLFDO &DXWLRXV 0DQDJHG % $FF e      
(WKLFDO &DXWLRXV 0DQDJHG % ,QF e       (QQLVPRUH 6PDOOHU &RV 3OF  ,5/ 
(WKLFDO &RUSRUDWH %RQG % $FF e        .HQVLQJWRQ &KXUFK 6W /RQGRQ : /'   
$UWHPLV )XQG 0DQDJHUV /WG )  8.  )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG
(WKLFDO &RUSRUDWH %RQG % ,QF e        6W -DPHV
V 6WUHHW /RQGRQ 6:$ /'    (QQLVPRUH (XURSHDQ 6POU &RV 1$9 e      
(WKLFDO (TXLW\ % $FF e      
&* $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG  ,5/ 
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV  0RRUJDWH /RQGRQ (&5 $< (QQLVPRUH (XURSHDQ 6POU &RV 1$9 é      
*OREDO (TXLW\ *%3 % $FF e       $UWHPLV 6PDUW*$53 8. (T , $FF       'HDOLQJ 7HO    )D[    )66$ ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHUV  8. 
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG )LQVEXU\ &LUFXV +RXVH  )LQVEXU\ &LUFXV /RQGRQ (&0 (%
+LJK <LHOG %RQG % $FF e       $UWHPLV &RUSRUDWH %RQG , $FF      
LQIRXN#IVVDLPFRP
+LJK <LHOG %RQG % ,QF e       $UWHPLV 6PDUW*$53 (XU (T , $FF       &* 3RUWIROLR )XQG 3OF &OLHQW 6HUYLFHV    'HDOLQJ /LQH   
,QYHVWPHQW *UDGH %RQG % $FF       $UWHPLV (XURSHDQ 2SSV , $FF       $EVROXWH 5HWXUQ &OV 0 ,QF e       $XWKRULVHG )XQGV
,QYHVWPHQW *UDGH %RQG % ,QF e       $UWHPLV 6PDUW*$53 *OR(PU (T , $FF       &DSLWDO *HDULQJ 3RUWIROLR *%3 3 e       $VLD$OO &DS $FF *%3 e      
6WHUOLQJ &RUSRUDWH %RQG % $FF e       $UWHPLV 6PDUW*$53 *OR (T , $FF       &DSLWDO *HDULQJ 3RUWIROLR *%3 9 e       ':6  /8;  $VLD )RFXV $FF *%3 e      
7HO      ZZZGZVFRP
6WHUOLQJ &RUSRUDWH %RQG % ,QF e       $UWHPLV *OREDO ,QFRPH , ,QF       'ROODU )XQG &OV ' ,QF e       )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG *UHDWHU &KLQD *URZWK $ 6KDUHV      
6WUDWHJLF %RQG % $FF e       $UWHPLV *OREDO 6HOHFW , $FF       'ROODU +HGJHG *%3 ,QF e       ':6 ,QYHVW 7RS 'LYLGHQG e       (QQLVPRUH (XURSHDQ 6POU &RV +HGJH )G -DSDQ )RFXV $FF *%3 e      
6WUDWHJLF %RQG % ,QF e       $UWHPLV +LJK ,QFRPH , 4 ,QF       5HDO 5HWXUQ &OV $ ,QF e       ':6 ,QYHVW 7RS (XURODQG e       2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV
8. (TXLW\ % $FF e       $UWHPLV ,QFRPH , ,QF       1$9 é      
':6 ,QYHVW 0XOWL 2SSRUWXQLWLHV e      
8. (TXLW\ $EVROXWH 5HWXUQ % $FF e       $UWHPLV 0RQWKO\ 'LVW , ,QF       ':6 ,QYHVW *OREDO %RQGV e      
8. (TXLW\ ,QFRPH % $FF e       $UWHPLV 3RVLWLYH )XWXUH )XQG e      
8. (TXLW\ ,QFRPH % ,QF e       $UWHPLV 6WUDWHJLF $VVHWV , $FF      
8. 2SSRUWXQLWLHV % $FF e       $UWHPLV 6WUDWHJLF %RQG , 4 $FF      
8. 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV % $FF e       $UWHPLV 7DUJHW 5HWXUQ %RQG , $FF      
$UWHPLV 8. 6HOHFW )XQG &ODVV , $FF      
$UWHPLV 8. 6PDOOHU &RV , $FF       (XURQRYD $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW 8. //3  &<0 
$UWHPLV 8. 6SHFLDO 6LWV , $FF       5HJXODWHG
$UWHPLV 86 $EV 5HWXUQ , +GJ $FF       6PDOOHU &RV &OV 2QH 6KDUHV é      
$UWHPLV 86 ([WHQGHG $OSKD , $FF       6PDOOHU &RV &OV 7ZR 6KDUHV é      
$UWHPLV 86 6HOHFW , $FF       6PDOOHU &RV &OV 7KUHH 6KDUHV é      
$UWHPLV 86 6POU &RV , $FF       6PDOOHU &RV &OV )RXU 6KDUHV é      
$HJRQ $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW 8. ,QYHVWPHQW 3RUWIROLRV ,&9& 8. 
 /RFKVLGH &UHVFHQW (GLQEXUJK (+ 6$
   ZZZDHJRQDPFRP
$XWKRULVHG )XQGV
3URSHUW\ ,QFRPH % $FF       )LUVW 6HQWLHU ,QYHVWRUV 8.  8. 
3URSHUW\ ,QFRPH % ,QF       &DQGULDP ,QYHVWRUV *URXS  /8;  )LQVEXU\ &LUFXV +RXVH  )LQVEXU\ &LUFXV /RQGRQ (&0 (%
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG LQIR8.#ILUVWVHQWLHUFRP
&DQGULDP (TWV / $XVWUDOLD &DS$       &OLHQW 6HUYLFHV    'HDOLQJ /LQH   
'RGJH &R[ :RUOGZLGH )XQGV  ,5/  $XWKRULVHG )XQGV
&DQGULDP 4W(TWV (XURSH &DS é        3DOO 0DOO /RQGRQ 6:< -* 'LYHUVLILHG *URZWK % $FF e      
&DQGULDP 4W(TWV 86$ &DS        ZZZGRGJHDQGFR[ZRUOGZLGHFRP    (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV %RQG $ $FFXPXODWLRQ e      
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV %RQG $ ,QFRPH e      
'RGJH &R[ :RUOGZLGH )XQGV SOF  *OREDO %RQG )XQG
(85 $FFXPXODWLQJ &ODVV é       *OREDO /LVWHG ,QIUDVWUXFWXUH $FF      
(85 $FFXPXODWLQJ &ODVV + é       *OREDO /LVWHG ,QIUDVWUXFWXUH ,QF      
$HJRQ $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW ,QYHVWPHQW &RPSDQ\ ,UHODQG ,5/ 
 1RUWK :DOO 4XD\ 'XEOLQ  ,UHODQG    (85 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV é       *OREDO 3URSHUW\ 6HFXULWLHV $ $FFXPXODWLRQ      
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG (85 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV + é       *OREDO 3URSHUW\ 6HFXULWLHV $ ,QFRPH      
$EVROXWH 5HWXUQ %RQG % *%3 $FF      
*%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV e      
+LJK <LHOG *OREDO %RQG $ *%3 ,QF      
&DQGULDP ,QYHVWRUV *URXS *%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV + e      
+LJK <LHOG *OREDO %RQG % *%3 ,QF       2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV 86' $FFXPXODWLQJ &ODVV       
*OREDO (TXLW\ ,QFRPH % *%3 $FF       $VKPRUH ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG  /8;  &DQGULDP (TWV / (PHUJLQJ 0NWV &DS é       'RGJH &R[ :RUOGZLGH )XQGV SOF*OREDO 6WRFN )XQG ),/ ,QYHVWPHQW 6HUYLFHV 8. /LPLWHG )  8. 
*OREDO (TXLW\ ,QFRPH % *%3 ,QF        UXH $OEHUW %RUVFKHWWH / /X[HPERXUJ &DQGULDP %RQGV &UHGLW 2SSRUWXQLWLHV é       %HHFK *DWH 0LOOILHOG /DQH /RZHU .LQJVZRRG 7DGZRUWK .7 53
86' $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV       
OREDO (TXLW\ 0DUNHW 1HXWUDO )XQG  % $FF *%3 e       )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG &DQGULDP %GV (XUR +LJK <LHOG &DS é       &DOOIUHH 3ULYDWH &OLHQWV  
*%3 $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV e       %URNHU 'HDOLQJV   
*OREDO 6XVWDLQDEOH (TXLW\ % $FF *%3 e       $VKPRUH 6,&$9 (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW 'HEW )XQG        &DQGULDP %GV (XUR 6K7HUP &DS é       *%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ 6KDUH FODVV e       2(,& )XQGV
*OREDO 6XVWDLQDEOH (TXLW\ & $FF *%3 e       $VKPRUH 6,&$9 (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW )URQWLHU (TXLW\ )XQG        )LQGOD\ 3DUN )XQGV 3OF  ,5/ 
(85 $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV é       $OORFDWRU :RUOG )XQG <$&&*%3 e        +HUEHUW 6WUHHW 'XEOLQ  ,UHODQG 7HO   
,QY *UG *EO %RQG $ ,QF *%+       $VKPRUH 6,&$9 (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW 7RWDO 5HWXUQ )XQG       
*%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV + e       $PHULFDQ 6SHFLDO 6LWV :$&&*%3 e       )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG
6KRUW 'DWHG +LJK <OG %G % $FF *%3 e       $VKPRUH 6,&$9 *OREDO 6PDOO &DS (TXLW\ )XQG       
'RGJH &R[ :RUOGZLGH )XQGV SOF86 6WRFN )XQG $VLD 3DFLILF 2SV :$FF e       $PHULFDQ (85 8QKHGJHG &ODVV é      
6KRUW 'DWHG +LJK <OG %G & $FF *%3 +GJ e       (0 $FWLYH (TXLW\ )XQG $FF 86'       
86' $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV        $VLDQ 'LYLGHQG )XQG :$&&*%3 e       $PHULFDQ )XQG 86' &ODVV       
6WUDWHJLF *OREDO %RQG $ *%3 ,QF       (0 (TXLW\ )XQG $FF 86'       
*%3 $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV e       &KLQD &RQVXPHU )XQG :$&&*%3 e       $PHULFDQ )XQG *%3 +HGJHG e      
6WUDWHJLF *OREDO %RQG % *%3 ,QF       (0 0NWV &RUS'HEW 86' )       
*%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV e       (PHUJLQJ $VLD )XQG :$&&*%3 e       $PHULFDQ )XQG *%3 8QKHGJHG e      
(0 0NWV /RF&F\ %G 86' )       
(85 $FFXPXODWLQJ 6KDUH &ODVV é       (QKDQFHG ,QFRPH )XQG :,1&*%3 e      
(0 6KRUW 'XUDWLRQ )XQG $FF 86'        &KDUWHUHG $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW 3WH /WG
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV *%3 'LVWULEXWLQJ &ODVV + e       (XURSHDQ )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
&$0*7) /LPLWHG        ([WUD ,QFRPH )XQG <$&&*%3 e      
&$0 *7L 9&&        ),' ,167  (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
5$,& 9&&        )LGHOLW\ $PHULFDQ )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
)LGHOLW\ $VLD )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
)LGHOLW\ &DVK )XQG <$&&*%3 e      
),' (PHUJ (XURSH 0LGGOH (DVW DQG $IULFD )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$WODQWDV 6LFDY  /8;  )LGHOLW\ (XURSHDQ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV : $FF e      
5HJXODWHG )LGHOLW\ *OREDO (QKDQFHG ,QFRPH )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$PHULFDQ '\QDPLF        )LGHOLW\ *OREDO )RFXV )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$PHULFDQ 2QH        )LGHOLW\ *OREDO +LJK <LHOG )XQG <$&&*%3 e      
%RQG *OREDO é       &RQVLVWHQW 8QLW 7VW 0JW &R /WG )  8.  )LGHOLW\ -DSDQ )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
(XURFURLVVDQFH é       6WXDUW +RXVH 6W -RKQ
V 6WUHHW 3HWHUERURXJK 3( ''
'HDOLQJ &OLHQW 6HUYLFHV    )LGHOLW\ -DSDQ 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
)DU (DVW        $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV )LGHOLW\ 6HOHFW  %DODQFHG )XQG 3,$&&*%3 e      
&RQVLVWHQW 87 ,QF       )LGHOLW\ 6SHFLDO 6LWXDWLRQV )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
&RQVLVWHQW 87 $FF       6KRUW 'DWHG &RUSRUDWH %RQG )XQG < $&& *%3 e      
$OJHEULV ,QYHVWPHQWV  ,5/  3UDFWLFDO ,QYHVWPHQW ,QF       )LGHOLW\ 6XVWDLQDEOH :DWHU :DVWH : $FF e       )RRUG $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW
5HJXODWHG 3UDFWLFDO ,QYHVWPHQW $FF       :HEVLWH ZZZIRRUGFRP  (PDLO LQIR#IRRUGFRP
)LGHOLW\ 8. *URZWK )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW , (85 é       )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG  /X[HPERXUJ 8&,76
'UDJRQ &DSLWDO )LGHOLW\ 8. 6HOHFW )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW 5 (85 é       ZZZGUDJRQFDSLWDOFRP )RRUG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQG _ 5       
*OREDO 'LYLGHQG )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW 5G (85 é       )XQG LQIRUPDWLRQLQIR#GUDJRQFDSLWDOFRP )RRUG *OREDO (TXLW\ )XQG /X[ _ 5       
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV *OREDO 3URSHUW\ )XQG :$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO ,QFRPH , (85 é       5HJXODWHG
9LHWQDP (TXLW\ 8&,76 )XQG $ 86'        *OREDO 6SHFLDO 6LWV :$&&*%3 e       )RRUG *OREDO (TXLW\ )XQG 6LQJ _ %       
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO ,QFRPH 5 (85 é      
,QGH[ (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV 3$FF e       )RRUG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 7UXVW *V\       
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO ,QFRPH 5G (85 é      
,QGH[ (XURSH H[ 8. 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO (TXLW\ % (85 é      
,QGH[ -DSDQ 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV ,* )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW , (85 é      
,QGH[ 3DFLILF H[ -DSDQ 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV ,* )LQDQFLDO &UHGLW 5 (85 é      
,QGH[ 8. 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV *OREDO &UHGLW 2SSRUWXQLWLHV , (85 é      
,QGH[ 86 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV *OREDO &UHGLW 2SSRUWXQLWLHV 5 (85 é      
,QGH[ :RUOG 3$FF e      
$OJHEULV *OREDO &UHGLW 2SSRUWXQLWLHV 5G (85 é      
0RQH\%XLOGHU %DODQFHG <$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV &RUH ,WDO\ , (85 é      
0RQH\%XLOGHU 'LYLGHQG <,1&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ 7HPSOHWRQ ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 6HUYLFHV 6DUO  ,5/ 
$OJHEULV &RUH ,WDO\ 5 (85 é       %URRNV 0DFGRQDOG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQG 0DQDJHUV /LPLWHG -(5  -30RUJDQ +RXVH  ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )LQDQFLDO 6HUYLFHV &HQWUH'XEOLQ  ,UHODQG
0RQH\%XLOGHU ,QFRPH )XQG <$&&*%3 e      
$OJHEULV )LQDQFLDO (TXLW\ 5 (85 é        $QOH\ 6WUHHW 6W +HOLHU -HUVH\ -( 4( 2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV
     ,QW      8. 0XOWL $VVHW $OORFDWRU $GYHQWXURXV )XQG <$&&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW 'HEW 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG 3OF
%URRNV 0DFGRQDOG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV /LPLWHG 0XOWL $VVHW $OORFDWRU 'HIHQVLYH )XQG <$&&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ (PJ 0NWV 'HEW 2SS &+)6)U      
(XUR +LJK ,QFRPH é       0XOWL $VVHW $OORFDWRU *URZWK )XQG <$&&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ (PJ 0NWV 'HEW 2SS *%3 e      
+LJK ,QFRPH e       0XOWL $VVHW ,QFRPH )XQG :,1&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ (PJ 0NWV 'HEW 2SS 6*'6      
0XOWL $VVHW $OORFDWRU 6WUDWHJLF )XQG <$&&*%3 e       )UDQNOLQ (PJ 0NWV 'HEW 2SS 86'       
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 17

MANAGED FUNDS SERVICE

)XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U )XQG %LG 2IIHU  <LHOG <U <U

(PJ 0NWV ,QF      

(XURSHDQ $OSKD $FF      
(XURSHDQ $OSKD ,QF      
(XURSHDQ 6PDOOHU &RV $FF      
*OREDO (TXLW\ ,QFRPH $FF      
*OREDO (TXLW\ ,QFRPH ,QF      
0DQDJHG %DO ,QF      
8. ,QFRPH $FF      
8. ,QFRPH ,QF      
8. 2PHJD $FF      
8. 2PHJD ,QF      
8. 6PDOOHU &RV ,QF      

)XQGVPLWK //3 )  8.  0LUDEDXG $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW  /8;  3RODU &DSLWDO )XQGV 3OF  ,5/  5XIIHU //3 )  8.  6WRQHKDJH )OHPLQJ ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW /WG  ,5/ 
32 %R[  &KHOPVIRUG (VVH[ &0 %:    ZZZPLUDEDXGFRP PDUNHWLQJ#PLUDEDXGDPFRP 5HJXODWHG  *UHVKDP 6WUHHW /RQGRQ (&9 14 ZZZVWRQHKDJHIOHPLQJFRPJEL
ZZZIXQGVPLWKFRXN HQTXLULHV#IXQGVPLWKFRXN /RWKEXU\ 3URSHUW\ 7UXVW 8. &RQYLFWLRQ EDVHG LQYHVWPHQW YHKLFOHV GHWDLOV DYDLODEOH KHUH ZZZPLUDEDXGDPFRP $XWRPDWLRQ $UWLILFLDO ,QWHOOLJHQFH &/ , 86' $FF        2UGHU 'HVN DQG (QTXLULHV    HQTXLULHV#VWRQHKDJHIOHPLQJFRP
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV  %LVKRSVJDWH /RQGRQ (&0 74     5HJXODWHG $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 5HJXODWHG
$VLDQ )LQDQFLDOV , 86'       
)XQGVPLWK (TXLW\ 7 $FF       3URSHUW\ 2WKHU 8. 8QLW 7UXVWV 0LU  *OE 6WUDW %G , 86'        $XWKRULVHG &RUSRUDWH 'LUHFWRU  /LQN )XQG 6ROXWLRQV 6) *OREDO %HVW ,GHDV (T % 86' $&&       
/RWKEXU\ 3URSHUW\ 7UXVW *%3 e       %LRWHFKQRORJ\ , 86'       
)XQGVPLWK (TXLW\ 7 ,QF       0LU  'LVF(XU ' &DS *%3 e       /) 5XIIHU (XURSHDQ & $FF       6) *OREDO %HVW ,GHDV (T ' *%3 ,1& e      
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHW 6WDUV , 86' $FF       
0LUDEDXG  8. (TXLW\ +LJK $OSKD e       /) 5XIIHU (XURSHDQ & ,QF      
(XURSHDQ ([ 8. ,QF (85 $FF é      
/) 5XIIHU (XURSHDQ 2 $FF      
)LQDQFLDO 2SSV , 86'       
/) 5XIIHU (TXLW\ *HQHUDO & $FF      
*(0 ,QFRPH , 86'       
/) 5XIIHU (TXLW\ *HQHUDO & ,QF      
*OREDO &RQYHUWLEOH , 86'       
/) 5XIIHU (TXLW\ *HQHUDO 2 $FF      
*OREDO ,QVXUDQFH , *%3 e      
/) 5XIIHU (TXLW\ *HQHUDO 2 ,QF      
*OREDO 7HFKQRORJ\ , 86'       
/) 5XIIHU *ROG & $FF      
*$0 0 * 6HFXULWLHV )  8.  +HDOWKFDUH %OXH &KLS )XQG , 86' $FF        7KHVLV 8QLW 7UXVW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG  8. 
32 %R[  &KHOPVIRUG &0 ;) /) 5XIIHU *ROG & ,QF      
IXQGV#JDPFRP ZZZIXQGVJDPFRP +HDOWKFDUH 2SSV , 86'        ([FKDQJH %XLOGLQJ 6W -RKQV 6WUHHW &KLFKHVWHU :HVW 6XVVH[ 32 83
5HJXODWHG ZZZPDQGJFRXNFKDULWLHV (QT'HDOLQJ    /) 5XIIHU *ROG 2 $FF       $XWKRULVHG )XQGV
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV ,QFRPH 2SSRUWXQLWLHV % , *%3 $FF e      
/$3,6 *%/ 723  ',9</'1D' e       /) 5XIIHU -DSDQHVH & ,QF       70 1HZ &RXUW )XQG $  ,QF e      
&KDULIXQG ,QF       -DSDQ 9DOXH , -3< g      
/$3,6 *%/ ) 2:'  ',9</'1D' e       /) 5XIIHU -DSDQHVH & $FF       70 1HZ &RXUW )XQG  $  $FF e      
&KDULIXQG $FF       1RUWK $PHULFDQ , 86'       
/) 5XIIHU -DSDQHVH 2 $FF ?       70 1HZ &RXUW (TXLW\ *URZWK )XQG  ,QF e      
0 * &KDULERQG &KDULWLHV )L[HG ,QWHUHVW )XQG &KDULERQG ,QF e       8. 9DO 2SS , *%3 $FF e      
/) 5XIIHU 3DFLILF (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV & $FF      
0 * &KDULERQG &KDULWLHV )L[HG ,QWHUHVW )XQG &KDULERQG $FF e       /) 5XIIHU 3DFLILF (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV & ,QF      
0 * &KDULW\ 0XOWL $VVHW )XQG ,QF e       /) 5XIIHU 3DFLILF (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV 2 $FF      
0 * &KDULW\ 0XOWL $VVHW )XQG $FF e       /) 5XIIHU 7RWDO 5HWXUQ & $FF      
/) 5XIIHU 7RWDO 5HWXUQ & ,QF      
/) 5XIIHU 7RWDO 5HWXUQ 2 $FF      
*HQHVLV ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW //3 /) 5XIIHU 7RWDO 5HWXUQ 2 ,QF      
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV 1HZ &DSLWDO 8&,76 )XQG 3/&  ,5/ 
/HFRQILHOG +RXVH &XU]RQ 6WUHHW /RQGRQ :- -% 3RODU &DSLWDO //3  &<0 
(PHUJLQJ 0NWV 1$9 e       ZZZQHZFDSLWDOIXQGVFRP 5HJXODWHG
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG (XURSHDQ )RUDJHU $ (85 é      
1HZ &DSLWDO 8&,76 )XQGV
00,3 ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG  *6<  1HZ &DSLWDO &KLQD (TXLW\ )XQG       
5HJXODWHG 1HZ &DSLWDO '\QDPLF (XURSHDQ (TXLW\ )XQG é      
0XOWL0DQDJHU ,QYHVWPHQW 3URJUDPPHV 3&& /LPLWHG
1HZ &DSLWDO '\QDPLF 8. (TXLW\ )XQG e      
8. (TXLW\ )G &O $ 6HULHV  e      
1HZ &DSLWDO *OREDO $OSKD )XQG e      
'LYHUVLILHG $EVROXWH 5WQ )G 86' &O $)       
1HZ &DSLWDO *OREDO (TXLW\ &RQYLFWLRQ )XQG       
+3% $VVXUDQFH /WG 'LYHUVLILHG $EVROXWH 5HWXUQ 6WOJ &HOO $) e      
1HZ &DSLWDO *OREDO 9DOXH &UHGLW )XQG       
$QJOR ,QWO +RXVH %DQN +LOO 'RXJODV ,VOH RI 0DQ ,0 /1   *OREDO (TXLW\ )XQG $ /HDG 6HULHV e      
,QWHUQDWLRQDO ,QVXUDQFHV 1HZ &DSLWDO -DSDQ (TXLW\ )XQG g       3ULYDWH )XQG 0JUV *XHUQVH\ /WG  *6< 
1HZ &DSLWDO 86 *URZWK )XQG        5HJXODWHG 7RVFDIXQG $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW //3  8. 
+ROLGD\ 3URSHUW\ %RQG 6HU  e      
1HZ &DSLWDO 86 6PDOO &DS *URZWK )XQG        0RQXPHQW *URZWK  e       ZZZWRVFDIXQGFRP
+ROLGD\ 3URSHUW\ %RQG 6HU  e       $XWKRULVHG )XQGV
1HZ &DSLWDO :HDOWK\ 1DWLRQV %RQG )XQG        $SWXV *OREDO )LQDQFLDOV % $FF e      
$SWXV *OREDO )LQDQFLDOV % ,QF e      

0DUOERURXJK )G 0DQDJHUV /WG )  8. 

0DUOERURXJK +RXVH  &KRUOH\ 1HZ 5RDG %ROWRQ %/ 43    5XEULFV *OREDO 8&,76 )XQGV 3OF  ,5/ 
ZZZPDUOERURXJKIXQGVFRP ZZZUXEULFVDPFRP
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 3UXVLN ,QYHVWPHQW 0DQDJHPHQW //3  ,5/  5HJXODWHG
+HUPHV 3URSHUW\ 8QLW 7UXVW  8.  (QTXLULHV    
3URSHUW\ 2WKHU 8. 8QLW 7UXVWV %DODQFHG       5XEULFV (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV )L[HG ,QFRPH 8&,76 )XQG       
5HJXODWHG
3URSHUW\ e       %RQG ,QFRPH       5XEULFV *OREDO &UHGLW 8&,76 )XQG       
3UXVLN $VLDQ (TXLW\ ,QFRPH % 'LVW        7RVFDIXQG $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW //3
&DXWLRXV ,QF       5XEULFV *OREDO )L[HG ,QFRPH 8&,76 )XQG       
3UXVLN $VLD (PHUJLQJ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF        ZZZWRVFDIXQGFRP
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV       7RVFD $ 86'       
3UXVLN $VLD )XQG 8 'LVW e      
(7) &RPPRGLW\ $       7RVFD 0LG &DS *%3 e      
(XURSHDQ 0XOWL&DS       7RVFD 2SSRUWXQLW\ % 86'       
([WUD ,QFRPH       3HJDVXV )XQG /WG $ *%3 e      
)DU (DVW *URZWK $ ,QF      
*OREDO      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ ,QYHVWRUV  8.  *OREDO %RQG ,QF      
32 %R[  &KHOPVIRUG &0 :% (QTXLULHV    6FRWWLVK )ULHQGO\ $VVHW 0DQDJHUV /WG  8. 
ZZZMDQXVKHQGHUVRQFRP +LJK <LHOG )L[HG ,QWHUHVW       6FRWWLVK )ULHQGO\ +VH  %O\WKVZRRG 6T *ODVJRZ * +-   
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 0XOWL &DS ,QFRPH $ ,QF       2DVLV &UHVFHQW 0DQDJHPHQW &RPSDQ\ /WG 3XULVLPD ,QYHVWPHQW )GV 8. )  8.  $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV
1DQR&DS *URZWK $ $FF       2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV  *UHVKDP 6WUHHW /RQGRQ (&9 14 0DQDJHG *URZWK ♦      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ $VLD 3DFLILF &DSLWDO *URZWK )XQG $ $FF      
2DVLV &UHVFHQW (TXLW\ )XQG 5       2UGHU 'HVN DQG (QTXLULHV   
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ $VLDQ 'LYLGHQG ,QFRPH 8QLW 7UXVW ,QF       6SHFLDO 6LWXDWLRQV $ $FF       $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 8. *URZWK ♦      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ &DXWLRXV 0DQDJHG )XQG $ $FF       8. 0XOWL&DS *URZWK $ ,QF       $XWKRULVHG &RUSRUDWH 'LUHFWRU  /LQN )XQG 6ROXWLRQV
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ &DXWLRXV 0DQDJHG )XQG $ ,QF       8. 0LFUR &DS *URZWK $       *OREDO 7RWDO )G 3&* $      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ &KLQD 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF       86 0XOWL&DS ,QFRPH       *OREDO 7RWDO )G 3&* %      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF       0)0  7KLUG 3DUW\ )XQGV *OREDO 7RWDO )G 3&* ,17      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ (XURSHDQ *URZWK )XQG $ $FF       -XQLRU 2LOV      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ (XURSHDQ 6HOHFWHG 2SSRUWXQLWLHV )XQG $ $FF       -XQLRU *ROG & $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ )L[HG ,QWHUHVW 0RQWKO\ ,QFRPH )XQG ,QF  
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ *OREDO (TXLW\ )XQG $FF     
   

0)0 %RZODQG
0)0 +DWKDZD\ ,QF
     
     
2*0 2DVLV &UHVFHQW *OREDO ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV 8. ,&9& 8. 
5HJXODWHG Slater
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ *OREDO (TXLW\ ,QFRPH )XQG $ ,QF     
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ *OREDO 6XVWDLQDEOH (TXLW\ )XQG $ ,QF     
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ *OREDO 7HFKQRORJ\ )XQG $ $FF     



0)0 7HFKLQYHVW 6SHFLDO 6LWXDWLRQV $FF      
0)0 7HFKLQYHVW 7HFKQRORJ\ $FF      
0)0 8. 3ULPDU\ 2SSRUWXQLWLHV $ ,QF      
2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO6KRUW7HUP,QFRPH)XQG86'&ODVV$6KDUHV'LVW
2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO(TXLW\)XQG86'&ODVV$6KDUHV'LVW
2*0 2DVLV &UHVFHQW 9DULDEOH )XQG *%3 &ODVV $ 6KDUHV 'LVW


e


















Investments
2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO,QFRPH)XQG86'&ODVV$6KDUHV'LVW        3XULVLPD ,QYHVWPHQW )GV &, /WG  -(5  7UR\ $VVHW 0JW   8. 
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ ,QVWO 8. ,G[ 2SSV $ $FF e        *UHVKDP 6WUHHW /RQGRQ (&9 14
5HJXODWHG
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL$VVHW $EVROXWH 5HWXUQ )XQG $ $FF       2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO/RZ(TXLW\)XQG86'&ODVV'6KDUHV'LVW        2UGHU 'HVN DQG (QTXLULHV   
3&* % ?      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU $FWLYH )XQG $ $FF       2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO0HGLXP(TXLW\)XQG86'&ODVV$6KDUHV'LVW        $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV
3&* & ?       $XWKRULVHG &RUSRUDWH 'LUHFWRU  /LQN )XQG 6ROXWLRQV
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU 'LVWULEXWLRQ )XQG $ ,QF       2*02DVLV &UHVFHQW*OREDO3URSHUW\(TXLW\)XQG86'&ODVV$6KDUHV'LVW       
7URMDQ ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU 'LYHUVLILHG )XQG $ $FF      
6SHFWUXP )XQG 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU *OREDO 6HOHFW )XQG $FF      
6SHFWUXP )XQG 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU ,QFRPH *URZWK )XQG $ $FF      
0DUZ\Q $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW /LPLWHG  &<0  6ODWHU ,QYHVWPHQWV /WG  8. 
ZZZVODWHULQYHVWPHQWVFRP 7HO    7URMDQ (WKLFDO 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU ,QFRPH *URZWK )XQG $ ,QF       5HJXODWHG
)&$ 5HFRJQLVHG 7URMDQ (WKLFDO 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU 0DQDJHG )XQG $ $FF       0DUZ\Q 9DOXH ,QYHVWRUV e      
6ODWHU *URZWK       7URMDQ (WKLFDO ,QFRPH 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 0XOWL0DQDJHU 0DQDJHG )XQG $ ,QF      
6ODWHU ,QFRPH $ ,QF       7URMDQ (WKLFDO ,QFRPH 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 6WHUOLQJ %RQG 8QLW 7UXVW $FF       2PQLD )XQG /WG 6ODWHU 5HFRYHU\       7URMDQ )XQG 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 6WHUOLQJ %RQG 8QLW 7UXVW ,QF       2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV 6ODWHU $UWRULXV       7URMDQ )XQG 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 6WUDWHJLF %RQG )XQG $ ,QF       (VWLPDWHG 1$9       
7URMDQ *OREDO (TXLW\ 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. ,ULVK 6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV )XQG $ $FF      
7URMDQ *OREDO (TXLW\ 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. $EVROXWH 5HWXUQ )XQG $ $FF      
7URMDQ *OREDO ,QFRPH 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. $OSKD )XQG $ $FF      
0F,QUR\ :RRG 3RUWIROLRV /LPLWHG  8.  7URMDQ *OREDO ,QFRPH 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. (TXLW\ ,QFRPH *URZWK )XQG $ ,QF      
(DVWHU $OGHUVWRQ +DGGLQJWRQ (+ 6)   7URMDQ ,QFRPH 2 $FF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. 3URSHUW\ 3$,) $ $FF e       $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 7URMDQ ,QFRPH 2 ,QF      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 8. 3URSHUW\ 3$,) $ ,QF e       %DODQFHG )XQG 3HUVRQDO &ODVV 8QLWV      
-DQXV +HQGHUVRQ 86 *URZWK )XQG $ $FF       ,QFRPH )XQG 3HUVRQDO &ODVV 8QLWV [G     
2U\[ ,QWHUQDWLRQDO *URZWK )XQG /WG
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV )XQG 3HUVRQDO &ODVV 8QLWV       2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV 5DP $FWLYH ,QYHVWPHQWV 6$
6PDOOHU &RPSDQLHV )XQG 3HUVRQDO &ODVV 8QLWV       1$9 )XOO\ 'LOXWHG e       ZZZUDPDLFRP
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV
5$0 6\VWHPDWLF (PHUJ 0DUNHWV (T       
5$0 6\VWHPDWLF (XURSHDQ (T é      
5$0 6\VWHPDWLF )XQGV *OREDO 6XVWDLQDEOH ,QFRPH (T        8QLFRUQ $VVHW 0DQDJHPHQW /WG  8. 
5$0 6\VWHPDWLF *OREDO (T 6XVWDLQDEOH $OSKD        32 %R[  &KHOPVIRUG (VVH[ &0 3'   
.OHLQZRUW +DPEURV %DQN /LPLWHG  8.  5$0 6\VWHPDWLF /RQJ6KRUW (XURSHDQ (T é       $XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV
7+ )ORRU  6W -DPHV
V 6TXDUH /RQGRQ 6:< -8 8. *URZWK $ ,QF      
'HDOLQJ DQG HQTXLULHV    5$0 6\VWHPDWLF 86 6XVWDLQDEOH (T       
0LOOWUXVW ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 0DQDJHG ,QYHVWPHQWV ,&$9 ,5/  5$0 7DFWLFDO *OREDO %RQG 7RWDO 5HWXUQ é       0DVWHUWUXVW $ ,QF ? )      
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 2UELV ,QYHVWPHQWV 8. /LPLWHG  *%5 
8QLW 7UXVW 0DQDJHU$&'  +RVW &DSLWDO PLPL#PLOOWUXVWFRP    ZZZPLOOWUXVWFRP  'RUVHW 6TXDUH /RQGRQ 1: 4* 6WHZDUW ,QYHVWRUV  8.  8. *URZWK % ,QF      
5$0 7DFWLFDO ,, $VLD %RQG 7RWDO 5HWXUQ       
5HJXODWHG ZZZRUELVFRP     6W $QGUHZ 6TXDUH (GLQEXUJK (+ %% 0DVWHUWUXVW % ,QF ? )      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV *URZWK $ $FF      
%ULWLVK ,QQRYDWLRQ )XQG e       5HJXODWHG HQTXLULHV#VWHZDUWLQYHVWRUVFRP
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV *URZWK $ ,QF       2XWVWDQGLQJ %ULWLVK &RV $ $FF ? )      
0$,  %X\ /HDVH $XVWUDOLD$       2UELV 2(,& *OREDO &DXWLRXV 6WDQGDUG e       &OLHQW 6HUYLFHV   
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV (TXLW\ ,QFRPH $ ,QF       'HDOLQJ /LQH    2XWVWDQGLQJ %ULWLVK &RV % $FF ? )      
0$,  %X\ /HDVH 1HZ =HDODQG1=       2UELV 2(,& *OREDO %DODQFHG 6WDQGDUG e      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV (TXLW\ ,QFRPH $ $FF       $XWKRULVHG )XQGV 8. 6PDOOHU &RV $ ,QF ? )      
0LOOWUXVW *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV )XQG  &ODVV $        2UELV 2(,& *OREDO (TXLW\ 6WDQGDUG e       6, $VLD 3DFLILF $ $FF      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV 0XOWL $VVHW %DODQFHG $ $FF       8. 6PDOOHU &RV % ,QF ? )      
2UELV 2(,& 8. (TXLW\ 6WDQGDUG e       6, $VLD 3DFLILF $ ,QF e      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV 0XOWL $VVHW %DODQFHG $ ,QF       8. ,QFRPH $ $FF ? )      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV )L[HG ,QFRPH $ $FF       6, $VLD 3DFLILF /HDGHUV $ $FF       8. ,QFRPH $ ,QF ? )      
+& .OHLQZRUW +DPEURV )L[HG ,QFRPH $ ,QF       5R\DO /RQGRQ  8.  6, $VLD 3DFLILF /HDGHUV $ ,QF e       8. ,QFRPH % $FF ? )      
 *UDFHFKXUFK 6WUHHW /RQGRQ (&9 UODPFRXN 6, $VLD 6XVWDLQDELOLW\ $ $FF       8. ,QFRPH % ,QF ? )      
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV
6, *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0NWV $ $FF      
5R\DO /RQGRQ 6XVWDLQDEOH 'LYHUVLILHG $ ,QF e      
6, *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0NWV /HDGHUV $ $FF      
5R\DO /RQGRQ 6XVWDLQDEOH :RUOG $ ,QF      
0LOOWUXVW ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 0DQDJHG ,QYHVWPHQWV 63& 6, *OREDO (PHUJLQJ 0NWV 6XV $ $FF      
5R\DO /RQGRQ &RUSRUDWH %RQG 0WK ,QFRPH      
HP#PLOOWUXVWFRP    ZZZPLOOWUXVWFRP 6, ,QGLDQ 6XE&RQW $ $FF      
5R\DO /RQGRQ (XURSHDQ *URZWK 7UXVW      
5HJXODWHG 6, /DWLQ $PHULFD $ $FF e      
0LOOWUXVW $ODVND %UD]LO 63 $        5R\DO /RQGRQ 6XVWDLQDEOH /HDGHUV $ ,QF      
6, :RUOGZLGH (TXLW\ $ $FF e      
0LOOWUXVW /DXULXP $IULFD 63 $        5R\DO /RQGRQ 8. *URZWK 7UXVW      
6, :RUOGZLGH (TXLW\ $ ,QF e      
0LOOWUXVW 0DUFHOOXV ,QGLD )XQG        5R\DO /RQGRQ 8. ,QFRPH :LWK *URZWK 7UXVW       :$ )L[HG ,QFRPH )XQG 3OF  ,5/ 
6, :RUOGZLGH /HDGHUV $ $FF      
0LOOWUXVW 6LQJXODU $6($1 63 )RXQGHUV        5R\DO /RQGRQ 86 *URZWK 7UXVW       5HJXODWHG
$GGLWLRQDO )XQGV $YDLODEOH 6, :RUOGZLGH 6XV $ $FF e      
0LOOWUXVW 63$5; .RUHD (TXLW\ 63 $        (XURSHDQ 0XOWL6HFWRU é      
3OHDVH VHH ZZZUR\DOORQGRQFRP IRU GHWDLOV 6, :RUOGZLGH 6XV $ ,QF e      
0LOOWUXVW 97% 5XVVLD )XQG 63       
0LOOWUXVW ;LQJWDL &KLQD 63 $       
7KH &OLPDWH ,PSDFW $VLD )XQG 63 &ODVV $       
7KH &OLPDWH ,PSDFW $VLD )XQG &ODVV %       
3ODWLQXP &DSLWDO 0DQDJHPHQW /WG
2WKHU ,QWHUQDWLRQDO )XQGV
3ODWLQXP $OO 6WDU )XQG  $        =DGLJ *HVWLRQ 0HPQRQ )XQG  /8; 
/D]DUG )XQG 0DQDJHUV /WG )  8.  3ODWLQXP *OREDO *URZWK 8&,76 )XQG        )&$ 5HFRJQLVHG
32 %R[  'DUOLQJWRQ '/ 5'
'HDOLQJ   ,QIR   3ODWLQXP (VVHQWLDO 5HVRXUFHV 8&,76 )XQG 6,&$9 86' &ODVV (        0HPQRQ (XURSHDQ )XQG  &ODVV 8 *%3 e      
$XWKRULVHG ,QY )XQGV 3ODWLQXP *OREDO 'LYLGHQG 8&,76 )XQG       
/D]DUG ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV 2(,& % 6KDUH &ODVV
'HYHORSLQJ 0DUNHWV $FF
'HYHORSLQJ 0DUNHWV ,QF
(PHUJLQJ 0DUNHWV $FF
      0LQLVWU\ RI -XVWLFH &RPPRQ ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV  8. 
3URSHUW\ 2WKHU 8. 8QLW 7UXVWV
     
7KH (TXLW\ ,G[ 7UDFNHU )G ,QF      
     
'LVWULEXWLRQ 8QLWV

*XLGH WR 'DWD
7KH IXQG SULFHV TXRWHG RQ WKHVH SDJHV DUH VXSSOLHG E\ WKH RSHUDWRU RI WKH UHOHYDQW IXQG 'HWDLOV RI IXQGV SXEOLVKHG RQ WKHVH SDJHV LQFOXGLQJ SULFHV DUH IRU WKH SXUSRVH RI LQIRUPDWLRQ RQO\ DQG VKRXOG RQO\ EH XVHG DV D JXLGH 7KH )LQDQFLDO 7LPHV /LPLWHG PDNHV QR UHSUHVHQWDWLRQ DV WR WKHLU DFFXUDF\ RU FRPSOHWHQHVV DQG WKH\ VKRXOG QRW EH UHOLHG XSRQ ZKHQ
PDNLQJ DQ LQYHVWPHQW GHFLVLRQ
7KH VDOH RI LQWHUHVWV LQ WKH IXQGV OLVWHG RQ WKHVH SDJHV PD\ LQ FHUWDLQ MXULVGLFWLRQV EH UHVWULFWHG E\ ODZ DQG WKH IXQGV ZLOO QRW QHFHVVDULO\ EH DYDLODEOH WR SHUVRQV LQ DOO MXULVGLFWLRQV LQ ZKLFK WKH SXEOLFDWLRQ FLUFXODWHV 3HUVRQV LQ DQ\ GRXEW VKRXOG WDNH DSSURSULDWH SURIHVVLRQDO DGYLFH 'DWD FROODWHG E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU )RU RWKHU TXHULHV FRQWDFW
UHDGHUHQTXLULHV#IWFRP    
7KH IXQG SULFHV SXEOLVKHG LQ WKLV HGLWLRQ DORQJ ZLWK DGGLWLRQDO LQIRUPDWLRQ DUH DOVR DYDLODEOH RQ WKH )LQDQFLDO 7LPHV ZHEVLWH ZZZIWFRPIXQGV 7KH IXQGV SXEOLVKHG RQ WKHVH SDJHV DUH JURXSHG WRJHWKHU E\ IXQG PDQDJHPHQW FRPSDQ\
3ULFHV DUH LQ SHQFH XQOHVV RWKHUZLVH LQGLFDWHG 7KH FKDQJH LI VKRZQ LV WKH FKDQJH RQ WKH SUHYLRXVO\ TXRWHG ILJXUH QRW DOO IXQGV XSGDWH SULFHV GDLO\ 7KRVH GHVLJQDWHG  ZLWK QR SUHIL[ UHIHU WR 86 GROODUV <LHOG SHUFHQWDJH ILJXUHV LQ 7XHVGD\ WR 6DWXUGD\ SDSHUV DOORZ IRU EX\LQJ H[SHQVHV 3ULFHV RI FHUWDLQ ROGHU LQVXUDQFH OLQNHG SODQV PLJKW EH VXEMHFW WR
FDSLWDO JDLQV WD[ RQ VDOHV
*XLGH WR SULFLQJ RI $XWKRULVHG ,QYHVWPHQW )XQGV FRPSLOHG ZLWK WKH DVVLVWDQFH RI WKH ,0$ 7KH ,QYHVWPHQW $VVRFLDWLRQ &DPRPLOH &RXUW  &DPRPLOH 6WUHHW /RQGRQ (&$ // 7HO    
2(,& 2SHQ(QGHG ,QYHVWPHQW &RPSDQ\ 6LPLODU WR D XQLW WUXVW EXW XVLQJ D FRPSDQ\ UDWKHU WKDQ D WUXVW VWUXFWXUH
'LIIHUHQW VKDUH FODVVHV DUH LVVXHG WR UHIOHFW D GLIIHUHQW FXUUHQF\ FKDUJLQJ VWUXFWXUH RU W\SH RI KROGHU
6HOOLQJ SULFH $OVR FDOOHG ELG SULFH 7KH SULFH DW ZKLFK XQLWV LQ D XQLW WUXVW DUH VROG E\ LQYHVWRUV
%X\LQJ SULFH $OVR FDOOHG RIIHU SULFH 7KH SULFH DW ZKLFK XQLWV LQ D XQLW WUXVW DUH ERXJKW E\ LQYHVWRUV ,QFOXGHV PDQDJHUÜV LQLWLDO FKDUJH
6LQJOH SULFH %DVHG RQ D PLGPDUNHW YDOXDWLRQ RI WKH XQGHUO\LQJ LQYHVWPHQWV 7KH EX\LQJ DQG VHOOLQJ SULFH IRU VKDUHV RI DQ 2(,& DQG XQLWV RI D VLQJOH SULFHG XQLW WUXVW DUH WKH VDPH
7UHDWPHQW RI PDQDJHUÜV SHULRGLF FDSLWDO FKDUJH 7KH OHWWHU & GHQRWHV WKDW WKH WUXVW GHGXFWV DOO RU SDUW RI WKH PDQDJHUÜVRSHUDWRUÜV SHULRGLF FKDUJH IURP FDSLWDO FRQWDFW WKH PDQDJHURSHUDWRU IRU IXOO GHWDLOV RI WKH HIIHFW RI WKLV FRXUVH RI DFWLRQ
([LW &KDUJHV 7KH OHWWHU ( GHQRWHV WKDW DQ H[LW FKDUJH PD\ EH PDGH ZKHQ \RX VHOO XQLWV FRQWDFW WKH PDQDJHURSHUDWRU IRU IXOO GHWDLOV
7LPH 6RPH IXQGV JLYH LQIRUPDWLRQ DERXW WKH WLPLQJ RI SULFH TXRWHV 7KH WLPH VKRZQ DORQJVLGH WKH IXQG PDQDJHUÜVRSHUDWRUÜV QDPH LV WKH YDOXDWLRQ SRLQW IRU WKHLU XQLW WUXVWV2(,&V XQOHVV DQRWKHU WLPH LV LQGLFDWHG E\ WKH V\PERO DORQJVLGH WKH LQGLYLGXDO XQLW WUXVW2(,&
QDPH
'DWD 3URYLGHG E\
7KH V\PEROV DUH DV IROORZV ᅧ  WR  KRXUV ♦  WR  KRXUV ▲  WR  KRXUV   WR PLGQLJKW 'DLO\ GHDOLQJ SULFHV DUH VHW RQ WKH EDVLV RI WKH YDOXDWLRQ SRLQW D VKRUW SHULRG RI WLPH PD\ HODSVH EHIRUH SULFHV EHFRPH DYDLODEOH +LVWRULF SULFLQJ 7KH
OHWWHU + GHQRWHV WKDW WKH PDQDJHUVRSHUDWRUV ZLOO QRUPDOO\ GHDO RQ WKH SULFH VHW DW WKH PRVW UHFHQW YDOXDWLRQ 7KH SULFHV VKRZQ DUH WKH ODWHVW DYDLODEOH EHIRUH SXEOLFDWLRQ DQG PD\ QRW EH WKH FXUUHQW GHDOLQJ OHYHOV EHFDXVH RI DQ LQWHUYHQLQJ SRUWIROLR UHYDOXDWLRQ RU D VZLWFK
WR D IRUZDUG SULFLQJ EDVLV 7KH PDQDJHUVRSHUDWRUV PXVW GHDO DW D IRUZDUG SULFH RQ UHTXHVW DQG PD\ PRYH WR IRUZDUG SULFLQJ DW DQ\ WLPH )RUZDUG SULFLQJ 7KH OHWWHU ) GHQRWHV WKDW WKDW PDQDJHUVRSHUDWRUV GHDO DW WKH SULFH WR EH VHW DW WKH QH[W YDOXDWLRQ
,QYHVWRUV FDQ EH JLYHQ QR GHILQLWH SULFH LQ DGYDQFH RI WKH SXUFKDVH RU VDOH EHLQJ FDUULHG RXW 7KH SULFHV DSSHDULQJ LQ WKH QHZVSDSHU DUH WKH PRVW UHFHQW SURYLGHG E\ WKH PDQDJHUVRSHUDWRUV 6FKHPH SDUWLFXODUV SURVSHFWXV NH\ IHDWXUHV DQG UHSRUWV 7KH PRVW UHFHQW
SDUWLFXODUV DQG GRFXPHQWV PD\ EH REWDLQHG IUHH RI FKDUJH IURP IXQG PDQDJHUVRSHUDWRUV ,QGLFDWHV IXQGV ZKLFK GR QRW SULFH RQ )ULGD\V
&KDUJHV IRU WKLV DGYHUWLVLQJ VHUYLFH DUH EDVHG RQ WKH QXPEHU RI OLQHV SXEOLVKHG DQG WKH FODVVLILFDWLRQ RI WKH IXQG 3OHDVH FRQWDFW GDWD#IWFRP RU FDOO     IRU IXUWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ ZZZPRUQLQJVWDUFRXN
'DWD DV VKRZQ LV IRU LQIRUPDWLRQ SXUSRVHV RQO\ 1R RIIHU LV PDGH E\ 0RUQLQJVWDU RU WKLV SXEOLFDWLRQ
18 ★ 19 June/20 June 2021

Twitter: @FTLex

Investors should
not rule out prospect
Channel 4: half-baked
of a growth scare
British sell-off Carbon counter: mile-high snub for exec jets
Jet emissions per passenger (kg CO2/hour)
Commercial airliner
‘For Sale: British broadcaster. Empty
library, highly restrictive terms of
trade, makes losses. Apply HM
Very light private jet
Light private jet
Medium private jet
600

500
Michael Mackenzie
The Long View
Government.’ Plans to privatise Large private jet
Channel 4, the UK’s slightly edgy 400
broadcaster, are doing the rounds

again. True, public finances are more
stretched this time. But supposing, via
wildly optimistic assumptions, that a
sale pulled in £1bn, roughly one times
sales, this would barely cover a
fortnight’s debt servicing.
Few if any bidders are likely to bite
under Channel 4’s current structure as
a public sector broadcaster funded by
advertising. Its remit, to maximise
expenses, jars with most investors’
mission to maximise financial returns.
Tangible assets are few.
Intangibles can be cultivated by
anyone with a commissioning budget.
Oh, and Channel 4 has only three years
left to run on its current licence. Trade
buyers would struggle to find cross-
selling opportunities. The pool of
bidders is a shallow one to begin with.
As the government has learnt from
its semi-nationalisation of the railways,
switching owners means rewriting the
terms of engagement. Patrick Barwise,
who co-authored the 2016 paper on the
consequences of privatising Channel 4,
calls it the ‘Robin Hood’ model. The big
hits, such as cooking show The Great
British Bake Off, subsidise obligatory
public service fare like news bulletins
or content for remote communities.
Restructuring Channel 4 for private
investors would mean diluting these
obligations and enabling the
broadcaster, rather than independent
producers, to hold the intellectual
property. Channel 4, which has its own
streaming operation, might then have
valuable assets to maximise — which
would be more appealing to investors.
The downside is the damage that
would do to Britain’s media ecosystem;
particularly the independent studios
that are, in effect, receiving subsidies.
Tellyland types take comfort: the
complexity of engineering a sale
outweighs potential returns.
Inchcape:
car cash
The phrase “firing on all cylinders”
would apply to car dealers, were it not
for large numbers of electric vehicles
on their forecourts. This is a good time
for that much-denigrated professional,
the car salesperson. They have plenty
of new product to promote as big
manufacturers pivot into hybrids and
EVs. Many customers are awash with
spare cash saved during lockdowns.
Citing strong demand and resilient
margins, UK distributor Inchcape said
yesterday that this year’s pre-tax
profits would beat market expectations
of £216m. Shares trading at a steep
discount to more fashionable peers are
just one reason that investors should
give Inchcape a test drive.
The bulk of profits come from its
international distribution unit. This
works with manufacturers including
Mercedes and Toyota to provide
services including marketing, delivery
and aftersales. Typically the group
handles jobs in smaller markets such as
Chile and Romania that manufacturers
tackle themselves in larger ones.
That business produces profits better
Airbus Airbus Cirrus Embraer Bombardier Cessna Embraer Gulfstream
A320 A320 Vision Phenom Learjet Citation Legacy
economy first class Jet SF50 100 EV
Sources: compareprivateplanes.com, RDC, company websites, FT research
Flying executives around the world in
private planes does not chime well
with company pledges for a low-
carbon future. Yet Facebook, Visa
and others cannot seem to shake the
habit. Chief executives like the
convenience and privacy that private
jets afford. They can also avoid fellow
travellers who might have Covid-19.
Aviation consultancy WingX
Advance data show that, on a seven-
day moving average basis, private
flights have now recovered to 2019
levels. Commercial flights are still at
about half the usual level.
Private jets impress fellow high-
rollers. But they are both more
expensive and more polluting than
commercial air travel.
For those considering a summer
trip, aviation consultancy RDC
calculates that a flight of about 900
than traditional forecourt retailing,
where the group remains active in the
UK. Operating margins in the group’s
Asian distribution business were more
than 7 per cent last year, despite a hit
to sales from the pandemic. That
compares with the measly 1 per cent
margin Inchcape made from UK
forecourt retailing in recent years.
Investors have pushed the shares 20
per cent higher year. At 15 times two-
year forward earnings, the highest
since 2015, Inchcape is well priced. As
its update shows, though, analysts had
underestimated the impact on profits
from costs reductions last year.
Against unprofitable online dealer
Aramis — which floated this week —
and Auto1, Inchcape looks a bargain at
0.5 times forward sales, a two-thirds
discount to the would-be disrupters.
That gap has steadily narrowed.
Expect traditional dealers to gain
further traction as they rev up amid
the economic recovery.
JPMorgan/Nutmeg:
no dummy run
In football, a “nutmeg” is a sneaky
move in which a player kicks the ball
through an opponent’s legs. US banking
heavyweight JPMorgan Chase has just
made a canny play of its own with the
acquisition of robo-adviser Nutmeg.
The Wall Street bank’s deal values
the UK digital wealth management
platform at about £700m. That is a lot
to pay for a business that has racked up
more than £80m in cumulative pre-tax
losses since launching in 2012.
But for deep-pocketed JPMorgan, it is
a small price to pay to get its hands on
300
200
100
0 blindsided by something else.
G550*
70 XLS 650E
* Cabin configured for sleeping
miles from London Heathrow to Ibiza
on a typical Airbus A320 emits about
16.5 tonnes of CO2. If the flight is full,
this works out to just under 100kg of
CO2 per seat.
Compare that with an eight-seater
business jet, which would produce
about 6 tonnes of CO2 over the same
distance. Each passenger in the
private plane would account for
750kg of CO2. The private-jet
passengers would still be responsible
for more than twice the emissions of a
first-class passenger in a commercial
plane, who takes up the space of two
or three economy seats.
Companies are aware that
shareholders dislike executive jets.
Until now, the focus has been on cost.
But in an era of ESG activism,
carbon emissions are another black
mark against corporate aircraft.
a well-known brand that could help it
build a bridgehead into the UK retail
banking market. Nutmeg is among a
generation of robo-adviser start-ups
that were hailed as disrupters of the
UK’s personal finance industry. These
businesses were supposed to provide
cheap, online automated financial
planning to the masses.
But robo-advisers have been
hampered by low uptake rates that
increased marketing cost. As a
standalone company, Nutmeg has
struggled to make money. With only
£3.5bn under management for about
140,000 customers it continues to
bleed cash. The most recent set of full
accounts, which are for 2019, show that
the group made a pre-tax loss of £22m
on £9.2m of turnover.
JPMorgan, with its towering $450bn
market valuation and vast resources,
should do better. The bank is planning
to launch a digital consumer bank in
the UK under its Chase brand this year.
It makes sense to complement that
with a wealth management service.
Nutmeg has sacrificed profits to
build stronger brand recognition with
mainstream consumers in the UK. This
is valuable for a company such as
JPMorgan, whose Chase brand is little
known to retail customers in the UK.
Customer acquisition costs will
remain steep, but JPMorgan will have
no issues in covering them — it spends
$11bn a year on tech alone. JPMorgan is
now prepared to spend to score some
goals on Nutmeg’s home turf.
Lex on the web
For notes on today’s stories
go to www.ft.com/lex
W
hen one type of macro
financial risk occupies
the attention of inves-
tors, it does leave them
at the mercy of being
A stubbornly higher pace of inflation
and much higher interest rates are
widely seen as a likely legacy of the
enormous stimulus by central banks
and governments in response to the
pandemic.
But what if the outcome turns out to
be a less discussed and very undesirable
scenario — a less impressive recovery
once pandemic stimulus fades that
leaves a burden of debt hanging like a
deadweight on the economy?
That scenario no doubt strikes some
as remote given the scale of the rebound
in economic activity unfolding. The
actions of governments and central
banks in the past 15 months have
spurred expectations of a sustained glo-
bal economic recovery and a decisive
shift upwards from the modest expan-
sion that typified the prior decade.
Indeed, this week the Federal Reserve
upped its forecast from 6.5 to 7 per cent
for the rate at which the US economy
would expand in 2021 and maintained a
solid growth rate estimate above 3 per
cent for 2022. In the wake of the finan-
cial crisis, the US economy failed to
match that pace of expansion before the
pandemic erupted.
Little wonder that there was a shift in
tone by the Fed at its policy meeting on
Wednesday. It signalled the “lift off”
from near zero overnight interest rates
will now begin in 2023, instead of 2024.
Details of a reduction, or tapering, in the
Fed’s current $120bn of monthly bond
purchases that it uses to keep rates low
should arrive in the next few months
and most probably start early next year.
The recognition that strong expecta-
tions for the economy will require less
monetary medicine beyond this year
has stirred financial markets. In truth,
the latest Fed shift is a belated recogni-
tion of what many investors believe is
the base case for markets and the econ-
omy in the next few years.
The latest monthly survey of fund
managers by the Bank of America noted
investors are “bullishly positioned for
permanent growth, transitory inflation
and a peaceful Fed taper”. The survey
also showed a preference for financial
assets that are boosted by a higher and
sustained pace of economic growth,
including commodities, energy, indus-
trial and financial companies.
Missing from this bullish growth
checklist though are steadily rising long-
Businesses face rising
wages and taxes at a time
when they are dealing
with a higher debt load
dated US interest rates, an important
indicator of a healthy and sustainable
recovery. Normally if there are strong
long-term growth expectations and the
prospect of a more sustainable infla-
tionary environment, 10-year and 30-
year bond yields would be trending
upwards.
Instead these important interest rate
barometers peaked for the year in late
March. This could be because of expec-
tations of continued bond buying by the
Fed. And it might reflect the sheer
weight of money looking to be deployed,
particularly from pension funds seeking
to lock in returns.
But it also suggests that some inves-
tors might have not have quite a rosy
view of the longer-term outlook as the
BofA survey suggests.
There are reasons for this. Recent
employment data have highlighted a
bumpy process of hiring. If that turns
into evidence of a “jobless recovery” in
the coming months, we might face a far
longer process of post-pandemic heal-
ing. And working against hopes of a
strong recovery is a pullback in fiscal
spending next year. Northern Trust has
forecast a steady recovery and transi-
tory inflation pressures as its “base case
scenario” for the US economy. However,
it does now see a risk to growth.
After fiscal stimulus represented 10.5
per cent and 11.5 per cent of the econ-
omy in 2020 and 2021 respectively, this
boost is seen easing to just 2.3 per cent in
2022, says James McDonald, chief
investment strategist and co-portfolio
manager of Northern Trust’s global tac-
tical asset allocation fund.
“While there is sufficient reason to
believe the private sector will pick up
the baton from government spending
next year, it is a big hurdle,” he says.
Companies face the likelihood of ris-
ing wages and taxes at a time when they
are dealing with a higher debt load built
up over the pandemic. That debt bur-
den, along with increased government
borrowing, also offers another interpre-
tation of why longer-dated yields are
not rising.
Some analysts suggest it means the
Fed will only have a limited capacity to
lift interest rates. A sharp increase could
trigger a major confidence shock via a
severe decline in the stock market and a
wave of downgrades for companies with
indebted balance sheets.
“The profitability of companies is
dependent on low rates and this
will restrict the rise in bond yields
and also limit the ability of the Fed to
tighten policy,” said Thomas Costerg,
senior US economist at Pictet Wealth
Management.
The prospect of a growth scare is very
much a contrarian view at this stage of
the recovery, but it is one investors
should take note of.
michael.mackenzie@ft.com

Interconnectors of the UK The world’s longest

Shetland
Projects Go-live date Capacity undersea electric cable
NORWAY was switched on this
IFA 1986 2GW Orkney
week, as testing began for
BritNed 2011 1GW the 720km interconnector
Nemo 2019 1GW North Sea that will trade power
k
IFA2 2020 1GW
a Lin between the UK and
Moyle 2001 0.5GW Se Norway.
rth
EWIC* 2012 0.5GW No DENMARK Electricity began flowing
North Sea Link 2021 1.4GW
Viking Link 2023
through the €2bn North
1.4GW Moyle Sea Link, with the joint
ElecLink 2022 1GW Link venture between the UK’s
EuroLink 2030 1.4GW ing
Vik National Grid and
Nautilus 2028 1.4GW EWIC Norway's Statnett set to
IRELAND Irish UK begin formal operations in
NETHERLANDS October.
Sea EuroLink
Nautilus The cable can carry as
BritNed much as 1.4GW of power
Existing projects ElecLink Nemo
Testing BELGIUM GERMANY — about the capacity of a
IFA nuclear reactor.
Under construction IFA2
Under development
For the FT’s latest
* The East West Interconnector FRANCE climate change stories
Source: National Grid, FT research Follow @ftclimate on Instagram ft.com/climate
Saturday 19 June / Sunday 20 June 2021

Flight into the future A ride in the ‘Tesla of the skies’ — PAGE 6
Follow us on Instagram @ft_weekend

into an apolitical space. The politics —

particularly the racial politics — have
always been there.
The identity issues are rather differ-
ent for Scotland. Euro 2020 comes as
the Scottish government is ramping up
demands for a second independence
referendum. This is the first major
international tournament the team has
qualified for since 1998 — neatly fitting
the narrative of national revival.

Arriving in Scotland for the first game

of the tournament, I find the local
papers full of optimism. In recognition
of the enormity of the occasion, the
Scottish government has even allowed
schools to stop lessons to allow the kids
to watch the game against the Czechs
live. As a visiting English fan, I wonder
how I’ll feel about all this. I grew up sup-
porting Scotland in big international
tournaments. I had little option, since
England failed to qualify for the World
Cups of 1974 and 1978. But British iden-
tity was less complicated back then.

One prominent Tory

thinker laments to me that
the national team has
become a source of division

The anthem played for the Scotland

side that lined up to play Brazil in 1974
was “God Save the Queen” (although the
YouTube recording does not show the
Scottish players looking particularly
delighted). Today, the crowd and team
will be belting out “Flower of Scotland”
— with its stirring words that “We can
still rise now/And be the nation again”.

Fever pitch
asked to react to comments from the
home secretary.
It would be natural to assume
that cabinet ministers are better at poli-
tics than footballers. But the Johnson
government has reason to be wary of
clashing with the England team. Last
year, it went down to an ignominious
defeat, when it took on Marcus Rash-
ford over the extension of free school
meals for poor families. The Manches-
As football fans revel in the Euros, the beautiful game is finding itself pulled ter United and England forward mobi-
lised a million signatures behind a peti-
tion — and forced the Johnson govern-
into the culture wars. Veteran tournament-goer Gideon Rachman returns ment to change tack. The 23-year-old
Rashford’s preparations for Euro 2020
included a Zoom call with Barack
to the stands to reflect on the long tension between the sport and politics Obama. While plenty of Tories are pre-
pared to grumble about the “woke”
Rashford in private, none are willing to
enjoyed being caught up in a near
riot outside a bar in Marseilles, I was
told curtly: “If you don’t like it, you
should stay at home and watch the game
on television.”
Football grounds in the 1970s were
also where I saw the most overt racism
that I’ve ever witnessed in Britain. It was
routine to see black players barracked
by boos and monkey noises. The foot-
ball authorities and commentators were
silent about this for many years. So if the
current national side feel they want to
make a statement about racism, it is
hard to accuse them of bringing politics
When Scotland qualified for the
World Cup in 1973, there were more
than 90,000 people inside Hampden.
But today — thanks to Covid — it’s a little
over 9,000. Far from the joyous return
to the big time that has been advertised,
it feels pretty bleak and lonely up in
the stands. Even if the Tartan Army
has been reduced to little more than a
couple of battalions, they belt out
“Flower of Scotland” loud enough to
drown out conversation.
The team start the game with all the
expected passion and stream forward.
Their captain, Andy Robertson, can be
Continued on page 2

G
oing to a football match in
the middle of a pandemic
feels like undergoing an
endurance test for a reality
TV show. A prematch mes-
sage instructs me to arrive at Hampden
Park in Glasgow at 11am — three hours
before Scotland kick off against the
Czech Republic.
I must wear a mask at all times; no
bags are allowed that are larger than a
piece of A4 paper (why?); I must decant
all food from my micro bag into a plastic
bag provided by the stadium (why?).
But I really better bring some food
because I will be in the stadium for five
hours — and all the catering outlets will
be shut. So no rancid burgers or cartons
of flat Pepsi to keep me going.
When I obediently turn up to the sta-
dium three hours early, the crowds are
predictably sparse. The pubs outside
the ground, overflowing with support-
ers wrapped in Scotland flags, look like a
tempting alternative. But when I sug-
gest to a steward that I might go and get
a drink ahead of the game, a look of con-
cern crosses her kindly face. “Be careful
which pubs you go into,” she says.
“They’ll see you coming.” What is she
referring to? Could it be the Daunt’s
book bag (A4 size) that I am clutching?
I have given my spare ticket to a real
Scot, my friend Alasdair. But he is from
Edinburgh, so also not 100 per cent at
home in Glasgow. We decide to take the
advice and skip the pub. Inside the sta-
dium we encounter a fan in the loudest
tartan suit I have ever seen, including a
tiny tartan clutch bag. I pose for a photo
with him and he tells me: “I had it tailor-
made, son, it fits me like a glove.”
It is not just Covid regulations that
make this a unique and peculiar Euro-
pean football tournament. Euro 2020
(as Uefa still insist on calling it) has also
become sucked into the culture wars.
National football teams are symbols of
the nation. But that is not a straightfor-
From above: fans at ward task at a time when national iden-
Wembley for the England tity is so fiercely contested. For Scot-
vs Croatia Euro 2020 land, the pressing issue is independ-
match, photographed for ence. For England, it is race.
the FT by Max The English football team has decided
Miechowski; Gideon to “take the knee” before matches, as a
Rachman at Hampden protest against racism. But each time
Park, Glasgow, for the they do it, they are booed by a signifi-
Scotland vs Czech cant section of their own supporters.
Republic game on Monday, Even the government seems uncertain
photographed for the FT about how to respond.
by Gregor Schmatz After hesitating for a while, Boris
Johnson, the prime minister, con-
demned the booing and urged fans to
get behind the team. But two members
of his cabinet, Jacob Rees-Mogg and
Priti Patel, have defended the protests —
with Rees-Mogg suggesting that the pro-
testers are not expressing racism but
condemning the “Marxist” politics of
the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patel, Britain’s home secretary, has
accused the players of indulging in “ges-
ture politics”.
Players from the England team,
whose pre-game press conferences are
normally confined to discussing tactics,
injuries and the atmosphere inside the
camp (“we’re buzzing”), are now being
take him on in public.
The culture wars over football are not
just happening in Britain. When the
multiracial Belgian team took the knee
in Russia ahead of their opening game in
the tournament, they were also booed
by the crowd. (Doubtless, the Russians
were also protesting against Marxism.)
Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hun-
gary, one of the host nations for Euro
2020, has defended fans who boo visit-
ing teams that take the knee, saying that
Hungarians see the gesture as a “provo-
cation”. Orban is himself a rightwing
provocateur who has become a hero to
the Trumpist right in America by issu-
ing frequent warnings about the alleged
dangers of Europe being flooded by
Muslims. But even some moderate con-
servatives are uncomfortable about
footballers “taking the knee”. One
prominent Tory thinker in Britain
laments to me that football used to be an
apolitical space — but now the national
team has become a source of division.
I can see what he means. This year’s
tournament inevitably brings back
memories of Euro 96 — when England
also played their games at Wembley and
the whole country did seem to get
behind the team in an uncomplicated
sort of way. Back then, packed stadiums
all joined in the singing of “Three Lions
(Football’s Coming Home)”. Now the
stadiums are largely empty and some of
the home crowd are actually booing the
players. But, as somebody who has been
to many England games over the years, I
know that the idea that the team was
never mixed up with politics or race is
an illusion. England games have always
attracted a substantial number of
assorted hooligans and “far right” sup-
porters, whose trademark chant is “No
surrender to the IRA”.
At the last European football champi-
onships in France in 2016, the ugly
tradition of English football hooligan-
ism re-emerged. When I remarked to
another fan that I hadn’t particularly
2 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Life
Last week, filled with childlike were drawn to Denmark from across

Note from the anticipation, I stole away from an

afternoon of work to head down to
Scandinavia, and this painting,
completed in 1888, is based on a

FTW editor
A big week for the world: Joe
Biden has made abundantly clear
that America is very much back —
as Ed Luce addresses compellingly
in his essay in the main section.
Wednesday’s summit took me
back to 2005, when I stood with
the White House press corps in
a Slovakian palace as Vladimir
Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I’d been
waiting months to see the Immersive
Van Gogh exhibit at Pier 36, in which
the artist’s most famous works are
turned into giant animated projections.
Similar exhibitions produced by a
number of different companies have
sold out around the world; London has
a Van Gogh Alive exhibition showing in
Kensington Gardens, with Van Gogh:
The Immersive Exhibition scheduled to
open in July. In the US, immersive
shows of various stripes will be
showing in almost 30 cities this year.
I’m no grander a fan of Van Gogh
than the average art enthusiast. I am
awed by the ferociousness of his
creativity — he made some 900 oil
paintings in the 10 short years of his
artistic career — and fascinated by his
life: how he answered the call to be an
artist, then lived and worked with
such passion while also struggling
with mental illness, eventually taking
his own life.
gathering at the home of the Danish
realist painter Michael Ancher.
The party is closely gathered in
a verdant alcove. There are open
bottles of champagne and wine, and
glasses half-full littered on a patterned
tablecloth. At one end of the table,
three smiling women and a child are
caught in a brilliant frame of radiating
sunlight; at the other, the men stand
toasting with raised glasses. It has the
feel of an eternal summer afternoon,
where the light lingers until 9pm, and
you easily forget the day must end.
I’m pulled into that joyful painted
reverie, anticipating my own
gatherings with gratitude, yearning to
hold all worries and concerns at bay for
a simple afternoon of companionship,
nature, sunlight and merriment. The
painting feels like a radiating reminder
that life’s treasures are often intangible
and as fleeting as passing light.
Something many of us have learnt over
Visitors at the ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ show at New York’s Pier 36 — Nina Westervelt the past year and a half.

Stepping into the frame

Putin lectured George W Bush
about democracy. That was in the
heyday of our Lunch guest, who
has delivered intriguing — if not
chilling — insights into Putin’s
thinking. The Russian president
may be thinking rather differently
now. I am reliably told that Biden’s
message to Putin in Geneva was
utterly unequivocal.
In its own way, it’s been a big
week for us as well. On Tuesday I
spoke to the European Newspaper
Congress to thank them for our
pre-Covid award as European
weekly paper of the year. I slipped
in a lightly shameless nod to our
retail surge across Europe.
Welcome, new readers! I hope
you will be inspired by Enuma
Okoro’s appeal to imagine a
picture to inhabit and Sarah Sands’
citing of Bach as the Pied Piper to
lead us from lockdown. I have two
other contenders for that role: Ian
McEwan and Max Richter, who
I can disclose will be speaking —
and playing — at September’s FT
Weekend Festival. Alec Russell
The idea of stepping into one of his
dreamlike paintings was thrilling to
me. Immersed in a space of 500,000
cubic feet, I spent time in each of the
three galleries, sitting cross-legged in
a socially distanced circle as I gazed at
the digital blank canvas, watching as
works such as “Starry Night”, “The
Bedroom” and “Sunflowers” were
created line by colour by form.
Eventually, the room was flooded with
a vibrant painting that flowed across
the walls and floors, me and everyone
else right in the middle of it. It was
playful, mesmerising and magical.
Months ago, when I first heard about
the Van Gogh show, it made me wonder
about other works of art that I’d love to
live in for a day or a few hours. I started
looking at art with a new question:
“What would it be like to step into that
frame and join that world?”
Depending on my mood, there were
some works I’d want to jump into just
to interrupt the homogenous narrative,
placing myself in the middle of a story
that didn’t expect or invite diversity
because of the period in history or
broader ideas of who is welcome where.
Others I’d slip into with an armful of
questions. If given a chance, I suspect
the painted worlds that any one of us
might sneak into would be determined
not only by our curiosity, but also by
what’s happening in our own lives.
Of all of Van Gogh’s paintings, right
now I’d most readily like to dissolve into
“Noon — Rest from Work”, his 1890
rendition of Jean-François Millet’s
1866 painting “Noonday Rest”. Two
harvesters sleep reclined against a
As immersive exhibitions of Van Gogh’s work sell out across the world, our
columnist asks — which painting would you most like to live in?
haystack in the middle of the afternoon.
THE ART Their posture suggests utter physical
exhaustion. The woman is curled into
OF LIFE the bale of straw, using her arm as a
pillow, and the man is passed out on his
ENUMA back, his hat pushed forward to cover
his eyes. Their blue clothes are almost
OKORO the exact shade of the deep azure sky.
In the background a field animal grazes
besides a work cart. The entire painting
is a swirl of rich colour that exaggerates
the glow of afternoon sunlight.
I have always been strangely lulled
by this painting. Perhaps it’s to do
with the intensified colour and the
brushstroke technique, which creates
a dreamy, romanticised atmosphere
and seems to elevate an ordinary scene
of hard labour and deserved rest.
This artistic recasting of what we
normally perceive as prosaic might
invite us to reconsider how we look at
our own attitudes towards work and
To elevate an rest. Many of us exist in cultures that
celebrate burning the wick at both
image of rest, as ends, running our bodies into the
Van Gogh does, is ground for the sake of professional
advancement or ever-growing pay-
to reclaim its value cheques, or simply because we’ve been
and its necessity trained to believe that being endlessly
busy equates to our importance or
relevance. To elevate an image of rest is
to reclaim its value and its necessity.
It’s fascinating to know that Van Gogh
finished this painting while in a season
of heightened depression, during his
year as an asylum patient in Saint-
Rémy de Provence. It was roughly a
year after he cut off his ear, and about
six months before he took his own life.
As we live in this peculiar space
between a closed world and an open
world, I think there is a deep physical
exhaustion that comes with figuring
out how to cope with the weight of
what we’ve experienced in the past
year, while continuing to inhabit our
lives with all the responsibilities still at
hand. To tiptoe into this golden haze of
empty silence space for a brief siesta
feels like a welcome invitation. Not
a running away or a giving in, but a
recognition of and honouring of rest.
Yet after a year of lockdown, another
painting I’d relish some time in would
be “Hip, Hip,Hurrah!”, by 19th-century
Norwegian-Danish painter Peder
Severin Kroyer. He was part of the
Skagen group, a colony of artists who
And perhaps out of a sheer sense of
hopeful camaraderie, I would sidle up
alongside the three graceful women in
the gorgeous 1980 oil painting “Women
with Baskets, Fish and Crab”, by
Filipina artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho. The
only female artist among the group of
celebrated Filipino artists known as the
Thirteen Moderns, Magsaysay-Ho was
known for her work rendering Filipina
women contentedly occupied in the
midst of daily activities such as selling
fruit, caring for chickens and mending
fishing nets. Women aware of the value
of their lives and their work.
The three women in “Women with
Baskets, Fish and Crabs” are depicted
in Magsaysay-Ho’s signature style,
graceful and alluring, with elongated
bodies, angular faces and long narrow
necks. The women stand intimately
next to one another handling their
brown woven baskets among a table
of shimmering fish and crab. They are
all wearing short-sleeved white shirts,
and white loosely tied handkerchiefs
that frame their faces, caught in a glow
of light. The three of them are as
elegant and demure as models playing
it casual at a photo-shoot.
I am drawn to their postures, their
quiet confidence and dignity. It is a
picture that belies our assumptions
about what women at market should
look like and how they should feel.
Society might want us to relegate these
women to the margins, but in this
beautiful image we have no choice but
to be confronted by them in all their
presence. It’s tempting to want to cosy
up to them and trade secrets.

After 15 months of lockdown, the

calibre of my virtual meetings has
suddenly improved. One day from
London, I stepped into the meeting of
Fever pitch
G7 leaders along with Dr Denis
Mukwege, a Nobel laureate Continued from page 1 piece by Jonathan Liew in the
gynaecologist based in the Democratic Guardian pointed out, England are
Republic of Congo, the next, last seen gesturing to his players uniquely bad at holding a lead in a
Saturday, I virtually attended my son’s to calm down. Then the Czechs tournament. The numbers seem
wedding in Hong Kong. It’s a funny old score and the air is sucked out of to suggest they might even be
world, connected and disconnected. the stadium. “bottlers” — and that, oh heresy,
The invitation to the G7 was to speak At half time, which I choose to the French and Italians are much
on behalf of the Gender Equality spend in the toilets next to the better at holding their nerve when
Advisory Council, a distinguished group hand-dryer — the warmest spot in they take a lead. If Gareth South-
of women including our own Dame Hampden — there is hopeful chat- gate, the England manager, can
Sarah Gilbert, who led the development ter around the urinals that Scot- somehow break this cycle and turn
of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, land might still be able to turn this England into a winning outfit, he
Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of round. But early in the second half, will inadvertently provide a huge
Cern, and Ritu Karidhal, a leading figure football history is made — by the boost to a Johnson government
in India’s Mars Orbiter Mission. Spot the Czechs. Patrik Schick, the team’s that is desperate for symbols of the
scientist. Science is especially relevant centre-forward, gets the ball on success of Brexit Britain. But
for the G7 challenges of pandemic the halfway line and floats the ball Southgate has subtly but unmis-
preparedness, the climate emergency over the Scottish goalkeeper into takably positioned himself to the
and a green economy. the net. It is one of the most bril- left of the government on taking
If girls and women are to be part of the Naomi Clarke liant goals any of us will ever wit- the knee. He leads a multiracial

Boris, Bach and wedded bliss

green recovery, many more need to be
encouraged to follow scientific careers. At
the moment, only 22 per cent of AI
professionals around the world are
women. They could be erased from the
architecture of the future. I was delighted
that the final communiqué, which
attracted little notice, possibly because it
was issued during the England-Croatia
match, pledged to address this imbalance.
I stoutly read out one of the council’s
recommendations to the G7 about the
need for more women in decision-
making roles. President of the European
Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,
answered ruefully that I was right but it
was hard. Boris Johnson announced a
determination to make the world “more
feminine”, by which he perhaps meant
having more women around.
He did not take the issue of gender
equality as personally as the
predominantly male group of sherpas at
a preparatory meeting a few weeks ago.
Afterwards, one of them offered to
resign to make way for a woman.
I have learnt through this process that
there are many routes to change.
Governments can only do so much. The
proposal from our French council
member was for a charter on the
portrayal of women in the media. The
use of language is so important in all
communications. And it has become a
big issue in recruitment. If you advertise
for a “driven individual in gaming”,
women will tend to shrug. If you ask for
“a reliable individual with an analytical
mind”, they might apply. Language can
be unconscious as well as conscious.
LONDON DIARY
SARAH SANDS
Sitting in the virtual lobby at the G7
meeting, I had time to observe the body
language of the leaders, without sound.
The UK prime minister naturally uses
zoological gestures. Joe Biden had a
more fireside manner, folding and
unfolding his arms or putting his hands
together, part prayer, part emphasis.
Justin Trudeau is emotive in his
gesticulation: he could be holding a rose
beneath a balcony. Emmanuel Macron
performs as if he were conducting a
military band.
Interestingly, the two women in the
room were the most physically
restrained. You might call their manner
task-based rather than vision-based.
Briefly unmuted, Angela Merkel used
the phrase “unfathomable debt”. No
amount of fraternal backslapping can
disguise the scale of the economic
challenge we face.
The pandemic made many press
pause on their wedding plans. But
lockdown limps on and we can’t wait
forever. I have a son in Hong Kong, a city
still demanding three weeks’ quarantine
for visitors from the UK; I have not even
bothered to look up returning
restrictions. There is no end in sight.
So our son and his girlfriend finally
tied the knot in Hong Kong Cathedral at
7am on Saturday, while his family
gathered in their various boxes at the
bottom of the screen, forming a virtual
congregation. I wore a hat. Other guests
dialled in from bed. The church link
went down, so the rest of us were left in
limbo shouting hymns at each other and
then, to pass the time, holding up pets. It
was comic and stoical and the couple
looked blissful in the screenshots sent
over afterwards. They are all set for their
honeymoon — in Hong Kong.
My daughter said it was as if we were
all spirits, looking back at a life that no
longer belonged to us. The disembodied
wedding was the strangest moment of
lockdown for me. I have never longed
more for physical presence.
The emotions of joy and sadness
found their greatest expression in Bach,
so it feels right that he should be the
composer to lead us out of lockdown. I
went to watch a rehearsal the other day
of a new play by Nina Raine, Bach & Sons,
soon to open at the Bridge Theatre.
It is directed by Nicholas Hytner and
Bach is played by Simon Russell Beale —
the role of a lifetime. The composer had
been described as the sum of humanity,
a flawed husband who had to bury 10 of
his children and yet was capable of
expressing the sublime.
Hytner conceived the idea of a play
based on an encounter between Bach
and Frederick the Great, discussing the
nature of existence. Bach believed in a
divine, mathematical order. Frederick
argued for random chaos.
Hytner commissioned Raine, who
wrote the family drama during the
pandemic, not knowing when or even if
it might be performed. “I was writing
the play and thinking, what is the
point? What is the point of art?” she
remembers. Hytner said that reading
the play left him in tears. “Because
what this play is about, is what we have
not had any of.” Russell Beale cheers:
“Live music!”
The great unlocking, when it finally
comes, will be emotional. Add Bach’s
cello suites and there will not be a dry
eye in the house.
Sarah Sands is chair of the Bright Blue
think-tank and a board director at
Hawthorn Advisors
ness. The crowd is now almost
totally silent — apart from a tiny
group of cheering Czechs on the
other side of the stadium, and a
group of children near me who
continue happily shouting for
Scotland, while the adults around
them watch frozen in horror.
After the match, Alasdair
reminds me that Scottish fans are
used to bitter disappointment.
Making the national football team
a symbol of the nation is a double-
edged sword. We imagine them
scoring wonderful goals and cele-
brating with the fans. But what if
your goalkeeper ends up flounder-
ing flat on his back, tangled up in
the net? Euro 2020 has already
delivered humbling setbacks for
two football-mad populist leaders.
Orban gave permission for a
capacity crowd to attend Hun-
gary’s opening games in Budapest
against Portugal, only to see the
national side lose 3-0. Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, president of Tur-
key, travelled to Azerbaijan and
sat in a place of honour next to the
Azeri president — from where he
was able to see Turkey go down to
a 2-0 defeat against Wales.
The England team also have a
habit of disappointing their most
ardent fans. The side are often por-
trayed as the embodiment of what
we like to believe are national
characteristics: courage, calmness
under pressure. In fact, as a recent
team and has eloquently defended
their right to make statements on
subjects other than football.
It has become accepted wisdom
in Britain that “culture wars”
always work better for the right
than the left. But football may be
an exception. A poll taken across
Europe before Euro 2020 showed
54 per cent of English football fans
supported taking the knee, with 39
per cent opposed. If the England
team keep winning, the number in
favour may rise, along with the
team’s popularity. For once the
right may find itself on the wrong
end of a culture war. For the dura-
tion of Euro 2020, I will care much
less about who wins the culture
wars than who wins the tourna-
ment. For Scotland, Euro 2020
began with a deflating defeat. By
the time this article appears, we
will know whether they have
restored their fortunes at the
home of the Auld Enemy. The Eng-
land team disappoint their fans
almost as reliably as the Scots —
just slightly later in the day.
On the other hand, this is a weird
tournament. It’s taking place in
the middle of a pandemic; the sta-
diums are a quarter full and Eng-
land are playing half decently. I am
allowing myself to hope for the
weirdest outcome of the lot — an
England victory.
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief
foreign affairs commentator
19 June/20 June 2021
Lunch with the FT Vladislav Surkov
‘An overdose of freedom W
is lethal to a state’
He is the architect of the managed
democracy that has kept Vladimir
Putin in power for 21 years. Over
champagne in Moscow, Russia’s ‘grey
cardinal’ tells Henry Foy about the
view from the Kremlin, his role in the
invasion of Ukraine — and what he
learnt from the Commedia dell’arte
T
here are two options,” says
Vladislav Surkov as we set-
tle into our seats. “The first
is Anglo-Saxon. I give you
the menu, you can choose
what you want. The second option is
Russian. There is no choice. The chef
chooses for you, because he knows bet-
ter what you want.” Surkov smiles. “I
suggest the Russian option.”
And so begins a meal heavily sea-
soned with allegory and metaphor,
orchestrated by a man who helped to
strangle Russia’s infant democracy and
replace it with an enfeebled parody of
heavily scripted political reality TV that
has kept Vladimir Putin in power for 21
years and counting — despite the rising
tide of dissatisfaction and unrest at its
dwindling economic benefits.
Surkov is a founding father of Putin-
ism, and one of its key enablers. He is
the architect of Russia’s “sovereign
democracy”, an ostensibly open system
with a closed outcome: elections are
called, candidates campaign, votes are
cast, ballot boxes are opened, and the
same man wins, every single time.
Its core idea is that the stability of the
state supersedes the freedom of the
individual, and entails fake opposition
parties, rigid control of the media and
impossible barriers to entry for political
figures not approved by the regime, off-
set by the illusion of the traditional trap-
pings of a true democracy.
Grey cardinal, éminence grise, a mod-
ern Rasputin, a Russian Richelieu —
Surkov exhausts the clichés as the con-
summate Kremlin backroom operator.
Never elected, he was Putin’s chief ideol-
ogist and by most accounts his closest
political confidant for more than a
dozen years, who went on to stage-
manage the 2014 annexation of Crimea
and Russia’s involvement in the ongoing
war in eastern Ukraine.
Surkov is either 56 or 58, depending
on which biography you believe; in Rus-
sian political terms, he is only just
reaching his prime. But he is no longer
inside the towering red brick walls of
the Kremlin, having parted ways with
Putin last spring. From scripting Rus-
sia’s democracy, he is now simply con-
trolling my diet.
In jeans and a pullover, in a secluded
corner of an ostentatious restaurant on
the roof of a luxury Moscow department
store, Surkov says that his departure is
irreversible. He has stayed out of the
limelight since, publishing some poetry
and — he tells me — exchanging political
management for political philosophy.
We order champagne (Surkov says he
only drinks sparkling) and as the first of
five courses arrives — a mess of barely
discernible shredded vegetables drown-
ing in truffle oil — I ask the obvious
question: how does one dismantle
democracy while enhancing its facade?
“In the Soviet Union, there was a lot of
homogeneity. And that homogeneity
ruined the Soviet Union, because people
need diversity. But in the 1990s, we had
diversity. And that diversity was ruining
Russia even faster,” he begins.
“For a while I was a student at the
institute of culture. I studied the Comme-
dia dell’arte. There is a limited cast: Pan-
talone, the merchant. There is a judge,
Tartaglia. There is Harlequin, a stupid
servant. Brighella, a smart servant.
Colombina, the young servant, and so
on. There is a limited group of players,
but they represent all strata of society.”
I am initially bemused by this detour
into Italian theatrical nomenclature but
it soon becomes clear. “People need to
see themselves on stage,” he continues.
“In this masked comedy, there is a direc-
tor, there is a plot. And this is when I
understood what needed to be done. We
had to give diversity to people. But that
diversity had to be under control. And
then everyone would be satisfied. And
at the same time, the unity of the society
would be preserved . . . It works, this
model works. It is a good compromise
between chaos and order.”
Later in our conversation, which took
place three weeks before Wednesday’s
BUR O T S U M
Petrovka Ulitsa, 2, Moscow,
Russia, 107031
Green vegetable carpaccio
in white truffle oil
Tuna carpaccio
Sweet beef with
parmesan cheese
Grilled sea bass with baked
tomatoes and zucchini
Bellini panna cotta with
pomegranate granita
1 bottle Perrier-Jouët
Blanc de Blancs
The Financial Times was
unable to pay for this meal
but has made a £200
donation to charity instead
★ † FTWeekend
summit in Geneva, Surkov will spell out
his central doctrine with even less
nuance: “An overdose of freedom is
lethal to a state,” he says. “Anything that
is medicine can be poison. It is all about
the dosage.”
R
aised by his mother in a city
300km from Moscow, his
Chechen father having left
the family when Surkov was
still young, he took an unor-
thodox route to Putin’s side.
He served in the Soviet army, worked
as a turner in a factory, and spent years
“smoking and talking with hippies and
some other queer people” before enter-
ing the chaotic world of Russia’s nascent
capitalism as first a bodyguard and
then a PR man for banking and oil
tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Kho-
dorkovsky was later stripped of his
assets, jailed and exiled during Surkov’s
time in the Kremlin.
After a stint at Russia’s state TV chan-
nel he was made an assistant to Alexan-
der Voloshin, President Boris Yeltsin’s
chief of staff, in 1999. When Putin inher-
ited the Kremlin at the turn of the mil-
lennium, Surkov was made deputy chief
of staff. “When the change happened, it
was absolutely clear to me that the per-
sonality of the new leader provided an
opportunity,” Surkov recollects. “With
Putin, I realised everything that I
wanted to do could be done now.”
Surkov entered the Kremlin when
Russia’s democracy was just eight years
old. In that short time, Yeltsin had sur-
vived an attempted coup, almost lost
the presidency to a communist, and had
in effect mortgaged the Kremlin to a
small coterie of businessmen who were
now calling the shots.
The industrious young political strate-
gist got straight to work, building a party
for Putin — today’s United Russia, which
has won every election it has entered —
while also helping to set up other parties
such as the nationalist Rodina (Mother-
land), nominally independent but
Kremlin-directed, designed to appeal to
disgruntled citizens who might other-
wise have voted for real opponents of
Putin, such as staunch leftists.
He tells me that Putin, with his help,
created “a new type of state”. He
describes his former boss as a modern-
day Octavian, the Roman ruler who suc-
ceeded Julius Caesar. “Octavian came to
power when the nation, the people,
were wary of fighting. He created a dif-
ferent type of state. It was not a republic
any more . . . he preserved the formal
institutions of the republic — there was a
senate, there was a tribune. But every-
one reported to one person and obeyed
him. Thus he married the wishes of the
republicans who killed Caesar, and
those of the common people who
wanted a direct dictatorship,” he says.
“Putin did the same with democracy.
He did not abolish it. He married it with
the monarchical archetype of Russian
governance. This archetype is working.
It is not going anywhere . . . It has
enough freedom and enough order.”
This is easy for him to say. Less so for
those who oppose Putin’s stealth autoc-
racy, such as Alexei Navalny, the leader
of Russia’s grassroots opposition, who
has mobilised hundreds of thousands of
protesters against the regime over the
past decade despite constant attacks.
Last year, he was poisoned with a weap-
ons-grade nerve agent in an assassina-
tion attempt he says was ordered by the
Kremlin and, after he recovered, was
arrested and jailed.
In response, tens of thousands of Rus-
sians took to the streets this winter, only
to be violently beaten by riot police and
detained. Is that part of Surkov’s
scripted democracy?
“When I started my work in 2000, I
suggested a very simple system to bring
law and order. We split the opposition
into systemic and non-systemic. And
what is systemic opposition? That is one
that obeys the rules, laws and customs,”
he says, referring to Kremlin-directed
opposition parties.
I call him out on this obvious paradox.
An opposition that is loyal to those who
set the rules is no opposition at all. He
presses on. “The second requirement is
that they do not work for foreign gov-
ernments. If they do that, they cannot
represent Russians . . . it breaches our
sovereignty,” he says. “How to exclude it
is a matter of taste, and depends on the
temper of certain people.”
Navalny’s organisation has been des-
ignated as a “foreign agent”, and its
members will be banned from partici-
pating in elections. It denies receiving
foreign support.
I ask him if he is shocked by the new
level of violence being used by police
against protesters this spring. He smiles,
and says he has no idea. I recommend he
goes to a protest. “Me? Why should I?”
he responds with mock affront.
“The state protects itself, every-
where,” he retorts. “Sorry, I’m saying
simple things like a Kremlin propagan-
dist, but this is obvious. In all countries,
illegal rallies are crushed by force. Why
should we be different?
“That man is not acceptable. Navalny
is not acceptable,” he says. “He should
not be part of Russian politics. Germans
love him, let him be elected to the
Bundestag . . . They can give him a
German passport.” This sharp national-
ist edge lies just below the surface of this
suave intellectual, who blends Bible
quotes with financial market theory and
kept a photo of the late US rapper Tupac
Shakur in his government office.
aiters bustle around.
Delicious tuna carpaccio
is an improvement on
the sorry salad, and next
comes slices of excellent
rare beef under shredded parmesan.
Surkov barely touches his food and takes
tiny sips of his champagne.
In 2011, Surkov moved from the
Kremlin to become deputy prime min-
ister, and in May 2013 was dismissed
from government. His rivals toasted the
end of his regency. But four months later
he returned, this time as a formal aide to
Putin, with oversight over Ukraine pol-
icy. It would be an assignment with simi-
larly seismic impacts as his first.
Surkov tells me that when he worked
for Khodorkovsky in the 1990s, he wrote
a memo to a senior politician arguing for
the need for Russia to retake Crimea, the
Black Sea peninsula that became part of
independent Ukraine when the USSR
dissolved. But, he admits, Russia lacked
the resources and the organisation at the
time. In February 2014, five months
after Surkov’s new appointment,
unmarked Russian troops entered Cri-
mea to capture strategic sites, and lend
muscle to to pro-Russian separatists that
demanded independence from Kyiv.
A month later, in a referendum
declared illegal by the UN General
Assembly, the territory voted to become
a part of Russia. Simultaneously, pro-
Russian groups in eastern Ukraine, sup-
ported by Moscow, began taking control
of regional institutions and clashing
with federal security services — clashes
that erupted into a full-blown war that
continues today.
Surkov is unrepentant, and portrays
himself as someone seeking to help a
country long divided between east and
west. “Ukrainians are very well aware
that for the time being, their country
does not really exist. I have said that it
could exist in the future. The national
core exists. I am just asking the question
as to what the borders, the frontier
should be. And that should be the subject
for an international discussion,” he says.
“The country can be reformed as a
confederation, with a lot of freedom for
the regions to decide things by them-
selves. Two bones need soft tissue
between them. Ukraine is right between
Russia and the west, and the geopolitical
gravity of both will sever Ukraine. Until
we reach that outcome, the fight for
Ukraine will never cease. It may die
down, it may flare up, but it will con-
tinue, inevitably.”
Surkov describes the Minsk agree-
ments — a peace deal signed by Moscow,
Kyiv and pro-Russian rebels — as an act
that “legitimised the first division of
Ukraine”. I remind him that 14,000 peo-
ple have been killed in fighting since
2014, including 298 civilians on board
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was
shot down by pro-Russian rebels,
according to international investiga-
tions that Moscow rejects. Surkov says
that was “a pity”.
“I am proud that I was part of the
3
Life
reconquest. This was the first open geo-
political counter-attack by Russia
[against the west] and such a decisive
one. That was an honour for me,” he
says. “Could it have been done better?
Of course it could . . . But we have got
what we have got.”
Throughout his time at Putin’s side,
Surkov was deployed as a deft propa-
gandist, and shrewd manipulator of
public mood. He helped birth Nashi, a
nationalist youth group that venerated
Putin and harassed perceived state ene-
mies. Much of the Kremlin propaganda
spewed out by state TV and social media
troll armies was drafted on his desk.
“People need it,” he says in response
to my comment that much of that prop-
aganda is dangerous. “Most people
need their heads to be filled with
thoughts. You are not going to feed peo-
ple with some highly intellectual dis-
course. Most people eat simple foods.
Not the kind of food we are having
tonight. Generally most people con-
sume very simple-meaning beliefs.
This is normal. There is haute cuisine,
and there is McDonald’s,” he laughs.
“Everyone takes advantage of such peo-
ple all over the world.”
Yet at some point, his methods saw
him fall from favour. He had become, in
his own words, “too odious”.
‘Most people need
their heads to be filled
with thoughts . . . most
people eat simple foods’
“When someone fills a certain office,
and people talk about him for so long
that he is a puppeteer, that he is a stran-
gler of democracy, that he is [19th-
century reactionary adviser to three
Russian tsars] Pobedonostsev and Ras-
putin — that is the essence of being odi-
ous,” he says. “The government has to
remove such people now and then
. . . those people have to be replaced, so
that they stop irritating people.”
But he also asserts that his final depar-
ture was mutual — that the fun of dress-
ing up a one-party state as a democracy
had gone. “In 2000, it was unbelievably
exciting. It was for the first time. Every-
one said: ‘Wow!’” he recalls. “And so
then what else? I had built this car, but I
got bored driving it. It needed people
who are more patient sitting at their
desks. I am not a driver.”
Yet he still evidently likes to be in
charge. Without my knowledge, he
has settled the bill. I protest, citing FT
rules. He waves me away, citing his own.
Surkov, who has mystified Kremlin
watchers with his low profile since leav-
ing — neither political exile nor lucrative
business appointments — rebuffs my
persistent questions about a possible
return to the fray. But as the plates are
cleared, and I ask about his role in the
next Kremlin transition, his discipline
cracks: “Well, let’s wait and see. Some
exciting things are ahead of us. There
will be many new dramatic transforma-
tions. Yes, I would like to understand
when it will happen. If I live long enough,
when it happens, then I will have a job.”
Henry Foy is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief
4 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Style

Rumpled Boris, Macron’s mistake

and other G7 sartorial missteps

Clockwise from main: the G7 leaders, plus EU representatives, assemble at Carbis Bay for their recent summit, with Boris Johnson at centre; Germany’s Angela Merkel radiates authority, whereas Johnson conveys the feeling of a disheveled
schoolboy; French president Emmanuel Macron (right) wears the dreaded peak-lapelled, single-breasted suit; Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau looks good in perfectly cut blue — Getty; Neil Hall/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

from your countrymen, Emmanuel. A standards looks downright strange.

Opinion | The diplomatic power of dress was on more pulled-together G7 would surely
have sent Macron a sharply worded
memo, if not an official communique,
display at the summit in Cornwall. But who were on this topic.
Michel’s problem is simpler. His suit
does not fit. It is cut too tight, resulting
the winners and losers? By Robert Armstrong in the tugging of fabric around the chest
that is characteristic of middle-aged
men who try to wear slim-fitting suits,
His trousers are so large they make
him look knock-kneed, and they
appear to be falling down. The jacket
fits like it’s borrowed from a hard-
drinking uncle. His collar doesn’t want
to lay down on his chest, and one cuff is
sticking out erratically.
This is a guy who redecorated his
apartment with a chunk of the bill ini-

A
fter decades of softening
dress codes and 16 months
of a pandemic there is still
at least one place where a
man has to wear a suit in
the summer: the G7 summit. Leading
the free world is, for at least a little
longer, considered serious business.
I note with regret that the future of the
suit did not make it on to the agenda at
last week’s meeting. Presumably the
topic got pushed aside by climate change
or tax fairness, which reflects that ina-
bility to prioritise that is the downfall of
international co-operation. It is left to
me, then, to write the memo on the state
of the suit in global diplomacy.
We turn, then, to the now notorious
family photo of the group, in which
(as more than one wit has already
pointed out) the leaders of the seven
look like Hunger Games contestants, or
Star Trek crew members waiting to be
beamed down to the surface of an
unsuspecting planet.
The oldest rule of male power dress-
ing still applies, and two of the veterans
on the platform, Joe Biden and Mario
Draghi, observe it. A man’s formal suit
should be dark in colour and completely
matt. So, far from having any
silken shine, no more light should
escape from it than from a black hole.
The effect is flattering to every body
type and conveys moral seriousness.
(I was sorry to see that Biden left his
pocket handkerchief on the other side of
the Atlantic. If he does manage to return
the world economy to 1970s-style infla-
tion, bringing back the white pocket
hanky might be his only shot at a posi-
tive legacy.)
Two of the younger delegates,
Emmanuel Macron of France and Euro-
pean Council President Charles Michel,
wore suits of light grey wool, presuma-
bly hoping for something more seasonal
and contemporary. A mistake. Light
grey suits, even when well cut, tend to
look shapeless and bureaucratic. There
is only one known exception to this,
which is light grey flannel, which
looks lovely and soft rather than
shapeless. I do not know how it achieves
this effect. Good wool flannel is magical.
Macron — who is generally beautifully
turned out — compounds the error by
wearing the dreaded peak-lapelled, sin-
gle-breasted suit. Men have been
trying this for many years now, hoping
to make the suit look modern. It has not
worked, and it is time to stop trying.
Husbands, a French tailor that is doing
as much as any brand to make the suit
au courant again, does not sell this style,
except in eveningwear. Take the hint
as well as some rather unfortunate
bunching up around the knees. In
Johnson’s trousers appear
to be falling down. The
jacket fits like it’s borrowed
from a hard-drinking uncle
another photo, of the group sitting
around a conference table, we get a look
at Michel’s back, and it appears to have
been shrink wrapped. Politicians, take
note: a few extra square feet of cloth will
not make you look old. It will make you
look comfortable.
Justin Trudeau looks well in perfectly
cut light blue. He always looks good, to
the point of arousing suspicion. As I
have argued before on behalf of bald
men everywhere, you really can’t trust a
politician whose hair is that good.
And now, alas, we must turn to the
centre of the platform, and Boris John-
son, who even by his own disarrayed
tially paid by a party donor. Surely some
agreeable Tory grandee would spring
for a trip to Anderson & Sheppard? It
would be a service to the nation and to
the world.
There is merit in a certain amount of
gentlemanly dishevelment, in good
clothes worn carelessly. There is also
something to be said for the political
power of nondescript or even unattrac-
tive clothes, which can convey a connec-
tion to the everyman voter as well as a
focus on what really matters. I think
Merkel’s plain dark trousers and mono-
tone, boxy suits succeed at exactly this.
She always radiates seriousness and
authority, and the clothes help.
But Johnson, so far from pulling off a
British version of Italian sprezzatura,
conveys the feeling of a schoolboy bust-
ing into the classroom 10 minutes late,
trailing rumpled homework papers.
Clothes are fundamentally diplomatic.
They show other people that we made
an effort on their behalf. What is John-
son’s laundry-hamper style trying to tell
the world?

Fur real? The rise of luxury pet shampoos

Shopping | Beauty brands are recognising the desire to pamper our pooches with new pet products. Kate Finnigan and her cavapoochon Meg put them to the test

M
y four-year-old cavapoo-
chon Meg is white and
curly haired, a dog at
whom toddlers often
point and say “sheepie”
or “baa” and want to pat her springy fur.
I wouldn’t, I often think, knowing where
she’s been.
Apparently some dogs don’t have a
penchant for other animals’ poo. But
Meg loves the stuff — fox and duck espe-
cially, but deer is pretty compelling, too.
She likes to roll in it, massaging it into
the crease under her jaw and below her
ears, the hard to reach places that I will
have to spend 10 minutes scrubbing
before scouring the bath. When this
happens first thing in the morning I find
it really sets me up for the day.
Even if you’re not planning on enter-
ing your pet into Crufts, some dogs
require a lot of upkeep, and mine is one
of them.
So it’s been interesting to see the fancy
new grooming products that have
emerged on to the dog market in
response to the rise in dog ownership
during the global pandemic.
In April, Euromonitor International
reported pet care sales had risen by 8.7
per cent in 2020 with pet food, accesso-
ries, beauty and grooming categories
benefiting the most from the pandemic
with growth of 8.1 per cent, 10.3 per cent
Pampered pooch: French actress
Michèle Laroque — Getty Images
and 11.3 per cent, respectively.
Until recently I have largely been
using the store-brand shampoos that
you find in Pets At Home or the garden
centre, reasoning that, well, I’m not
mad. Twenty-five pounds on fancy dog
shampoo on top of all the other doggy
expenses? Barking. Besides, nothing is
as effective on fox poo as tomato
ketchup. But with some interesting new
products arriving, I wondered whether
bathing Meg had to be quite as basic as I
was making it.
One that caught my eye was allPaws,
from the eco-minded human grooming
brand Green People, which launched
two pet shampoos this year (fellow eco
brand Faith in Nature will launch dog
shampoo in September). Its Cleansing
shampoo (it also has a scent-free Sensi-
tive option, pictured right, £14, green-
people.co.uk) smells vaguely tooth-
pastey and comes up in a better lather
than Pets At Home’s “white dog” sham-
poo (£4.50, petsathome.co.uk). Also the
packaging is cute, with sweet line draw-
ings in black on white.
And that’s the big thing with many of
the new brands in this category: aes-
thetics. Packaging good enough to put
alongside your George Northwood or
your Oribe. We’re really in sophisticated
marketing territory now when it comes
to pet products, as the hard-working
brand names alone indicate. The Amer-
ican brand Pride & Groom, now found at
Selfridges in the UK (shampoo £25,
selfridges.com), is, according to its web-
site, approved by Oprah Winfrey and
has a strong, masculine feel. Sniffe &
Likkit, which launched in 2020, comes
in metallic silver tubes and falls under
the humorous modern British brand
tradition of the likes of Innocent. Its
Fragrant Fur Coat, a brightening and
conditioning shampoo (£14.14,
fetch.co.uk), features an illustration of a
hound called Bruce showering him-
self. It’s formulated with aromatherapy
oils and leaves a mild and
pleasant fragrance.
Jen Atkin, hair stylist to the
Kardashians and founder of
the beauty brand Ouai (pro-
nounced “way”), introduced
its dog shampoo Fur Bébé as a
limited edition in 2018. Due to
customer demand, Fur Bébé,
pictured below, is now back this
month as an ongoing offering
and is available in the UK at
lookfantastic.com for £25. After
a recent riverside duck incident,
my husband took on the washing
chore using Fur Bébé, which
comes in very stylish minimalist pack-
aging, and reported a pleasing lather
and a good smell. I thought Meg’s
fur looked brighter and the fra-
grance lasted for a few days.
The above are new competi-
tors to already existing sham-
poos such as the beloved
Ae s o p A n i m a l ( £ 27,
aesop.com), which doubles as
a hand wash for humans,
Kiehl’s Cuddly Coat Groom-
ing Rinse (£20, kiehls.co.uk)
and those from British pre-
mium pet brand Mungo &
Maud. The latter are so lovely
you might be forgiven for mis-
taking them for baby products, which is
completely fitting in an age when
we treat our pets as our darling
offspring. It has two shampoos,
Petite Amande and Petits Flo-
cons D’Avoine (both £33.50,
mungoandmaud.com), which
are not fragranced and therefore
suitable for sensitive dogs and
puppies. Founder Nicola Sacher
has noticed an increase in its sales
during the past year, which she
puts down to the increase in
puppy ownership.
But do we need these fancier
dog grooming products? Only in
as much as we “need” expensive
shampoos with added benefits for our
own hair. Personally, though, I have
found recent more upmarket tries a
little more effective and easier to
use than other cheaper brands,
particularly allPaws and Sniffe
& Likkit.
The more pertinent question
is, do our dogs need them? Dan-
iella Dos Santos, senior vice-
president of the British Veteri-
nary Association, won’t com-
ment on particular brands, but
she says that grooming is an
important part of having a pet.
“It’s important for the upkeep
of their coats and to keep them
comfortable and so on. But there isn’t a
one size fits all approach to how much of
it you need to do. If you have a spaniel
like mine, who loves jumping in muddy
puddles, then I’m going to need to bathe
her more often than a dog who doesn’t.
It also depends on the type of coat — the
long fur of a Newfoundland is going to
require more upkeep than a Stafford-
shire bull terrier. My advice is to ask
your vet about what is right for your dog
and their lifestyle, age and breed.”
The BBC dog grooming series Pooch
Perfect caused concern at the RSPCA
Even if you’re not entering
your pet at Crufts, some
dogs require a lot of upkeep
— including mine
this year when episodes featured fur
dying and nail painting. Santos is keen
to warn against “inappropriate anthro-
pomorphism”, or otherwise unnaturally
changing a pet’s appearance. “Not only
is it not necessary, it’s potentially harm-
ful, and it could prevent pets from
expressing their natural behaviours,”
she says. Shampooing out unsightly
messes though? That, as one brand
might have it, is paw-fectly fine and
often more than a little necessary.
19 June/20 June 2021
Report | Flora Macdonald
Johnston on the young milliners
making headwear modern
W
here is millinery with-
out events? When
Europe started to lock
down last March, it left
fine hat-makers in a
state of flux. In the UK, Royal Ascot
went ahead without guests and the
Henley Royal Regatta was cancelled;
weddings were either postponed or
scaled down.
Even without the pandemic, milli-
nery is a tough landscape to master.
Stephen Jones, who has created hats for
the catwalks of Dior, Balenciaga and
Givenchy, launched the British Hat
Guild in 2019 to represent UK milliners.
In an interview with the FT last year
Jones said that hats are among the first
orders to be cancelled by wholesalers
and department stores in a crisis.
‘You need to see them on
the face, but most
importantly you need to
feel the quality of the fabric’
But millinery looks a little less gloomy
as Royal Ascot returns this week and
from June 21 weddings in England will
be allowed as many guests as the venue
can accommodate with social distanc-
ing. Buyers at MatchesFashion say they
have noticed a recent pick-up in hat
sales, particularly straw styles; Stephen
Jones continues to be the site’s best-
The great
seller in the occasion-wear category.
Despite the ongoing uncertainty,
a new generation of British creatives
are taking up the craft, banking on col-
laborations, lower price points, person-
hat tip
alisation and everyday use to boost their
businesses.
James Pink Studio
Jaunty sailor hats crafted in satin, mili-
tary-style berets made of velvet and
leopard-print faux fur, and gingham-
mesh sun hats in hues of minty green
★ FTWeekend
and brown: James Rushfirth’s creations
are equal parts camp, contemporary
and commercial, which is exactly how
he likes it.
“I think hats should be accessible,
but they need to be robust too,” the
27-year-old, Leeds-based graduate of
Central Saint Martins says of his
designs, which are priced from £120 for
a beret, and up to £175 for a bucket hat
made with sequins or wool. “I want
someone to wear one of my hats to the
pub, out shopping, or even at a wedding
but I don’t want it to be out of their per-
sonal style.”
Rushfirth launched his unisex milli-
nery label in September, quickly build-
ing a profile thanks to Harry Styles, who
has worn his berets, and buzzy collabo-
rations with eco-minded fashion brand
Chopova Lowena, menswear designer
Reuben Selby and stylist Harry Lam-
bert. All of Rushfirth’s designs are made
by hand, and he can turn out one per
day. He sources deadstock fabric from
mills in Yorkshire and London suppliers
including The Silk Society.
Like many millennial business own-
ers, Rushfirth owes much of his early
success to social media, which is
where the majority of his US-
and Japan-based clients dis-
covered him. “In Japan,
there are certain small
communities of clothes-
lovers that influence each
other and me too. They
really appreciate lesser-
known international brands,
and style is a big part of their life-
style and identity,” he says.
For those unsure about hats,
Rushfirth’s advice is simple: try
them on. “You need to see them on the
face, but most importantly you need to
feel the quality of the fabric. There’s a
massive difference between a bucket
hat in a high street store and a well-
made hat.”
Filipa Cardoso
Filipa Cardoso has a tongue-in-cheek
approach to design. She’s created a
deconstructed boater that looks as if
it is unravelling mid-air, petite hats
with ribbons that appear to be floating
away in a breeze, and wide-brim styles
with graphic scribbles embroidered
with black thread (her hats are priced
from £250).
A recent graduate, Cardoso has felt
the pressures of launching a business
during a pandemic keenly. Brexit has
also increased the prices of her materi-
als considerably. “My designs might
take three to four days to make when
focused, and the materials are incredi-
bly expensive as they are all-natural
fibres,” she explains.
Cardoso sources her straw from
suppliers in the UK, who in turn
source the materials from the
Philippines; her felt is primarily
from Portugal.
Cardoso is hopeful for milli-
nery’s future: “There is a feel-
ing and need, it seems, to dress
up now. People want to stand
out and feel special after being
at home for so long.”
Lucy Brice
“When I was little I would run
away from my parents in John
Lewis, and they would
always then discover me
trying on hats,” says 28-
year-old Lucy Brice, who has
been fascinated by milli-
nery ever since. At 18, she
met a milliner at a coun-
try fair who agreed to
teach her the craft, so
Brice travelled to Scot-
land for a week and spent
hours stitching, sewing
and shaping hats. “It gave
me the basic understanding,
and after that I just didn’t
stop,” she says.
While studying Rural
Land Management at the
5
Style
Clockwise from
main: James
Pink Studio
beret; Filipa
Cardoso; her
Contrasting
Sonata
headband, £550;
Lucy Brice’s
Josie hat in
Turquoise,
£125 — Tomila Katsman
Royal Agricultural University, Brice
spent her student loan not on nights out
but on wooden hat blocks. “I just did it
for fun for myself and for friends, then I
started getting questions and requests
because people had seen [my designs]
on my social media,” says Brice.
Demand for hats tends to be season-
ally driven; Brice relies heavily on
events such as Ascot, Cheltenham and
fairs for orders, and so she has been
juggling a job in marketing alongside
her direct-to-consumer millinery busi-
ness. Lockdown gave Brice the chance
to create her first full collection of but-
ton-shaped hats, rendered in pops of
orange, yellow and pink and adorned
with feathers and netting. “It is all
about personalisation. The hat must
match the face and I am always happy
to create custom colours,” says Brice,
whose prices start at £105 for
colourful button hats to £295
for larger styles with wide
slanting brims.
During the past year,
Brice had to be thrifty and
created baker boy hats in
tweed (priced at £150) to
glean some additional reve-
nue. But clients are once
again requesting formal hats
as lockdown eases. “I would
love to focus on millinery
full time,” she says. “I just
bought a shed for my garden
so I can move in there and
make a studio that isn’t my
living room.”
6 ★
Travel
Aviation | The dream of emission-
free flying is closer than you
might imagine. Tom Robbins takes
a ride in the first all-electric plane
I
n a scrappy lean-to on a former
farm at London’s eastern fringe, we
drank a mug of instant coffee, ate a
biscuit, then set off to experience
the future of aviation.
Those who don’t follow the industry
closely would be forgiven for thinking
its Holy Grail — fully electric, zero-
carbon flight — was still a vague ambi-
tion, years from being realised. In fact, it
was waiting for me on the far side of the
rusting metal hangar at Damyns Hall
Aerodrome, a couple of miles from the
final stop on the Tube’s District line.
There, new and gleaming white in the
early morning sun, was the world’s first
fully certified electric aircraft, a two-
seater Pipistrel Velis Electro. The EU
Aviation Safety Agency awarded it
“type certification” in June last year —
meaning it can be used in commercial
operations and carry passengers. That
achievement was arguably a milestone
to rank alongside the first certification
of a piston-engined plane (1927) and of
a jet-powered passenger plane (1952),
and yet it was all but overlooked by the
mainstream press. Perhaps that was
because the world was preoccupied with
the pandemic, perhaps because the
milestone was achieved not by Airbus or
Boeing but a small Slovenian manufac-
turer founded in 1989.
Wearing aviator shades and sandals,
Deepak Mahajan, an instructor at
Damyns Hall and head of flight opera-
tions for NEBO Air, a start-up all-elec-
tric “micro-airline”, showed me how to
get in, gingerly sitting on the edge of the
lightweight composite cockpit and
swinging my legs inside. This plane was
the first Velis in the UK, delivered last
month and with 10 hours of flying time
on the clock, but 39 have already been
sent to customers worldwide, mainly to
flight training schools or private pilots
eager to own a “Tesla of the skies”.
Anyone who has flown in a light air-
craft will be used to waiting while the
pilot performs an exhaustive pre-flight
checklist — testing oil pressure, check-
ing fuel tanks, revving the engine — but
there was none of that. Instead,
Mahajan flicked a few switches, we
waited perhaps 30 seconds while the
plane’s computers carried out a self-
check, then we were ready to go. “I’m
still learning how to fly it,” he chuckled
as we taxied across the grass.
With neither the vibration of a piston
engine nor the roar of a jet — rather a
polite whirr — the plane shot forward,
and within 250 metres we were air-
borne. We climbed above the rush-hour
traffic on the Dartford bridge, passed
low over a glittering Thames, banked
over the filling car parks of the Lakeside
Shopping Centre. Perhaps it was the
good weather and early hour, but the
flight felt far smoother than you might
expect in such a small plane.
POSTCARD
FROM . . .
CAIRO
i / DETAILS
Egypt is currently open to international tourists
but a negative PCR test, taken within 72 hours
prior to their flight taking off, is required; see
egypt.travel for more information
My flight into the future
One of the many screens showed how
much power we were using — as little as
8kW at some points (equivalent to about
four domestic kettles), though typically
about 20kW — while a bigger display
showed the power left in the two batter-
ies. Owners of electric cars will know the
feeling of “range anxiety”; in the air, it
takes on a rather greater significance.
Aside from avoiding carbon emis-
sions, the advantages of electric flying
are numerous. Without all the heat gen-
erated by a conventional engine, stored
power is converted to motion far more
efficiently, making flying much cheaper
(for our 30-minute flight the fuel bill
was about £1). Without the vibrations,
the aircraft requires less maintenance
and, with fewer moving parts, it is sim-
pler to carry out.
Batteries, though, are the big sticking
point, currently lacking the “energy
density” — more simply, being too heavy
— to allow for long flights or carrying
large numbers of passengers. The Velis’s
two liquid-cooled batteries (one behind
the seats, the other behind the propel-
I
n a covered street in Cairo’s Islamic
heart, surrounded by splendid
monuments and tall minarets, the
artisans of the Tentmakers’ Bazaar
keep alive a craft that is almost a
thousand years old — one that has been
part of the city’s pomp and pageantry
since medieval times.
For centuries the bazaar’s main
product was ceremonial tents, opulent
feats of temporary architecture
commissioned by princes and
sultans, and used to host public
events and festivities. They were
made with a technique still in use
today called needle-turned appliqué,
in which pieces of cotton fabric cut in
intricate designs are hand-stitched
FTWeekend
ler) give it a flying time of about an hour.
Luggage capacity is pretty much zero.
NEBO Air, founded by Russian-born
lawyer and pilot Sergey Grachev, plans
to use the plane for public pleasure
flights at Damyns Hall, starting this
month, for pilot training and later as a
way of transporting individual passen-
gers between London, Shipmeadow (a
private airfield on Grachev’s Suffolk
hobby farm) and Wickenby Aerodrome
in Lincolnshire. That route map is an
esoteric proposition for an “airline”,
especially given that, as it takes an hour
to recharge the plane’s battery, it would
probably be quicker to drive.
In fact, a key part of NEBO Air’s plan is
simply to attract eco-conscious custom-
ers to Grachev’s 40-acre farm. There,
guests will be able to experience electric
flights before enjoying yoga, farm tours
and walks with alpacas, while staying in
a range of kooky, solar-powered accom-
modation, including a yurt, treehouse
and railway carriage. “It’s a wonderful
place,” says Grachev. “Soon after you
land, the animals come out to meet you
and say hello.”
Wickenby
Sheffield Aerodrome
North
Nottingham
Norwich Sea
UK Shipmeadow
Airfield
Cambridge
Damyns Hall
Aerodrome
London
50 km
©Mapcreator.io/©HERE
on canvas to form elaborate patterns.
In recent decades, with demand for
expensive handmade public tents
declining, the craftsmen of the market
have thrived by turning their skills to
making items for tourists, focusing on
household textiles such as wall
hangings, bedspreads, cushion covers
and tablecloths.
Coronavirus, however, has dealt
them a severe blow. It halted the
tourist flow less than a year after it had
recovered to levels unseen since the
2011 revolution, which ushered in a
long period of political upheaval.
“There was a slowdown that lasted
until 2019 when business bounced
back,” says Mahmoud al-Hariri, one of
the master craftsmen of the market.
“Then corona came and stopped
anyone coming or going.”
But if there are few tourists now, the
older generation of skilled artisans
such as Hariri say they are taking the
opportunity to work on difficult and
time-consuming pieces that showcase
their prowess while they wait for the
market to take off again.
“My colleagues and I, we are
constantly looking at each other’s work
and challenging each other,” says
Hariri as he proudly unfolds what he
considers his masterpiece, a bedspread
that took six months to make,
decorated with interlaced arabesque
stars and finely detailed floral designs
in green, red and blue. A Kuwaiti
sheikh wanted to buy it, he says, but he
refused to sell when it turned out it
would be used as a carpet.
At 53, Hariri boasts of a career that
started when he was 10, apprenticing
with his uncle and learning the trade
until he reached the status of a
“craftsman on a cushion”. The term
refers to an accomplished artisan who
sits cross-legged while stitching — a
All that might make electric flying
seem a narrow and slightly nerdy niche,
fun for a few virtue-signalling early
adopters but of little relevance to general
travel until the big players get on board.
But this is a ground-up revolution.
“Everybody starts small but it’s
enough to provide an example,” says
Grachev. “NEBO is an exercise to show
pilots, airfields, engineers and the
authorities that electric flying is here
and we need to get ready for it.” In the
absence of a government programme,
he is applying for regional grants to put
chargers (which cost about £15,000
each) at intermediate airfields along the
way, then hopes to spread routes out-
wards like a growing spider’s web.
Pipistrel is now making about five
Velis Electros per month; more than
200 pilots and 27 mechanics have been
trained; this month the Danish military
said it would start using the plane. And
Ivo Boscarol, Pipistrel’s founder, is
confident the pace of progress will accel-
erate. “We proved to the aviation com-
munity that the first step, the most
important step — the type certification
— was possible,” he says. “This has been
done and now the door is open to bigger
electric aircraft, to longer range, to the
development of really emission-free
aviation.”
One important detail is that the Velis’s
engine and battery are certified inde-
pendently of the plane itself, meaning
other manufacturers can use them in
their own designs, shortcutting develop-
ment time. Boscarol estimates 10 to 15
aircraft will have been produced using
the Velis’s propulsion system in the next
five years, with at least two achieving
type certification. Even those projects
are a tiny proportion of the total:
‘What we do is like
sculpture using fabric on
fabric. Mosques are our
place of study. We are
steeped in the decorations
on their walls’
sight still familiar in the small shops
that line both sides of the street.
“What we do is like sculpture using
fabric on fabric,” says Hariri, who grew
up in the neighbourhood around the
market working for Fattoh Sons, his
cousins’ family company, and drawing
inspiration from the area’s medieval
and Ottoman monuments. “Mosques
are our place of study. We are steeped
in the decorations on their walls.”
Sitting bent over a piece of canvas
marked with the outline of an
arabesque shape, Mostapha al-Leithy,
55, another master artisan, explains
Clockwise from main: the Pipistrel
Velis Electro flying over east London
on June 8; Tom Robbins in the plane
at Damyns Hall Aerodrome; NEBO
Air founder Sergei Grachev, creative
director Celeste Goschen, and head
of flight operations Deepak Mahajan.
Photographed for the FT by
Lucy Ranson
i / D E TA I L S
Flights in the Velis Electro will be available at
Damyns Hall later this month, from £150 per
hour; see neboair.co.uk. For details of Wilderley,
the Suffolk farm where NEBO Air is based,
see wilderley.com
Matthew Cook
how the craft has changed in his
lifetime. Although there is still use for
public tents in Egypt, in the late 1970s
fabric printed in the traditional designs
made by the tentmakers started to
replace the hand-stitched panels that
were the staple of workshops where he
trained surrounded by brothers and
uncles. “Suddenly there was no work
for many people so we had to adapt
and learn to go beyond the traditional
motifs we produced,” he says.
Arabesques still take pride of place in
the output of the tentmakers, with
pieces drawing on the geometric
shapes of traditional Islamic woodwork
or reproducing in vibrant colours the
carved stone and marble of prayer
niches in mosques. Arabic calligraphy,
rural scenes, pharaonic motifs such as
the lotus flower, birds and fish also
decorate textiles of all sizes stacked
high in the tentmakers’ shops.
“Islamic is my preferred style,”
says al-Leithy. “It is like you are
carving the fabric to create a painting.
There is flow in the patterns.”
His brother, Yasser al-Leithy,
19 June/20 June 2021
according to consultancy Roland
Berger, 215 electrically propelled air-
craft are currently in development.
“Now everything will happen much
faster and the battery industry will
understand that there is a market
for cells with a different chemistry,”
says Boscarol.
Batteries are improving. Since
December 2019, Vancouver-based sea-
plane airline Harbour Air has been test-
flying a de Havilland Beaver that has
been retrofitted with an electric motor.
It hopes a new battery system will allow
it to gain certification and start com-
mercial flights by next year, carrying
four passengers on up to 30-minute
trips. Meanwhile, Israel-based Evia-
tion’s new Alice aircraft, designed to
carry nine passengers for 800km, is due
to have its first flight this year. Others
are working on hybrids — VoltAero’s
Cassio will make its public debut at the
France Air Expo in Lyon this weekend.
However, most expect the big advance
to come from swapping batteries for
hydrogen — an onboard fuel cell can cre-
ate electricity to run a motor, with water
the only emission. This too is already a
reality, if not a certified commercial one:
in September last year the ZeroAvia
project made the first test flight of a fully
hydrogen-powered passenger plane,
using a converted six-seater Piper
M-class at Cranfield in England.
Pipistrel is also developing a new
hydrogen-powered plane, the Miniliner,
which will carry 19 passengers up to
400km. Boscarol hopes it will be flying
by 2028, and certified by 2030. Crucial
is that, in part thanks to its lightweight
construction and multiple engines, it is
designed to fly from small grass airfields
currently used by recreational pilots.
That vision, shared by the developers
of several other short-take-off electric
planes and air taxis, means places such
as Damyns Hall, and even Shipmeadow
with its goats and llamas, are perhaps
exactly the right place for electric flying
to begin. Much closer to towns and cities
than conventional airports, they are
also numerous enough to offer a ready-
made network just waiting to be linked
by zero-emission flights. Electric avia-
tion isn’t about to replace longhaul jets
but it might just be pioneering a new,
more local and small-scale paradigm.
“Right now, aviation is not organised in
a very smart way because the passen-
gers are forced to go to the airport,” says
Boscarol. “We must change this: we
must bring the airport to the passenger.”
Many small airfields in Europe are
under threat of being sold and built on,
but the quietness of electric flying might
provide a lifeline — removing the noise
objections that have often restricted
their operations. On my test flight we
made several low passes over the air-
field for photographs, then circled
above a golf course and a lake where
people were fishing. Neither golfers nor
fishermen glanced upwards — they
might have heard us, but we plainly
weren’t disturbing them. (Pipistrel says
the Velis emits no more than 60dB, less
than many washing machines.)
We swooped back to land, coming
softly to a halt on the grass and taxiing
in past the airfield café. The families
at the outdoor tables paid us little
attention, focusing instead on two noisy
and brightly coloured vintage planes
undergoing pre-flight drills. For now,
flying’s electric revolution remains a
quiet one in every sense — but perhaps
not for much longer.
recognised as a top designer, works
from a spare office reached through a
maze of winding alleys behind the
market. An accountant at an oil
company in the morning, he pursues
his passion as a tentmaker in the
afternoon.
On a computer screen, he shows a
pictorial record of his work, including a
recent wall hanging that reproduces
Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last
Supper”. “It was for an Italian client
who wanted to hang it in a church in
Italy,” he says. “It took me five months.
The same client had the painting
reproduced on papyrus and woven on a
loom like a rug in Iran.”
As much as the craftsmen of the
bazaar are passionate about their work,
they also fear it faces an uncertain
future. Few young people want to take
up the laborious work involved. “I give
this craft 10 years before it disappears,”
says Yasser al-Leithy. “Now hardly
anyone comes to learn.”
Seif El Rashidi, an art historian who
co-wrote The Tentmakers of Cairo:
Egypt’s Medieval and Modern Appliqué
Craft, believes the artisans have already
shown a capacity to adapt to new
markets. “Many of them exhibit
internationally at craft fairs, and the
standards of their products have
improved,” he says. “I think the craft
still has a future.”
Hariri takes heart from the long
history of the tentmakers’ art and the
way it has shown resilience over the
ages. “True, there were periods of
decline,” he says. “But there is
something in the genes of traditional
crafts that helps them struggle and
survive.”
Heba Saleh
Heba Saleh is the FT’s Cairo correspondent
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 7

I
n 1890, the economist Alfred Mar-
shall lamented the human ten-
dency to consume too much stuff.
“The world would go much better, if
everyone would buy fewer and sim-
ple things, and would take trouble in
selecting them for their real
beauty . . . preferring to buy a few
things made well by highly paid labour
than many made badly by low paid
labour,” he wrote in his textbook Princi-
ples of Economics.
The same sentiment was expressed
two years later by a member of the
Women’s Co-operative Guild, a group of
activists who wanted to reset the
relationship between workers and
shoppers during the first wave of global
capitalism. “It does seem strange
when we think of it, how lightly and
thoughtlessly we go out shopping, how
easily we let the money slip through our
fingers,” wrote “Katy”, in an essay called
“Shopping”.
There has been much anguish over
the years about consumption, but little
has changed. “The question of what col-
our in what room is consuming me,”
reflects the essayist Eula Biss about buy-
ing a new house and scanning the Far-
row & Ball chart. “I can’t admit to valu-
ing paint that costs $110 per gallon. But I
find this paint unbearably luminous.”
Drinking mineral water from a cobalt-
blue bottle, she admits, “I wanted the
bottle more than the water”.
Biss has a laconic honesty about her
own vulnerability to the temptations of
today’s consumer age. That makes a
change. More often, when critics assail
the status signalling behind fashion and
frippery, they have in mind someone
else’s bling. The sumptuary laws of the
medieval and early modern ages
cracked down on peasants and traders
donning fancy hats and expensive
robes, not to eliminate waste but to let
the nobility monopolise privilege.
So we have carried on: buying, wear-
ing and showing things that make us feel
comfortable, or express our taste. Now,
we face a crisis that goes far beyond the
doubts of the past. The world depends
on personal spending as an engine to
drive economic growth, with no obvious
alternative. Yet, as three new books illu-
minate in different ways, that appetite is
pushing the environment to a tipping
Shop tactics
Essay | What created our hunger for stuff? How does it harm the planet?
Can we change? John Gapper examines three books with timely insights
Handbags on display at point. The Earth itself is in danger of
The Webster boutique, being consumed.
New York — eyevine The average citizen of a rich country
buys 13 times as much as one in a poor
country, we are using the planet’s natu-
ral resources at a rate 1.7 times faster
than it can regenerate, and we order an
asteroid-sized 50m tonnes of clothing
each year, the journalist JB MacKinnon
records. “We must stop shopping, but
we can’t stop shopping: the consumer
dilemma has become, quite simply, the
question of whether we can sustain
human life on Earth.”
Consumerism is deep in the psyche. In
The Day the World Stops Shopping,
MacKinnon visits a contented bushman
of Namibia’s Kalahari Desert, who hunts
antelope and has escaped the “harried
busyness of the earn-and-spend cycle”.
But potlatch, the symbolic destruction
of excess wealth by some North Ameri-
can tribes, is a prime example of what
the economist Thorstein Veblen dubbed
“conspicuous consumption”. Gaining
pleasure from displaying possessions
predates the industrial revolution.
There are glimmers of hope. Capital-
ism is relentlessly adaptable and there is
a growing market in sustainable con-
sumption, or at least what is billed as
The Day the World “sustainable”. Fast fashion is now chal-
Stops Shopping: How lenged by trading of vintage fashion on
Ending Consumerism online stores and apps such as Vestiare
Saves the Environment Collective — backed by luxury group
and Ourselves Kering, owner of Gucci — and Depop
by JB MacKinnon (recently acquired by Etsy for $1.6bn).
Ecco $28.99/Bodley Head £20 Food and drink companies are compet-
336 pages ing to make “clean label” products and
curb plastic packaging. The consumer
The Sympathetic juggernaut is slowly turning.
Consumer: Moral Critique When consumers band together to
in Capitalist Culture force change, it can be powerful. The
by Tad Skotnicki technique was employed by abolition-
Stanford University Press $28/ ists in 18th century Britain in their cam-
£21.99, 280 pages paign to halt the slave trade. Tad Skot-
nicki writes in The Sympathetic Consumer
Having and Being Had that consumption of sugar grew from
by Eula Biss 6lbs per person to 23lbs in England by
Faber £15.99, 324 pages 1770 as cargo ships arrived from Carib-
bean plantations.
Rather than today’s worries about
consumer obesity, abolitionists were
appalled by the toll on enslaved work-
ers. “Every person who habitually con-
sumes one article of West Indian pro-
duce is guilty of the crime of murder,”
William Fox wrote in a widely read 1791
pamphlet, calling for shoppers to boy-
cott slave-produced sugar. Another
warned that “consumers of sugar and
rum, innocent or guilty, are actually the
first and moving cause of all those tor-
rents of blood and sweat that annually
flow from the body of the poor African.”
The insight that consumers held
power over how purchases were pro-
duced was taken up by the co-operative
movement in the early 20th century to
raise wages paid to store workers, and
curb sweated labour. “The ‘woman with
the basket’ is one of the great types of
humanity . . . She is mistress of the
markets of the world, for what she will
not buy, men need not make nor pro-
cure,” read the Women’s Co-operative
Guild manifesto.
Skotnicki, a sociology professor at the
University of North Carolina, draws a
parallel with modern fashion brands
coming under pressure to reform their
supply chains. Everlane, a US retailer,
displays images and details of all the
factories where its clothes are made,
while Whole Foods, the organic grocery
chain owned by Amazon, is what he
calls “a trusted curator of virtue”. They
still encourage consumption, albeit in a
new guise.
It is not enough. “Nothing we have
done to green our consumer appetite
has been able to keep pace with how
quickly that appetite is growing, to the
point that unwavering dedication to
greening has become peculiar, if not
absurd,” writes MacKinnon. “If we wish
to lessen the harms caused by con-
sumption, why not consider . . . con-
suming less?”
Good question. But it would be quite a
shock to the system if implemented at
the necessary scale, as he acknowledges.
Sugar boycotts, or campaigns against
individual companies, would have noth-
ing on shoppers reducing spending en
masse, given that personal consump-
tion accounts for 68 per cent of gross
domestic product in the US. We have
evidence of what could happen from the
plunge in economic activity that fol-
lowed the pandemic lockdowns.
MacKinnon mounts a thought experi-
ment: imagine consumer spending
dropping by 25 per cent, which he says
would only turn back the clock a dec-
ade. He embarks on a global tour, talk-
ing to people involved in the phenome-
non, including some corporate gadflies
who think big on the conference circuit.
They include Paul Dillinger, vice-presi-
dent of global product innovation for
Levi Strauss, who has not washed
his own jeans for several years but
The world depends on
personal spending as
an engine to drive
economic growth, with
no obvious alternative
“freshens them with spritzes of vodka.”
Dillinger declares that his industry is
“propped up on unnecessary consump-
tion” — and he should know. It makes
sense for Levi’s to spread the idea of pay-
ing more for fewer branded jeans, given
that it occupies that end of the market.
The most artful purveyor of anti-con-
sumerism is Patagonia, the outdoor
clothing company that in 2011 put an ad
in the New York Times on Black Friday
that declared “Don’t Buy This Jacket”,
detailing the environmental impact of
making one. Sales duly increased.
“The Patagonia universe is one of
camaraderie and achievement in wild
and authentic places, populated by
physically fit people who embody words
like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’,” MacKinnon
writes. Some also embody words like
“rich” and “investment banker”, so pay-
ing a lot for ecological hiking gear feels
like a personal carbon offset. Vincent
Stanley, “a strange hybrid of marketeer
and philosopher at Patagonia”, admits
that it does not do too much to put off
shoppers. “Our stores are beautiful and
all the stuff looks great,” he tells
MacKinnon.
Veblen would have recognised Pat-
agonia. Conspicuous consumption has
come to be identified with flashy excess
but he was as scornful of his era’s
organic consumer in Theory of the Lei-
sure Class (1899). He satirised the Arts
and Crafts movement, seeing its belief
in artisanship as a triumph of status-
seeking over utility. “The visible imper-
fections of the hand-wrought goods,
being honorific, are accounted marks of
superiority . . . Hence has arisen that
exaltation of the defective.”
But Veblen addressed the psychology
of consumption, not its environmental
impact. Patagonia’s loyalists, and those
who eat plant-based burgers or live in
timber-framed houses, are showing off
as much as those who drive Ferraris, but
it is net positive for the planet. As
MacKinnon says, a consumer strike on
the scale of Finland’s severe recession of
the early 1990s would not only be grim,
but is unlikely. “Consumer culture has
made it very, very easy to keep going
back for more small pleasures.”
Karl Marx had a term for our rela-
tionships with what we buy: commod-
ity fetishism. “People dream with, or
imagine themselves through, things,”
Skotnicki writes. Goods can be unrelia-
ble partners. “In the furniture stores we
visit, I’m filled with a strange, unspe-
cific desire. I want everything and noth-
ing,” Biss writes in Having and Being
Had. But while she fantasises about
casting off her possessions to outrun the
fairy story witch, it is not her style. “I
think people are what matter to me, but
I spend my time on writing and my
money on this house.”
Perhaps this is not such a terrible
admission, provided that consumption
is diverted to a greater good. The middle
classes, with their luminous paints and
canvas shopping bags, are in a fashion
parade as surely as medieval nobles
dressed in ermine robes. But they are
pulling capitalism towards operating
sustainably. Let us hope it changes
fast enough.
John Gapper is FT Weekend
business columnist

Brown’s blueprint for softening the blows of globalisation

The ex-PM’s appeal for global
co-operation is laudable, says
Ngaire Woods, but overlooks
nations’ scope for acting alone
and generous aid to help the poorest
countries compete. This is clearly still
the core of Brown’s view. His book
underscores the challenges.
In it, he calls for more money for
development, including a “Marshall
Plan for Africa”. Recall that from 1997,
Seven Ways The problem is that progress towards decisive international co-operation. entered government in 1997. The robust
to Change reforming international institutions has This book is a magisterial synthesis of global governance and more generous
the World: been glacial in comparison with the ideas not so much for how to build a aid programs he called for back then
How to Fix the rapid speed of globalisation. As he fairer better world but for how global co- look more imperilled than ever.
Most Pressing notes, some 23 years after he proposed operation could contribute to that aim.
Problems global tax reform at the G7, the US has But behind this positive agenda, the Ngaire Woods is dean of the
We Face for the first time announced its support dilemmas of globalisation have deep- Blavatnik School of Government

I
n his lifetime, Gordon Brown has
seen dramatic changes in the world.
Borders have been thrown open in
finance, trade and communica-
tions. For some, huge opportunities
have resulted. But for others, globalisa-
tion has dismantled the barriers that
protected their security, wages and well-
being. The result has been a divide, now
deepened by Covid-19.
The dilemmas of globalisation lie at
the core of Seven Ways to Change the
World, which joins an expanding library
of works offering answers to the prob-
lems in the global system and describing
a path to a better, post-pandemic future.
As a politician, the former UK prime
minister has grappled since the 1980s
with how to harness the benefits of glo-
balisation, while also managing the
risks. Freeing up global finance brought
cheaper mortgages but also a financial
crisis. Freer trade may bring cheaper
food, but bankrupt local farmers — and
who regulates the overseas suppliers?
In the 1990s many centrist politicians
believed that full-throttle globalisation
could be managed through a combina-
tion of more robust global governance,
Brown was part of a Labour government
that transformed UK aid, adopting a
spending target of 0.7 per cent of GDP
and creating an independent aid agency.
But Boris Johnson’s current Conserva-
tive government has suspended the aid
commitment and merged the Depart-
ment for International Development
(DfID) with the Foreign Office.
After the recent G7 summit, Brown
described resulting commitments on
vaccines as “an unforgivable moral fail-
ure”. His proposals for more agreed
funding for health, education, the
achievement of net-zero carbon emis-
sions and the sustainable development
goals will be tough to realise in the cur-
rent climate.
Equally central to this book is reform
of global governance. In several of
Brown’s seven ways to change the world
(presented across seven chapters), he
draws together ideas he has been build-
ing since the late 1990s. Reforming the
International Monetary Fund to create
an financial early warning system ech-
oes the changes he pressed for after the
1997 Asian financial crisis. Similarly, his
call for a UN tax convention to ensure
fairer payment of tax and greater UN-
by Gordon Brown
Simon & Schuster £25
512 pages
World Bank co-operation to advance the
Sustainable Development Goals echo
arguments that Brown made around the
turn of the century.
In response to the pandemic, Brown
calls for the strengthening of the World
Health Organisation and a “burden-
sharing formula” for global health con-
tributions. The formula reminds me of
that created nearly 80 years ago to
apportion contributions to (and votes
in) the IMF. Then a big dose of political
realism ensured that the US emerged in
the leading role of global institutions.
This was crucial to ensuring that the US
would agree to participate.
The Brown formula for global health
contributions works out at 27 per cent
for the US and 13 per cent for China
(with the UK at 6 per cent), and is
buttressed by a chapter on US-China co-
operation that reflects on how this kind
of practical co-operation issue-by-issue
is probably the best way forward for the
world’s two leading superpowers.
for a global minimum tax. It is not ened and sharpened since Brown first at the University of Oxford
enough, Brown argues. That under-
scores the challenge.
This is not a self-congratulatory book.
If anything, Brown downplays the cen-
tral role he played getting the G7 to
write-off debt of the poorest developing
countries in 2005, and rallying the G20
in 2009 to agree a bold plan for manag-
ing the global financial crisis. Yet these
remarkable successes doubtless con-
tinue to fuel his belief in co-operation
and institutional reform as the way to
manage globalisation.
As Brown traverses across public
health, financial stability, a zero-car-
bon future, better humanitarian assist-
ance, the closing of tax-havens and the
prevention of nuclear proliferation, I
was left thinking about the alternatives
to “acting decisively and together”.
What should national governments be
doing better to manage globalisation?
Better global governance would no
doubt make some efforts easier. But
given its pitifully slow progress, efforts
at the national level should surely be
redoubled. Put another way, perhaps
there is more scope for acting deci-
sively alone than for some less-than-
8 ★
Books
A sandhopper on the shore — Alamy
Pools of knowledge
Adam Nicholson’s simple shoreline experiment on the west coast of Scotland
becomes a vehicle for meditations on almost everything. By Caspar Henderson
W
here did life begin? A
hypothesis first
sketched in 1871 by
Charles Darwin, and
supported by recent
evidence, makes the case for little warm
pools near the edge of the sea. Here, “all
sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,
light, heat, electricity” would conspire
to create the right conditions, he wrote.
It’s not the only theory out there —
some researchers place more credence
on living organisms forming in hydro-
thermal vents on the sea floor —
but whatever the answer, one thing is
not in doubt: the tidal zone is among the
most dynamic environments on Earth.
Without it, the history of life would be
very different, and humans might never
have evolved.
It is no criticism of Adam Nicolson’s
new book to note that he does not
explain the origin of life. At one
level, The Sea Is Not Made of Water is a
simple account of how, over the sum-
mers of 2019 and 2020, Nicolson built
some small artificial rock pools on the
shores of Morvern in western Scotland.
The idea was to study how biological
Soft powers
Gillian Tett makes the case
for using anthropology to
better understand ourselves.
By Margaret Heffernan
A
s a teenager, one of my most
memorable education
experiences was reading
about a tribe in North
America called the
Nacirema. They resorted to odd oral rit-
uals and their women baked their heads
in ovens.
Most students were appalled by such
barbarity, only for our teacher to reveal
that the tribal name spells American
backwards. We were reading about our-
selves — through the eyes of an anthro-
pologist. It was an unforgettable learn-
ing experience, leaving me with an abid-
ing respect for outside perspectives.
I did not become an anthropologist,
but Gillian Tett did. The skills she
acquired studying the marriage rituals
of Tajikistan gave her a way of seeing —
lateral vision, asking questions, assum-
ing nothing — that notably yielded
rewards when she predicted the finan-
cial crisis of 2007-08. In her new book,
Tett, an FT journalist, makes a compel-
ling case that “anthro-vision” can help
us understand ourselves, our tribes,
companies and communities, and to
reduce our wilful blindness.
Tett describes how anthropology has
fuelled her journalism. Open-ended
curiosity, interpreting markets through
The Sea is Not
Made of Water:
Life Between
the Tides
by Adam Nicolson
William Collins £20
384 pages
their symbols and rituals, illuminated
early the dangerous isolation of the
financial sector and, later, the growth of
ESG investing. Another Tett observa-
tion — that the tech sector was starting
to look like pre-crash finance in its arro-
gance, wealth and isolation from reality
— was just as important.
Engineers are a tribe much like bank-
ers: isolated by power, money and a lan-
guage no one else understands. They
impose their values on products, which
forces us to behave in constrained ways,
undermining our autonomy.
Quoting the anthropologist Jan Eng-
lish-Lueck, Tett concludes that engi-
neers have merged “useful”, “efficient”
and “good” into a single moral concept
— but that morality is not comprehen-
sively shared. The techlash has been
fuelled by assumptions technologists
made — about voters, consumers, stu-
dents and teachers — without any
engagement with those communities.
Why not, Tett asks, work with these
groups, and understand their values
and concerns, rather than against them?
We’ve been sold the myth that with
enough hard data, we can know every-
thing. But numbers can only show what
is; they don’t reveal why. Soft data is
what anthropology reveals: the meaning
behind behaviours. In Japan, a KitKat
isn’t a relaxing snack (“Have a break”),
it’s a good-luck charm. In Malaysia and
Singapore, a car isn’t just a machine for
travelling; it’s also a haven of social
safety that people treat a lot like home.
Anthropological insights don’t come
from surveys but from fieldwork:
FTWeekend
communities would establish them-
selves, and to record what he saw. But
through the exercise of close attention
and unbounded curiosity, as well as
study of the scientific and historical lit-
erature, it becomes a meditation on
almost everything.
In this book we have: an exploration
of the “minds” of apparently simple
animals; a meditation on the long
movement of geological time; and a
deep dive into the varieties of human
belief, suffering and presence. The pools
in the tidal zone — not a landscape
but “a halfscape that reverberates with
the mutability of things” — become a
lens through which to see further
and deeper, and the book becomes a
“net of miraculous beginnings, in
all dimensions”.
The Sea Is Not Made of Water is divided
into three parts. The first considers the
so-called “lower” animals — principally
sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs
and sea anemones — whose lives are
governed by the movements of the
tides. “I had seen them a thousand times
before, and never considered their
existence, never named them, never
Anthro-Vision:
How
Anthropology
Can Explain
Business
and Life
by Gillian Tett
Random House
Business £20
304 pages
directly observing and talking to people.
Without such understanding, we force-
fit meaning on to others, make costly
mistakes and miss opportunities for
knowledge, innovation and legitimacy.
So-called scientific management —
using metrics to assess everything from
productivity to employee mood —
hasn’t prevented business failures.
Focus on returns raised no concerns
about some reckless banks pre-2007,
but the practice of awarding cash or cab-
bages to high or low performers would
have caught an anthropologist’s eye.
After each such fiasco, culture is
deemed the culprit, HR deputed to
design surveys and the ensuing change
programmes, which mostly fail. But
companies are communities and
anthropologists, whose study is the
social systems of meaning, could bring
more pragmatic insight. Meetings don’t
carry the same expectations to different
people, just as the culture on one floor of
a building won’t necessarily be the same
as on another. Decades of leadership
and teamwork consulting have focused
on retraining individuals, whereas
looked at one,” Nicolson writes of
sandhoppers (amphipods that feed on
rotting seaweed and resemble wood-
lice). “Now, though, the invitation takes
me in.”
Following their life cycles reveals that,
when you really start to look, “every
part of the world is an otherworld”.
Prawns, each “as intricate as a space sta-
tion . . . a micro-engineer’s fantasy of
applied brilliance”, live in what appears
to be a near constant state of terror but
are nevertheless capable of exercising a
measure of choice over reflex by “decid-
ing” whether or not to trigger the most
powerful muscle in their body that
shoots them away from predators.
Crab sex is delicate and tender, with
the large male and much smaller female
clamping each other for two or three
days until copulation is over.
Anemones, with whom humans last
shared an ancestor in the Cambrian
period, more than 500m years ago, have
a well-developed sense of self, demon-
strated by their fierce battles with any
other anemone that is not their
clone, and may even cast light on the
origin of consciousness.
The second part of the book puts
the Morvern shore in planetary context.
“To see the tide is to see quite literally
the physical drive of the Earth,” writes
Nicolson. “We may think of [it] as a rise
or fall of the water but the real move-
ment is [a] long, fast, shallow, rotatory
The pools in the tidal
zone become a lens
through which to see
further and deeper
wave, swirling brandy-like around the
ocean basins”. The rocks, meanwhile,
are a record of change and catastrophe,
“our ever-present library of time”.
Part three explores human experi-
ence. Nicolson suggests that a 15th or
16th century folk tale, in which a young
bride given in a gesture of reconciliation
between clan chiefs of Argyll and
MacLean but deliberately left to drown
in the rising tide, may echo Bronze Age
myths and rites such as the story of
Andromeda, who is “led out to the sea
shore at night and left there to keep the
devastation of the human world at bay”.
He argues that the brutality of medie-
val and early modern life — a “three-
part structure of poverty, communality
and outward-directed violence” — is not
the whole story.
No less vital and true than these bleak
and instrumental realities was the
Gaelic concept of dúthchas: “a world of
natural affinities and connected-
ness” that expresses people’s love of the
land, water and each other.
Returning to his artificial rock pools,
which have now integrated with the nat-
ural world around them, Nicolson con-
cludes with dual philosophical and sci-
entific reflections. There is the sense of
“total thereness” that can come from
attending to the complexity of a world
beyond words.
And there is his growing understand-
ing of how life thrives in a regime of
“intermediate disturbance”, in which
different species of seaweed, and the life
that depends on them, struggle with
each other but also over time achieve a
kind of dynamic equilibrium. Nicolson’s
pools — “cup[s] of wonder” — teach him
that “the core of being is interplay, and
its give-and-take of quick and still is the
animation of life”.
unpacking webs of collective meaning
could untangle knotted collaboration.
The recommendation not to hire for cul-
tural fit is just one of several good and
possibility-rich suggestions.
With case studies and examples rang-
ing from Google’s errors to pandemic
beards, Tett explains anthropological
revelations invisible to computers. I
found myself thinking of other,
unsolved, cases that might be cracked
by thinking like an anthropologist: the
toxic Home Office, the flailing Church of
England or our failure to design really
good education systems. Where data
scientists and ideologists assert, anthro-
pologists could reveal.
Inventing words in the hope of creat-
ing a brand has become a tiresome fad
in business publishing, but “anthro-
vision”, however, is a useful way to illu-
minate much that can’t be seen any
other way — and so are philosophy, lit-
erature and history.
In an age obsessed with hard science,
it’s becoming painfully obvious that the
so-called “soft” subjects — social sci-
ences and the humanities — have the
power to reveal what otherwise remains
obscure. One of the glories of Anthro-Vi-
sion is that it never argues (as many do)
that its way of seeing is the only way. It’s
a timely call for decision makers to wean
themselves off their dependency on big
data and embrace the full complexity of
human life.
Margaret Heffernan is the author
of ‘Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore
the Obvious at our Peril’
19 June/20 June 2021
A design for life
What do six remarkable experimental communities
teach us about how to live? By Lucy Scholes
A
hundred years ago, Trabuco College in the desert out-
people were strug- side Los Angeles. Founded later
gling in the aftermath than the other groups — in the
of both the first world 1940s, during the war all these dis-
war and the Spanish parate communards had been try-
flu pandemic. The unprecedented ing to avoid — and described by one
scale of the destruction — initially visitor as “a Quaker meeting with
on the battlefields, and then closer yoga classes”, it predated the alter-
to home — left many looking to live native cultures that became syn-
their lives in new ways. onymous with 1960s California.
This wasn’t that surprising. Certain key figures — like Elm-
From the Reformation through hirst — crop up in more than one
American independence to the chapter, yet each community is a
aftermath of the second world war, standalone case study. Neima is an
experiments in utopianism have engaging storyteller, but it’s her
arisen during periods of upheaval. diligent scholarship that directs
Some sought to found new econo- the book. She’s less concerned
mies, others to break with estab- with intricate portraits of day-to-
lished systems of hierarchy, belief day life than she is with the bigger
or gender relations. picture of each collective’s rise and
In the wake of the carnage a cen- fall. Dartington Hall’s school, she
tury ago, the promotion of paci- writes, was rife with drugs and sex
fism and internationalism was scandals. I wanted to learn more,
high on the agenda of those hoping but beyond the leaders them-
to create a better world, as histo- selves, The Utopians isn’t especially
rian Anna Neima explains in her interested in the psychology of
engrossing and illuminating book those drawn to these lives.
The Utopians, which tells the sto-
ries of six remarkable communi-
The fact that only the Bruderhof
still exists — about 2,900 people
ties from around the world. currently live in 23 settlements
Santiniketan-Sriniketan in East
Bengal was a new type of school
around the globe, from Austria to
South Korea and North America —
conceived by the Indian polymath
Rabindranath Tagore. Dartington
Hall in Devon, south-west England
— an estate financed by American
heiress Dorothy Straight and led
by her husband Leonard Elmhirst
(who had been Tagore’s second-in-
command) — combined progres-
sive education and self-sufficient
rural living.
On the other side of the world,
the Japanese writer Mushanokoji
Saneatsu was leading the New Vil-
lagers of Atarashiki Mura, a group
The Utopians: Six Attempts
to Build the Perfect Society
of intellectuals and artists who pri- by Anna Neima
oritised self-realisation (the oppo- Picador £25, 368 pages
site of Japan’s ethos of self-sacrifice
for the collective good). These
three communities, Neima writes, shows how hard it is to reinvent
all “sought to offer a more com- the wheel. Underpinning each
plete existence — one that fulfilled community was what Aldous
people creatively, intellectually, Huxley called “that most difficult
socially and spiritually, as well as and most important of all the arts
economically”. — the art of living together in har-
By contrast, the other three mony and with benefit for all con-
groups discussed in the book were cerned”. As Mushanokoji wrote of
run by more traditional guru-like Atarashiki Mura, theirs was a
idealists driven by a fear that “the “third way”; not capitalism, nor
material ambitions of industrial socialism, but rather “humanism,
capitalism [and] empirical sci- world brotherhood.”
ence” were only adding to “the It sounds simple, but it wasn’t.
assault on religion and faith of all Money problems were common,
kinds brought about by the horror as was the difficulty of practising
of the war and pandemic”. what you preached. The Elmhirsts
Take George Gurdjieff’s Insti- championed democracy, but while
tute for the Harmonious Develop- others lived in poorly built cot-
ment of Man in France, where this tages on the estate, Dorothy’s col-
Rasputin-like figure preached the lection of modernist art adorned
“Fourth Way”, a system heavily their wing of the Hall.
reliant on “shocks” to encourage That said, certain ideas forged in
his followers into wakefulness. these collectives, Neima argues,
More peacefully, the quasi-monas- have seeped into our lives today,
tic Bruderhof community in Ger- from the welfare state to environ-
many was husband and wife Eber- mentalism, along with theories
hard and Emmy Arnold’s attempt about enlightened ways of living.
to “turn the Christian utopia They may also yet inspire any
hinted at in the Bible into a real modern-day utopians looking to
place”. Finally, Neima takes us to reshape a post-pandemic world.
The Poem
Sister Iggy Deejay
By Lorna Goodison
She is no whistling woman; but she warbles
as she sits perched at her desk to compile
the playlist for Saturday afternoon dances
where she’s operator of Mutt and Jeff
sound system.
Instruments of brass range row on row
on wooden shelves planed by apprentices.
She has dispatched two of the Alpha boys
to Times Store to buy hot 45’s heard on radio.
Her chatter between platters will range wide.
Here, she will say, you’ll hear, Amos Milburn
singing, ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon One Beer’.
You boys must not imitate his inebriated ways.
Enjoy this blues just the same.
Next I’ll play piano concerto #21 by Mozart
— a boy genius. So she spins, she enlightens.
Later under tutelage of bandmasters:
Rueben Delgado, Lennie Hibbert and Sparrow
Martin, the boys will grasp what they’ve learned
then bend familiar sounds till they
become new again.
She helped to make them into men who make
music that will save them.
From ‘Mother Muse’ (Carcanet £10.99)
The Sister Iggy of the poem is Sister Mary Ignatius Davies (1921-2003),
who ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys in Kingston. She is
credited with mentoring many of Jamaica’s most gifted jazz, ska and
reggae musicians
The school still exists as the Alpha Institute, and has an online radio station
with Alpha alumni on every song it plays: alphaboysschool.org/radio/
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 9

Books

D Where women
amon Galgut rose to fame in
the 2000s with a series of
tersely written, thriller-like
novels (The Quarry, The
Good Doctor, The Imposter)
dissecting post-apartheid South Africa.
dare to tread
More recently, he has branched out,
both stylistically and geographically:
the Booker-shortlisted In a Strange Room
(2010) was an elliptical work describing
journeys in Greece, Zimbabwe and
India; Arctic Summer (2014) fictional-
ised the life of EM Forster. Nilanjana Roy
The Promise is Galgut’s first novel in
seven years, and it sees him return to
more familiar terrain. A family saga that
moves from the 1980s to the present, it’s
Reading the world
a complex, ambitious and brilliant work

A
— one that provides Galgut’s fullest
exploration yet of the poisonous legacy s a tourist, I’ve always
of apartheid. judged the places I visit
The Swarts are a white family by one measure: not the
descended from Afrikaners who live on quality of the restaurants
a farm outside Pretoria. An entitled, or the beauty of scenery,
unreflective clan, they regard it as the but whether I could walk freely,
natural order of things that they live in a without fear or obstruction. To be
house with 24 outside doors, while threatened or made to feel unwelcome
Salome, their black maid — who came in a strange place is harsh enough;
“with the land” when they bought the when this happens in your own
homeland, it leaves a searing scar.
Galgut describes his Some years ago, the writer and
journalist Anita Sethi was travelling
characters with rare on a TransPennine Express train from
assurance and skill, Liverpool to Newcastle, when a
stranger yelled that she was a “Paki
conjuring them to life ****” who did not belong in Britain.
She recorded her abuser and reported
Magnum Photos
him to the authorities.
Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatry
student whose night walks around
Manhattan and the wider city grow
longer and longer, introducing a moving
cast of New Yorkers, many of them
immigrants. Open City reclaimed the
streets for different groups of writers,
and I remember the thrill, as a reader,
of walking invisibly alongside Julius,
invited inside the lives of people who
rarely found their way into fiction.
But in 2018, Cole was moved to write
an anguished Facebook post after two
black men were arrested in a branch of
Starbucks in Philadelphia, an incident
widely seen as an example of glaring
racial bias: “We are not safe even in the
most banal place . . . This is why I
always say you can’t be a black flâneur.

property — lives with her son in a
cramped dwelling on its fringes.
The novel opens in 1986, in the imme-
diate aftermath of the death from can-
cer of Rachel, the family matriarch.
Over a few days of ritualised mourning,
a host of relatives and hangers-on
descend on the estate, among them
Rachel’s three children: quiet and awk-
ward 13-year-old Amor, summoned
back from boarding school; self-
obsessed, boy-mad Astrid, 17; and rebel-
lious 19-year-old Anton, who is doing
his national service.
We learn that, before she died, Rachel
made her husband Manie promise to
make Salome the legal owner of the tiny
house she lives in. Having been nursed
by the maid during her illness, Rachel
felt that she must “have something”.
This conversation was overheard by
Amor, the one family member who
cares about such things, and who serves
as the family’s (and the novel’s) con-
science. But when she presses her father
on the matter, he responds vaguely: “If I
promised then I’ll do it.”
It becomes clear that he has no inten-
tion of honouring his pledge; nor does
any other family member. This betrayal
functions as the novel’s silent motor, the
erasure to which it continually returns.
The years pass, South Africa ostensibly
changes — apartheid gives way to truth
and reconciliation — but still the Swarts
refuse to acknowledge or act; they are
immobilised by their self-interest.
Meanwhile, the broken promise
becomes a kind of curse. The novel is
divided into four sections, each sepa-
rated by roughly a decade. And each
centres on a family member’s untimely
death: Manie is fatally bitten by a cobra;
Astrid is murdered during a carjacking;
Anton blows his brains out.
Finally, Amor is left as the one
A poisonous legacy
South African Damon Galgut’s first novel for seven years is written with
an immediacy that gives its themes more impact, says William Skidelsky
surviving Swart, and she makes good on
her mother’s pledge by handing Salome
the deeds to the house. The occasion,
however, is far from happy. The maid is
now in her 70s, nearing the end of life.
As Salome’s son bitterly points out, the
gesture has arrived “30 years too late”.
In outline, The Promise may sound
somewhat schematic, but that isn’t the
effect when one reads it. Galgut
describes his characters with rare assur-
The Promise ance and skill, conjuring them to life in a
by Damon Galgut narrative voice that moves restlessly
Chatto & Windus £16.99, from character to character, inhabiting
304 pages/Europa Editions $25, each consciousness for just a few lines
256 pages before moving on to the next person.
This all-seeing voice is not a neutral
presence, as it would be in a conven-
tional realist novel; instead, it possesses
its own personality and outlook, making
it more like a chorus in a Greek drama.
It alights on figures unconnected to
the story: a homeless man loitering out-
side a church; even a couple of jackals.
And its bitingly ironic judgments are
sometimes aimed at the novel itself — as
when it suggests that a rainstorm near
the end is “like some cheap redemptive
symbol in a story”.
The intriguing effect of this technique
— a kind of hyper-omniscience — is to
create an almost physical sense of
immediacy. Rarely have I had such a
strong sense, while reading a novel, that
I myself was there, in the room with the
characters.
And the up-close narrative has an
additional advantage, which is to dis-
tract from — or at least delay awareness
of — the larger symbolic points being
made. Galgut ties his narrative to well-
known public events (a funeral takes
place on the day of the Springboks’ tri-
umph in the 1995 Rugby World Cup;
another character dies as president
Jacob Zuma resigns) and a sense slowly
builds of a larger story in the back-
ground, an allegory revealing itself.
Yet it is only at the very end — as one
emerges, blinking, from the dark and
airless pages — that one realises just how
neatly the novel’s themes have mapped
on to those of the country in which it is
set. The Swarts may be, as the narrator
says, “just an ordinary bunch of white
South Africans”. And yet they stand for
something larger.
Exploitation and appropriation;
property taken and not given back; a
sense of restitution always coming too
late. Isn’t this the story, too, of modern
South Africa?
Some time later, looking at a map,
her eye was caught by the Pennines,
the beautiful range of hills known as
“the backbone of England”, and it
inspired a desire to walk through the
landscape as a way of reclaiming the
space as her own.
The result is I Belong Here: A Journey
Along The Backbone of Britain, the first
volume in a planned trilogy from Sethi
that combines nature writing and an
exploration of roots and identities with
personal memoir. “Humans have long
hungered for footpaths, and that
summer so did I,” she writes.
Sethi was born in Manchester. Her
mother, born in Guyana, was part of
the Windrush generation, one of the
roughly half-million people who came
to Britain from the Caribbean.
Whenever she is asked, “Where are you
from?” — or worse, told that “you don’t
look like you come from here” — Sethi
is firm: she does look like she belongs,
because Manchester is home to so
many people of colour. As she walks,
she retraces the history of imperialism
and slavery that determined her place
in the north of England — and in doing
so, she makes a fierce plea for this
painfully earned right to belong to be
taught and explained.
For many years, the catalogue of
literary explorers, walkers and flâneurs
— from Soren Kierkegaard and Henry
David Thoreau to Charles Baudelaire
and Ernest Hemingway — was mostly
male and mostly white. Even the more
recent genre of nature writing has
tended to continue this demographic
trend, and yet within the last two
decades there has been a shift.
This year marks the 10th anniversary
of Open City by Nigerian-American
writer, photographer and critic Teju
Cole. This remarkable novel follows
Flânerie is for whites. For blacks in
white terrain, all spaces are charged.
Cafés, restaurants, museums, shops.
Your own front door. We wander alert,
and pay a heavy psychic toll for that
vigilance. Can’t relax, black.”
Gender, as well as race, has played
its role in creating what Sethi calls
“barriers of place”. I felt an instant jolt
of recognition when reading “Power
Walking”, the brilliant 2018 essay by
the Scottish-Sierra Leonean writer
Aminatta Forna, in which she wrote
about the act of walking alone and
female down a street: “I didn’t want to
be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw
belonged to boys but not girls.”
It’s a theme that underpins books
such as Wanderlust: A History of Walking
(2000), Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent
study of cultural, political and spiritual
quests — and also Lauren Elkin’s
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City (2016),
her account of women, from Virginia
Woolf to Agnes Varda, who asserted
their right to wander like men. But it
has been explored in a number of
recent novels too. In Rachel Cusk’s
Outline trilogy and Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Whereabouts, female protagonists claim
their own cities or the places they visit
with their feet, their urge to explore
despite resistance or hostility.
On her walking journey through the
Pennines, Sethi encounters a warmer
welcome than she or the reader might
expect: a hug from a small child on a
railway platform, kind advice from an
elderly couple. As she takes in details
along the way — ancient lichens dating
back to the Ice Age, for instance, or the
Horton Women’s Holiday Centre, built
in 1980 as a place of rest and refuge for
women who might not otherwise be
able to afford a holiday — Sethi slowly
but surely finds her way home.

A very middle-class apocalypse The bullied boy

S Kawakami undermines
usannah Wise’s debut Scarpio, a former winner of a dan- according to such qualities as Heaven his mother fails to realise what’s
This Fragile Earth gerous secret game popularly physical attractiveness and by Mieko happening. But Kawakami isn’t
(Gollancz £14.99) known as Rabbits. Scarpio tells K childbearing capability. our moral assumptions Kawakami aiming for realism.
opens with an under- that something has gone badly The rebellious middle-aged in this savage tale about translated by
Sam Bett and
Instead, Heaven is set in a sinis-
stated, slow-burn wrong with Rabbits and “we’re all widows in the Oxford ghetto ter parallel world, where the
sequence as heroine Signy and well and truly fucked” if it isn’t known as Widowland have other suffering. By Max Liu David Boyd
Picador £14.99/
darker elements of our own socie-
her six-year-old son Jed come to fixed. He then disappears, leaving ideas, however, and are suspected ties are accentuated, perhaps to

the realisation that all technology
in their near-future world has
suddenly and mysteriously failed.
The ice in the freezer has melted.
Phones aren’t connecting. Cars
stall on the road.
It’s a foretaste of worse to
come. Civilisation, so reliant on
its WiFi and its electronics,
begins to lose its cool. Martial law
is declared, and after a violent
killing, Signy elects to escape
London with Jed and seek refuge
in the countryside.
The novel is a very middle-class
apocalypse, an example of the
sub-genre that late sci-fi grand-
master Brian Aldiss dubbed the
“cosy catastrophe”, a largely
bloodless doom. Readers may be
drawn in by Signy’s search for
rural sanctuary and by the assort-
ment of characters she meets
along the way. They may, equally,
be put off by her repeated eco-
hand-wringing and by Jed’s wise-
beyond-his-years precocity.
A different kind of global disas-
ter strikes in Benjamin Percy’s
The Ninth Metal (Hodder &
Stoughton £14.99) which sees the
debris from a comet’s tail strike
our planet as meteorites, leaving
deposits of a substance hitherto
unknown to science. The mineral,
nicknamed “omnimetal”, has all
sorts of exploitable properties.
Not only is it a superconductor
GENRE ROUND-UP
SCIENCE FICTION
By James Lovegrove
and a powerful new energy
source, it also forms the basis for a
highly addictive drug.
In northern Minnesota, two
family-run, mafia-like conglom-
erates feud over rights to the large
quantities of omnimetal present
there. Another plot thread con-
cerns a teenage boy whose expo-
sure to the stuff has led to him
developing superhuman powers
and who is being experimented
on by unprincipled scientists. The
engine of the novel, first of a tril-
ogy, has a lot of moving parts but
Percy keeps them all meshing
nicely together with sinewy prose
and strong characterisation.
The shape of the world is
altered yet again in Rabbits (Mac-
millan £16.99) by Terry Miles,
but this time the changes are sub-
tler and more nebulous. The
novel’s first-person narrator,
known only by the Kafkaesque
abbreviation K, is approached out
of the blue by billionaire Alan
it up to K and his friend Chloe to
figure out not just what the game
entails but how to solve it.
Rabbits is, essentially, about
spotting clues around you — coin-
cidences, patterns, apparent
glitches in reality — and making
sense of them. Miles’s novel,
based on his hugely popular pod-
cast of the same name, riffs on
pop-culture references in much
the same way Ernest Cline did in
his bestselling Ready Player One,
albeit less nerdily and more satis-
fyingly. It also bears recognisable
traces of Time Out of Joint, Philip K
Dick’s paranoid 1959 masterpiece
about a man who repeatedly wins
an innocent-seeming newspaper
contest that turns out to have geo-
political ramifications.
The shadow of a different Dick
novel hangs over Widowland
(Quercus £14.99) by historical
author Jane Thynne, writing
under the pseudonym CJ Carey.
Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
(1962) is one of the foremost
examples of a certain kind of
counterfactual fiction that hinges
on the conceit that the Axis pow-
ers won the war. In Widowland, set
in 1953, this manifests as an alli-
ance between Britain and Ger-
many, with the former becoming
a protectorate of the latter. Brit-
ish women are now defined by a
caste system that ranks them
of plotting to kill Hitler, referred
to only as the Leader, during an
upcoming state visit. Rose Ran-
som, who works at the Ministry of
Culture rewriting classic novels so
that their content falls in line with
government ideology, is tasked
with infiltrating the radicals’
ranks, but perhaps unsurpris-
ingly undergoes a Damascene
conversion. Austere and low-key,
Widowland succeeds when it
comes to evoking the drab atmos-
phere of an occupied nation. As a
thriller, though, it does not quite
enthral.
This Eden (Riverrun £16.99) is
altogether more gripping. A con-
temporary spy story with a specu-
lative fiction edge, Ed O’Lough-
lin’s fourth novel sees an ordinary
Canadian, Michael Atarian, get
recruited by Irish secret agent
Aoife and sucked into a world-
spanning conspiracy that takes
the two of them from Uganda to
Jerusalem to France and beyond,
the sort of flashy location-
hopping usually reserved for
Bond movies. The threat to global
stability here is an unholy amal-
gamation of AI and cryptocur-
rency, and O’Loughlin salts the
action with big ideas and keeps
the pace from flagging, although
he loses points for his decision to
do without inverted commas to
denote direct speech.
H
eaven, the latest
novel by the Japa-
nese writer Mieko
Kawakami to be
translated into Eng-
lish by Sam Bett and David Boyd,
contains some of the most violent
and disturbing scenes you’re
likely to read this year.
In 2020, Kawakami’s bestseller
Breasts and Eggs was published to
critical acclaim in Bett’s and
Boyd’s translation, but Heaven,
which appeared in Japanese in
2009, was Kawakami’s first full-
length novel.
Its structure is more straight-
forward than that of Breasts and
Eggs, which was split into two sec-
tions and used extended passages
of dialogue to explore ideas about
reproduction and the female
body. In Heaven a 14-year-old pro-
tagonist provides a linear account
of being savagely bullied by his
classmates, ostensibly for having
a lazy eye (they call him “Eyes”).
At the beginning of the book he
finds a note folded inside his pen-
cil case: “We should be friends.”
It’s from Kojima, a girl described
by the narrator in his characteris-
tic deadpan style: “Short, with
kind of dark skin.”
Kojima “never talked at school”
and is tormented by other girls.
Neither the narrator nor Kojima
Europa Editions
$23, 176 pages
defend themselves and instead
accept their classmates’ attacks
with resignation.
The pair visit an art gallery
where Kojima shows the narrator
“a painting of two lovers eating
cake in a room with a red carpet
and a table”, which she calls
“Heaven”.
While not lovers they find sol-
ace in each other’s company;
When the twist
comes, it hits you
with a strange and
unexpected force
Kojima predicts they will achieve
redemption through their suffer-
ing: “We do it for everyone who’s
weak everywhere, in the name of
actual strength. Everything we
take, all of the abuse, we do it to
rise above.”
Why doesn’t a teacher or par-
ent intervene? The attacks
become increasingly sadistic and
blatant, yet even when the narra-
tor goes home covered in blood
after a game of “human soccer”,
remind us that, as WH Auden
observed in his poem “Musée des
Beaux Arts”, suffering always
takes place “while someone else is
eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along”.
In contrast, Kojima’s Christ-like
claims can sound grandiose.
When the narrator eventually
confronts one of the bullies, the
other boy says: “Listen, if there’s a
hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a
heaven, we’re already there. This
is it.”
It’s left to the reader to decide
whether the bully’s indifference
to his victim’s pain is a symptom
of terrifying emotional numbness
or whether it contains wisdom.
Kawakami’s novel undermines
our moral assumptions and
leaves us unsure what to think
about the way its characters
behave.
Heaven is set in the 1990s and,
although Kojima briefly alludes to
the idea that the world might end
in 1999, it’s not clear why. “My
bad,” says a girl after making a
mistake, but I’m not sure people
said that then. It’s a rare false note
in this short but assured novel.
By the end, the reader is so diz-
zily absorbed in its visceral details
and philosophical complexity
that, when the twist comes, it hits
you with a strange and unex-
pected force.
10
Books
L
ast month, the US politician
and former Georgia House of
Representatives member Sta-
cey Abrams published her
first thriller, While Justice
Sleeps. Although better known for her
political career, Abrams had already
published eight romance novels under
the pen name Selena Montgomery,
which have together sold more than
100,000 copies.
Her latest book, a “suspenseful mys-
tery” set in present-day Washington DC,
is already set for a small-screen adapta-
tion. It follows Avery Keene, a young law
clerk who becomes legal guardian with
power of attorney to judge Justice
Wynn, after his rare illness leads to a
coma. Before long, Keene unearths
clues to a dangerous secret of Wynn’s
and a conspiracy that infiltrates the
highest governing powers. But does she
have the courage to expose the truth?
Abrams’ literary achievements are an
inspiration — but for many people of
colour with similar ambitions, the
chances of success are low.
Since George Floyd’s murder in May
2020, there has been wider recognition
of the lack of diversity in the UK pub-
lishing industry. A report in February by
the UK’s Publishing Association noted
True detectives
that representation of people from
black, Asian and minority ethnic groups
has remained at about 13 per cent since
2017, only marginally lower than the UK
population of 14 per cent, but many
argue there is a wider story to be told.
A report by Anamik Saha and Sandra
van Lente last year challenges the
assumption that efforts at diversifying
the workforce lead to a more diverse
output. “Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Pub-
lishing”, which covered literary fiction,
crime/thriller and young adult genres,
noted that while publishers would like
to publish more writers of colour, they
expressed concerns about what they
saw as a “lack of ‘quality’” work, and
that books by people of colour were
“considered a commercial risk”.
Leye Adenle, a British-Nigerian writer
and author of The Beautiful Side of the
Moon — a sci-fi thriller that draws on
“age-old African storytelling traditions”
— argues that publishers unintention-
ally act as gatekeepers. “If they don’t
believe they can sell your books as much
as an ‘English person’s’, then it’s a sensi-
ble choice [not to].”
Factors — including assumptions
about audiences and concepts of “qual-
ity” — go some way towards explaining a
historic lack of diversity in crime fiction
and thrillers.
Unlike fantasy, sci-fi and romance
genres — which tend to have a broad
scope for flexibility and innovation —
CHESS LEONARD BARDEN
Long ago, when I first trio were soon overrun. After
competed in the annual I resigned, my conqueror
Hastings congress, I lost a Herbert Rhodes, a Southport
decisive game for first prize solicitor who was awarded
in the Masters group. There the Military Cross in the first
were other pieces on the world war, told me he found
board, but essentially the the queen-knight duo to be
battle was between my two generally superior, but few
rooks and a bishop and my players were fully aware of it.
opponent’s queen and Rhodes’s tip came back to
knight. On the traditional me when mention on a
point count of queen nine or forum of a Caro-Kann 1 e4
10, rook five, bishop three c6 opening trap stimulated
and a half, knight three, it several posters to say that
should have been an even they had used it, fallen for it,
fight, but my rook-bishop or witnessed it. The snare
POLYMATH 1,131 SET AARDVARK
★ FTWeekend
Genre fiction | Crime novels and thrillers lag behind in ethnic diversity,
but some publishers are trying to redress the balance. By Aaliyah Harris
crime fiction and thrillers have, over
time, developed more rigid conventions
of form, structure and characterisation.
Abir Mukherjee, who grew up in Scot-
land, is author of the best-selling Sam
Wyndham crime series. Set in India’s
Raj era, his books follow Captain Sam
Wyndham, a former Scotland Yard
detective recruited to Calcutta’s police
force while struggling to process his
traumatic experiences of the first world
war. Within three months of starting his
crime writing career, Mukherjee won a
writing competition and bagged a book
deal for his first novel, but he is well
aware of the challenges.
“The publishing industry reflects a
narrow section of British society,”
he says. “Fiction is skewed towards
Diversions
8
it out in a simultaneous
7 display to defeat four
6 opponents in consultation.
The sequence to remember
5 7 6
is 1 e4 c6 2 Nc3 d5 3 Nf3
4
dxe4 4 Nxe4 Nd7 5
3 Qe2 (setting the trap) Ngf6??
2
6 Nd6 mate. And again it is
our old friends the queen and
1
A B C D E F G H
knight that do the damage.
2423
has scored for at least two Wei Yi v Tigran L Petrosian,
chess legends. Paul Keres China v Armenia, Pro Chess
won a 1950 tournament League 2020. Find White’s
game with it, while surprise winning move.
Alexander Alekhine brought Solution, back page
ABC1, older, middle-class women.”
Mukerjee decided to run a test that
pitted ethnic minority and “religious”
names such as “Mohammed” against
British/US names. Readers were sent
newsletters with an adapted book blurb
that featured one of 10 names with the
option to click for further information.
“The click rate for the white names was
significantly greater than ethnic minor-
ity names,” he says.
While some writers tackle discrimi-
nation by using Anglo-Saxon pen
names, others are unwilling to hide their
identity. “My surname is Braithwaite, if
I use my initials there would be no way
for anyone to know that I was black,”
says British-Nigerian author Oyinkan
Braithwaite. Her debut novel, My Sister,
BRIDGE PAUL MENDELSON
To paraphrase Eric
Morecambe: some hands
require you merely to play
the right tricks; others
demand the right tricks in Q 10 5 2
the right order . . . Q J 10 9
Q 7 5
Most pairs found their
way into game; those who
stopped in 3S were happier.
Almost no one made 10
tricks. West led Q♦, and
declarer could see one loser which to throw losers from
in each suit. How should he hand but, here, with five
plan to discard one of them? trumps each, it doesn’t
Usually, one looks for a matter whether the discard
long suit in dummy on is made from hand or from
CROSSWORD 16,816 SET BY MUDD
Jotter pad
19 June/20 June 2021
the US, for example, several new
imprints have been launched with a
focus on works by writers of colour,
including Hachette’s Legacy Lit, led by
publisher Krishan Trotman, which will
release its first books in January 2022.
This follows the 2017 launch of the Dia-
logue Books imprint from Little, Brown
Book Group in the UK.
Dahlia Books, established by writer
and editor Farhana Shaikh, is a UK-
based press focusing on fiction that
champions regional and diverse writers.
“Publishers are always looking for the
next big thing,” Shaikh says. “This is a
mistake when investing in diverse writ-
ing talent because we need writing to be
judged on its own terms rather than
through the lens of exceptionalism.
‘We need writing to be
judged on its own terms
rather than through the
lens of exceptionalism’
“We’re definitely seeing work by writ-
ers of colour being celebrated on the
world stage,” she adds. “However, we
need to do more to actively champion
Andy Edwards
translated fiction to ensure that writers
across the world who don’t happen to
write in English are also able to enjoy
wider audiences.”
Last month, Penguin reissued five
novels from Chester Himes’ Harlem
Detective series — hard-boiled detective
stories that Himes wrote during the
1950s and 1960s — bringing the work of
the Serial Killer — a thriller set in mod- this often overlooked writer to a new
ern-day Lagos — won the 2020 British
Book Award for crime and thriller fic-
generation of readers. It’s a timely
reminder of the demand for more
tion, and has been translated into 30 diverse voices in genre fiction, from the
languages. Now, Braithwaite says she is present but also the past.
glad she used her real name but she is
unsure whether the temptation to use a
pen name was a subconscious desire to
avoid discrimination or ambiguity.
Mukherjee describes his background
as “hyphenated”, encompassing British,
Asian, Scottish and Bengali. “I was going
to write my books from two points of
view, the Englishman and an Indian,
Bengali,” he says. “But I didn’t feel confi-
dent enough to write in the voice of a
native Indian.” So he decided to focus on
Sam Wyndham. Summer Books 2021
If the publishing market caters to a Do you have a favourite book
white audience, it’s not surprising that or audiobook published
during 2021? We would love to hear
authors and their characters reflect this. from you. Visit ft.com/
Earlier this year, The Bookseller exam- readersbooks2021 and post a
ined the catalogues of the UK’s “Big comment to tell us the book, plus a few
Five” publishers and selected independ- sentences about why others should
ents, and found that only 2.5 per cent of read it. We’ll publish a selection of the
authors and illustrators featured were best responses on FT.com
black British. But changes are afoot. In
Q98 5 2 Dealer: South Game All dummy and lead J♣. When
A87
A64 North East South West East plays low, it should be
J 3 — — 1S NB run, losing to West’s Q♣.
N 3S NB 4S West continues with J♦, won
A
W E K963 in hand with K♦. Declarer
853 dummy. The only long suit must now cross back to
K8642
S worth attacking is clubs. dummy with A♥ and lead
K J 10 4 3 Holding ♣AJ109, there is a 3♣. When East plays low
J 4 good chance of making one this time, declarer must
K7 2
A 10 9 extra trick. finesse with 9♣. This holds
Declarer does not have the trick, and South can use
time to draw trumps now. If A♣ to discard the final
he does, East wins, returns a diamond from the table.
diamond and the loser there Trumps can now be drawn,
is exposed. Instead, South and the diamond loser
should win trick 1 with A♦ in ruffed later.
Crossword competitions suspended
Dear readers — we have suspended the Crossword and
Polymath competitions while our editors work from home.
We hope you continue to enjoy completing them until
normal newsroom services resume.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11

Cézanne | A show of the artist’s radical works on paper at New York’s Museum of Modern Art
reveals a surprising choice of predecessor and hints at unexpected heirs, writes Ariella Budick

Drawn to darkness and light

I
n the dim lights of a drawing gallery
at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, Cézanne’s jagged strokes
flicker and twist, refusing to cohere.
“There is no line,” the artist insisted
and he avoided defining contours or
marking out the boundaries between
substance and air. A bather’s leg
dissolves into a nest of twigs. A melon on
a table quivers with pleasure or dread.
The cumulative effect of all this
vagueness is electrifying.
Jodi Hauptman, the brilliant curator
of Cézanne Drawing, lays out exactly how
Cézanne’s process — his refusals, his
conflicts, his violence, his horror —
compels our attention. Picking up clues
with Sherlockian perceptiveness, she
leads us inexorably to her conclusion:
the “foundational figure of modern art,
more often recognised as a painter, pro-
duced his most radical work on paper”.
He drew almost every day, from the
late 1850s until his death in 1906. The
discipline tethered him to reality and
tuned his eye. His acolyte, the painter
Maurice Denis, described Cézanne’s
routine: “His afternoon consisted of two
options: going to a museum to draw stat-
ues, or venturing out-of-doors with his
box of watercolours. He believes that
this prepares him to see well the
following day.”
The exhibition does something simi-
lar for the viewer’s eye, patiently
training it to pick up fresh subtleties
amid Cézanne’s relentless repetitions.
He was gripped by apples, obsessed with
a specific mountain, bedevilled by
bevies of nudes. With a mixture of
fervour and labour, he produced
sheaves of doodles, cramming dozens of
separate drawings on to a single page
that he sometimes kept working on for
many years.
On the recto of one of these “study
sheets”, a copy of a Goya self-portrait in
a top hat jostles with a rendering of
Cézanne’s own face, an apple casting a
shadow, a bird’s-eye view of a couple in
bed and a female bather lumbering
toward a riverbank. The verso features a
draped figure copied from an
18th-century clock, along with the
painter’s wife and son captured from
various angles.
In these free-associative forays,
Cézanne mixed animate and inanimate,
snippets from old art and contemporary
life, sly humour and dour watchfulness.
Each page is like a dream, offering up
elusive meanings and connections. In a
pencil drawing from the early 1880s, he
placed an apple side-by-side with a
self-portrait, the fruit’s smooth round-
Clockwise from
main: Cézanne’s
‘Still Life with
Cut Water-
melon’ (c1900);
‘Study of a Skull’
(1902-4);
‘Bathers’ (1885–
90); ‘Mont
Sainte-Victoire’
(1902–6) — Peter
Schibli; Bruce M White; MoMA
ness mirroring his bald pate. “I will
astonish Paris with an apple,” he
claimed, a subject he might have
considered especially worthy because it
was his alter ego.
Cézanne saw other people and objects
as doubles, too. He paired his wife,
Hortense, with an orange, tacitly
acknowledging the unflattering nick-
name bestowed on her by his contemp-
tuous friends: la boule, or the ball.
Elsewhere, Hauptman hangs a mar-
vellous watercolour of a green jug, its
stout form sprouting sensual curves,
beside a sketch of the same piece of pot-
tery upside down. The jug shares the
page with two nude bathers, glimpsed
from behind, buttocks erupting into
globular mounds. The rhyming curves
make the analogy clear. He saw people
as components of a grand still life, or
memento mori — the fragility of fruit and
objects a stand-in for human mortality.
Cézanne did not compare himself
only to food or crockery, but also to a
surprising choice of predecessor: Goya
— his companion on the study sheet.
Cézanne is usually regarded as the ulti-
mate Frenchman, the modern-day
Poussin, enshrining the naturalism of
the Impressionists in the classical
mould of the old masters.
This view glosses over his Goya-esque
studies of killing and assault, rendered
in a brutal style. In “The Rape”, a man,
seen only from behind, forces himself
upon a screaming, panicked woman,
her features three scrawled hollows of
Cézanne’s manner of attacking paper
with pen demands that we reconsider
his skill as a draftsman. Was his
unpolished line a matter of deficiency or
of choice?
The show points in both directions at
once. He returned regularly to studies of
baroque sculpture and Hauptman gath-
ers half a dozen pencil drawings of
Pierre Puget’s 1661-62 statue of Her-
cules, made over 15 years, all of them
shocking distortions.
Puget’s hero is taut; Cézanne’s is slack.
Ripped muscles reconfigure into
bulbous lumps, a titanic foot mutates
into a cloddish paw. Cézanne shrinks
Hercules’s massive head to a hump that
barely rises above his shoulders. Other
Puget paragons suffer similar
treatment, metamorphosing from men
into monsters or dissipating into
random bristles.
Cézanne could work in the academic
style when he chose; a study of a stand-
ing male from 1862 proves it. But that
early exercise doesn’t demonstrate inor-
dinate skill and, unsurprisingly, he
didn’t get into the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris. It’s hard to know whether that
rejection inflamed his resistance or if he
was just temperamentally hostile to
conformity, but either way he had little
use for high-gloss virtuosity.
“I have to work all the time, but not to
Bloodthirstiness was never
far from Cézanne’s
imagination, even though
he later buried it beneath
veneers of peel or rind
horror. These are times when Cézanne achieve the finish that earns the admira-
allows the molten forces within him to tion of imbeciles,” he wrote to his
well up through his perfectionism. mother. “That thing that is so widely
These preoccupations with savagery valued is nothing more than a work-
also hint at unsuspected heirs. We know man’s craft, and makes all the resulting
Cézanne as the progenitor of analytical work inartistic and common.”
cubism, all of those cerebral, mono- Critics responded with predictable
chrome arrangements of angles and harshness and he didn’t have a solo
shapes. But he begot a wilder streak, too, exhibition until 1895, when he was in his
especially among German Expression- mid-fifties. In retrospect, and through
ists. Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max the prism of MoMA’s show, it’s easier to
Beckmann enshrined Cézanne’s taste see how his seething, morbid, rough-
for sexual violence as “Lustmord” and hewn work must have disconcerted the
amplified the technique’s coarseness. general public.
Bloodthirstiness was never far from
Cézanne’s imagination, even though he
later buried it beneath veneers of peel or
rind. In “Still Life With Apples, Pears
and a Pot” (1900), the handle of a blue-
black knife hovers menacingly above
the carnal cleft of the blushing pears.
The omnipresence of death often
emerged as a skull that bore more than a
passing resemblance to Cézanne’s orb-
like head.
The show closes with two paintings:
a skull and a curtained threshold, open-
ing on to a gloomy room. “I live a little as
if in a void,” he wrote to his son at the
end of his life.
And yet, as Hauptman points out,
Cézanne’s voids are solid, impenetrable
masses. The empty eye-sockets of the
dead face have more presence than the
brightness all around. In Cézanne, light
is darkness, darkness light.
To September 25, moma.org

Submit, instead, to the sound of those
THE LIFE gorgeous harmonies.
“Take It Easy” was mostly written by
OF A SONG Jackson Browne, a non-Eagle, and
partly by Glenn Frey, an alpha-Eagle.
TAKE IT EASY Browne, a boyish and mournful young
songwriter, started the song with an
account of his woman problems. Out of
make a move. Happiness was
a flatbed Ford away. The Eagles took
the song to number 12 in the US
charts. Browne also decided to record
his own version, which appeared on
1973’s For Everyman, more measured
than the Eagles’ hit, and embellished
by the lovely pedal steel playing of
Below: The Eagles in the suffered a reversal in its fortunes when
early 1970s, from left, a new bypass was built to take
Glenn Frey, Don Felder, motorists away from what was a
Bernie Leadon and Don respectably thriving centre. (See the
Henley — Redferns Pixar movie Cars, partly inspired by
Winslow’s misfortune, to get the idea.)
How, the city’s authorities wondered,
could they lure people back into
frontman, leaning against a lamppost,
which now stands just a few metres
away from the original.
The timing was freakishly apt: just as
the whole of America seemed to
become embroiled in the issue of the
relevance and suitability of its public
memorials, smashing down statues and

T
he Eagles’ first single,
“Take It Easy”, was
released on the first day of
May in 1972, and it gently
began the process of
seducing a troubled world out of some
of its greatest anxieties. The Vietnam
anthems had come and gone. So had
the highest-profile victims of drug
experimentation. The protest
movement was losing its momentum.
The 1960s were well and truly over.
But here was the counterculture
adopting an opposite approach. Forget
those clamorous demos and feisty
slogans. Go the other way, said the
sunny opening chords of “Take It
Easy”. Everything will be fine.
Californian indolence was turned into
an (in) action plan for a generation
fatigued by its struggles. “Don’t let
the sound of your own wheels drive
you crazy,” soothed the chorus.
the seven on his mind, he said, only legendary West Coast session-man Winslow? What was it famous for? urging their replacement with more
one was a friend. The rest wanted to “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow. They looked — where else? — to that worthy figures, Winslow seemed to
own him, or stone him. Never mind; But the song’s devotees began to fortuitous line from “Take it Easy”. give its citizens a gentle message:
take it easy. wonder: what exactly was it about that And so was born, in 1994, the Standin’ weren’t they heroes too, those denim-
In the following verse, he placed corner in Winslow, Arizona? They on the Corner Foundation. It devised a clad troubadours, who counselled
himself in a geographically remote and would soon find out. In the years plan to build a park on the now- nothing more profound than to turn
existentially bereft place, to following the song’s release, the city fabled junction, centred on a life’s dial down a notch or two?
further reflect on his bronze statue of a guitar player And the song itself? In all honesty, it
lucklessness. “Well, I’m at rest, which looked hasn’t spawned many cover versions,
standin’ on a corner in remarkably like the young such was the strength of its association
Winslow Arizona . . .” And Jackson Browne. The park with Browne, Frey and the rest. But
then he got stuck. His friend opened in 1999. there was a jaunty 1993 version by the
Frey, less melancholy by The move was a success: country singer Travis Tritt, who asked
nature, concluded the line boomers befuddled by the some of the Eagles, who had broken up
with a surge of pure LA pace of post-acoustic 13 years earlier, to appear in his video
narcissism: “Such a fine guitar life sought solace in of the song.
sight to see, it’s a girl, my the revivified city centre, The five members of the band who
Lord, in a flatbed Ford, which began to attract turned up had such fun that they
slowin’ down to take a look tourists, tens of thousands decided to re-form. They commence
at me.” a year. In 2016, Browne’s their latest international tour at the
Here was the reward for friend and co-writer Glenn Frey end of August, loosening their load
taking it easy, if you were died, and the SOTC foundation somewhere near you.
young, bright-voiced and, sprang into action once more, Peter Aspden
well, male. You didn’t even have to commissioning a statue of the Eagles More in the series at ft.com/life-of-a-song
12
Arts
Asia Society | Tess
e Thackara
talks to museum director
Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe
about fostering dialogue
betwee
w n the US and Asia
M
useum directors around
the world have faced a
tumultuous period — but
one that has also honed
their missions. For
Michelle YunY Mapplethorpe, who leads
artistic programmes aat the Asia Societty
and serve
r s as director for the Asia Soci-
etyy Museum in New York, the pandemic
has brought both upended plans and a
renewed sense of purpose.
The Asia Society’s first triennial, We
Do NNot Dream Alone, co-curated byy Yun
Mapplethorpe and Boon Hui Tan, was
thrown into disarray during the lock-
down. Set to launch in 2020 across New
York k City,
t including in the 19th-century
“Colonels’ Row” houses on Governors
Island, the ambitious showcase was
intended to bring more visibility to
Asian artists and combat rising xeno-
phobia, as well as cultivating a younger
audience and bringing fresh energy to
Looking east
its museum building on New York’s
Upper East Side.
Instead, it was adapted to roll out in
two phases at the museum and has
received mixed coverage. (Part two is
open now and closes on June 27.) 7
But Yun Mapplethorpe sees the
moment as one thatt is as galvanising as
it is sobering. She has found herself
at the helm of an institution whose
raison d’être
’ is to foster dialogue
between Asia and the US at a time of
heightened tension between the two
and charged anti-Asian sentiment in the
western world.
“I do feel a greatt sense of responsibil-
ity, butt also a great sense of opportunity
to have
a this platform,” she says over
Zoom frof m herr home in Connecticut.
The institution’s response to recent
events has included a screeningg and dis-
cussion of the documentary Who Killed
Vincent Chin?, a touchstone in the his-
tory of violence against Asian Ameri-
★ FTWeekend
Clockwise from cans and a catalyst for Asian-American
main: Mina activism in the 1980s. The screeningg was
Cheon’s (aka part of the institution’s series “Asia
“ Soci-
Kim Il Soon) ety at the Movies”, meant “to bring
‘Dreaming more of a mass appeal to think about
Unification: otherr issues relating to Asia” at a time of
Oori, Protest rising popular recognition for f Asian
for Peace’ film, says
a Y Yun Mapplethorpe.
(2019-20); Part of the challenge in addressing
Michelle Yun recent events, she says
a , is her mandate
Mapplethorpe; to represent the whole continent of Asia
FX Harsono’s — a vast and multi-faceted terrain. “Asia
‘(Still) Writing is such a broad geopolitical and cultural
in the Rain’ landscape,” Yun Mapplethorpe says.
(2011) — Bruce M White; “You havea to be very judicious about
Edward Mapplethorpe; Perry Hu
where those energies are best expended
— the platform is not infinite.”
The scope she has chosen to cover is
on view now in part two of the triennial.
The exhibition runs the gamut from
Abir Karmakar’s photorealist recrea-
tions of domestic settings in India to
Reza Aramesh’s Hellenistic-like vases
displaying bodies locked in violent,
homoerotic configurations, to Mina
Cheon’s explorations of the partition of
Korea through herr North Korean alter-
ego, Kim Il Soon.
A projectt that spans both parts of the
triennial, Xu Bing and Sun XunX ’s We the
People, responds to the US Declaration
Mischief and moral philosophy
Television | Marvel’s ‘Loki’ delves into character and ethics. By Peter Aspden
A
number of philosophical
themes swirl around the
opening couple of episodes
of Loki, Disney Plus’s new
series devoted to the epon-
ymous Norse god of mischief, as ffiltered
through the phantasmagorical filter of
the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In fact,
few of them are absent. There is the
thorny paradox of determinism versus
free will, the existential thicket concern-
ing the nature of personal identity, the
dangers of moral absolutism.
There is even a sprinkling of that 21st-
century touchstone of self-realisation,
the importance of being the best possi-
ble version of yourself, although Tom
Hiddleston’s wryness of delivery makes
clear these particular references are
satirical. “Sheathe your smarm for a
moment,” , Loki tells another version of
Loki (don’t ask), his enunciation so
sharp it could slice open an Infinity
Stone all by itself.
Keen viewers of the MCU will remem-
ber the Infinityy Stones, a keyy elementt in
the gnarled storyline of the Avengers
v series to circle, in ever more sophisti-
movies. W Well, forget about that. Here,
they have
a been bathetically reduced in
importance to actingg as paperweights in
the soulless offices of the Time Variance
Authority, which has arrested the pesky
protagonist for the understandably
severe offence of crimes against the
Sacred Timeline (aka changing the
course of history).
Loki spars with detective Mobius M
Mobius (Owen Wilson) over a black
Saarinen tulip table (lovelyy retro-futur-
ism abo
a unds), and the two of them hur-
tle through time and the history of
moral philosophy. They bond, a little,
and we are kept in a state of genuine
tension: is the “mischievous scamp”
malign or misunderstood?
It’s impossible not to admire the zest
of these exchanges, nor the ambition of
the MCU’s startlingg evolution in recent
years. Loki is the third partt of phase four
f Tom Hiddleston and Wunmi Mosaku in Marvel’s ‘Loki’ — Chuck Zlotnick
of Independence via Sun’s Chinese-style
paintings of American violence and Xu’ X s
“collaboration” with silkwo k rms, which
the artist let loose on a text byy Confucius
— who was ffoundational to both US and
Chinese political thought.
t That, for her, is the crux of her work
Among the territories tthat are frontt of
mind at the moment for the director is
Myanmar, which she has spotlighted in
recent programming, and Iran, which
will be the subject of an exhibition
hosted by the Asia Society Museum
later this year. Regions and countries
she would like to see given more atten-
of the franchise’s long-term unravelling
of its tight-suited assets, and in many
ways one of the boldest. Like its TV
predecessors WandaVision and (less so)
The Falcon andd the Winter Soldier, it uses
television’s extended narrative arc to
dig deeper into character and embrace
ethical complexity.
t Lindelof’s ’ dazzling Watchmen.)
The openingg episodes of Loki, directed
byy Britain’s Kate Herron, are heavy on
Itt is also good fun,
f thanks
in large
r part to Tom
T vandalism and bouts of earthly self-
Hiddleston’s larkyr ways
with statements of the epic
dialogue and exposition, however leav- a
ened by the jokes, and distinctly short
on spectacular action sequences. The
first movie in phase ffour, Black Widow
W w, is
released in July and will no doubt
reverse those priorities. But Marvel has
found a sweet spot here, using the TV
19 June/20 June 2021
tion include Indonesia, where “power-
ful” work byy artists such as FX Harsono
are “processing and expressingg the great
sociopolitical upheaval that many peo-
ple have had to live through
t ”, she says
a .
Yun Mapplethorpe also sees urgent
applications for her work in the US in
the coming years. As American muse-
ums work to diversify their collections,
she hopes to serve as a conduitt to bring
Asian artists, historical artworks and art
professionals to visibility in the west,
while amplifyingg Asian-American art-
ists and arts workers.
“The Asian-American communityy is
the fastest-growing minority commu-
nity in the US,” she says. “It would
behove organisations across the board
to be more cognisant and more aware
and empathetic to tthose communities.”
She adds that in just a few decades’
time, the minority base in the US will be
turned on its head — there will be more
black, indigenous and other people of
colour than white people. That, says a the
director, makes it all the more salient to
champion artwork that challenges
Eurocentric narratives of art history.r
‘I did experience a lot
of self-c
f onsciousness
about my race. To be a
woman and a minority
is a double whammy’
Yun Mapplethorpe is Chinese-born
American, and grew up in Michigan,
with few other minorities and Asian-
American role models in her orbit. “I
did experience a lot of self-conscious-
ness about my race,” she recalls. She
also came up in an art world with few
women in the top posts at institutions —
a reality that has led to her emphasis
today on supporting Asian-American
women artists and arts workers. “To be
a woman and a minority is a double
whammy,” , she says.
It was ultimately the Asiaa Societyy that
changed the course of Yun Map-
plethorpe’s career, shifting her focus
from western modern and contempo-
rary art, in which she was trained, to
Asian art. In 1998, while workingg at the
Museum of Modern Art in the painting
and sculpture department, she saw
Inside Out: New w Chinese Art at the Asia
Society,
t an exhibition she says
a “impas-
sioned in me this desire to focus on con-
temporary Chinese art”.
“To see otherr Chinese people thatt are
makingg things and that are creative and
that are forging an identity and a voice
for themselves in the arts — it allowed
me to think about what could be possi-
ble,” she adds.
and what she aims to invoke in visitors
to the Asia Society. “To inspire people to
become impassioned through the work
that they’re seeing,” she says
a , “to inspire
them the way that I was inspired as a
young professional.”
To June
J 27,7 asiasociety.o
y rg
cated fashion, around the themes pre-
sented in the movies, and even take on a
life of their own. (It must be noted that
DC Comics, which has generally strug-
gled to match Marvel’s flair with movie
adaptations, has provided TV’s finest f
comicc book turn to date, namely Damon
In purely pragmatic terms, Loki
looks like a safe bet for further excur-
sions: its (anti?) hero is able to change
form, skip across time, and indulge with
equal intensity in crafty acts of space
doubt. That is what you call dramatic
potential.
It is also good fun,
f thanks in large
part to Hiddleston’s larky ways with
statements of the epic. “I’d like all files
pertaining to the beginning of time,
please,” he tells the dour librarian in the
Time Variance Authority, who comes up
with the most crushing line of the
episode: “It’s classified.” It would be.
Neww episodes every
v Wednesday
on Disney Plus
19 June/20 June 2021
T The secret
here is no shortage of actors
getting a shot at singing in
Robert Altman’s sprawling,
messy 1975 movie Nashville.
That is as you’d expect from
a film set in Music City, where music and
politics are intersecting during a fic-
tional presidential campaign.
None of the performances are bad —
bar the ones that are meant to be — but
one stands out. On stage at the Grand
Ole Opry, the weekly concert that is to
country music what Bayreuth is to Wag-
ner, Karen Black, playing Connie White,
approaches the mic in a red dress
trimmed with sequins.
The actress’s voice is rich and velvety,
her delivery languid and relaxed; she
radiates charisma, controlling the stage
like someone who had spent years
working her way through the clubs to
the theatres. Most surprising, though, is
that the songs she sings — “Memphis”
and “I Don’t Know If I Found It In You”
(and, in a later scene, “Rolling Stone”) —
were not written by professional writ-
ers. Black wrote her own songs, and they
sound as though they could have come
from a very good album.
All this makes it less surprising that
next month sees the release of Dreaming
of You (1971-76), a collection of record-
ings by Black, mostly with producers
Bones Howe and Elliott Mazer. They
were discovered after her death in 2013
by her fourth husband, Stephen Eckel-
berry, who hadn’t known her in the
1970s, then compiled and prepared for
release by Cass McCombs, a musician
specialising in Americana.
All bar a couple of the songs were writ-
ten by Black, and all are very good: play-
ful, largely acoustic and idiosyncratic.
You wouldn’t be in the least surprised to
be told they were by some twenty-some-
thing bohemian “freak folk” artist.
“She sang all the time at home,” Eckel-
berry says. “She loved singing. But it was
kind of a push-me, pull-you. She wanted
to sing, but she was really worried about
the technical part of it. She didn’t feel
she had the command over it that she
did over acting. So pushing past that
slight reticence was part of her singing.”
‘She does it in a way that is
still spontaneous, it’s just
erupting from her, from her
soul. Her spirit just ejects’
And she sang in public, too. She sings
in several of her stellar run of films from
the early 1970s: in a car, to Jack Nichol-
son, in Five Easy Pieces; duetting with
Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike; on the
soundtrack, as she and George Segal sit
on windswept beach in Born to Win. She
sang her own composition “Did You
Ever Wonder?” on Dolly Parton’s TV
show in 1976, she sang in her one-
woman stage show on the New York
stage in 1982. Oddest of all, she sang
Sonny Bono’s “Bang Bang (My Baby
Shot Me Down)” on a cable TV show in
1997, backed by the punk band L7.
All of which suggests someone willing
to take on most challenges. “She was
totally game for anything,” Eckelberry
says. “She didn’t think of herself this
way, but I thought of her as fearless.”
So why did those recordings from the
’70s end up in a box in her house, rather
than being hawked around record
labels? Eckelberry points out that her
scant recording sessions were just asides
in the context of her career. “A session
was just two or three days of her life. She
was so busy, constantly working, that it
was one of those things that slipped
right by.”
Collecting
London is alive with art and
antiques in the next few
weeks — the Masterpiece
fair, mecca for cross-genre
collecting with galleries
showing work that ranges
from antiquity to modern
jewellery, Impressionists to
African masks, opens its
online edition on June 24.
Next comes London Art
Week, a wide range of
gallery shows to visit in
person, opening on July 3.
Our latest supplement is at
ft.com/collecting
songwriter
Music | ‘Five Easy Pieces’ actress Karen Black’s
recordings have been unearthed after 50 years
and reveal a singular talent, writes Michael Hann
From top: Karen Black in Robert
Altman’s ‘Nashville’; in 1971’s ‘Drive,
He Said’, directed by Jack Nicholson;
with Nicholson in 1970’s ‘Five Easy
Pieces’; with Stephen Eckelberry in
1983; with Cass McCombs; Sandy
Dennis, Cher and Black in 1982’s
‘Come Back to the Five and Dime,
Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ — Alamy;
Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock; Bridgeman Images; Getty Images
★ FTWeekend 13
Arts
get close to be being released. They Suddenly you are transported to the
didn’t even get to the next step, where
you go back to the studio and you
early ’70s.”
In her latter years, in those horror
record with other musicians.” movies, Black became a cult figure.
Listening to the tapes was an odd Once a figurehead of the New Holly-
experience for Eckelberry too. He had wood, she had become the Queen of
not known Black when she made them Horror. Younger creative types collabo-
— they married in 1987 — and now he rated with her, and after her death the
was hearing something of his wife he experimental hip-hop group Death
had never known. Grips released footage of her reading
“It was both familiar and a revelation from a film script called Bottomless Pit to
He notes also that she was always cre- at the same time,” he says. “It was preview an album of the same name.
ating. Even after her acting career Karen, and it was this young Karen I But these were other people’s projects.
slipped from those ’70s highs into a suc- hadn’t known. She was 40 when I met With the release of Dreaming of You,
cession of B-movies and horror films, her but she always looked younger than Black’s real voice is finally heard again.
she was writing poetry and a musical. her age. She was always playing people
Some songs from decades earlier were younger than she was. And she had a ‘Dreaming of You (1971-76)’ is released on
simply not that important to her. young-sounding voice. But boy, that July 16 on Anthology Recordings.
McCombs met Black in 2009, and youthful sweetness, it was astounding to ‘Nashville’ is back in UK cinemas from
promptly roped her into singing with hear that. It’s very much a time capsule. June 25
him on “Dreams Come True Girl”. “We
kept on getting together and coming up
with new ways to collaborate,” he says.
They recorded more — two new collabo-
rations feature on a single that accom-
panies the album — and had been plan-
ning an album together when Black
died. And then the tapes came to light.
“I’m talking lots and lots of tapes,”
McCombs says. “Not just reel-to-reel
tapes, but different mediums — half
inch, quarter inch, one inch. Shoeboxes
and shoeboxes of cassette tapes. Crazy,
totally undocumented. We didn’t know
what was on there.
“On some she was studying for film
roles. Some were recordings of her one-
woman show, just live recordings. Oth-
ers are of her practice tapes of musical
ideas. And others are what ended up
being the album, professional record-
ings she had done in the early ’70s. She
was a very, very creative person. It
wasn’t just music. One day I went over to
her house, and she was like: “Sit down,
Cass.” And she immediately had to draw
a picture of me. She was always doing
and being creative. She had a renais-
sance kind of mind.”
There was little information about
the songs — the album credits note they
come from “various recording sessions
between 1971 and 1976” with “instru-
mentation by various session musi-
cians” — but McCombs was struck by
the quality of her writing, and her
voice. “She does it in a way that is still
spontaneous, it’s just erupting from her,
from her soul. Her spirit just ejects
from a real place. Certainly Karen was a
great technical singer, but what makes
her interesting is that it is completely
herself.” What puzzles him is that the
recordings could have languished so
long. “It felt strange to me . . . that
these songs didn’t get released. Or even
14 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Arts | Collecting

Sculpture in the City | Outdoor

show brings a human scale to
the Square Mile’s post-lockdown
streets. By Jackie Wullschläger

T
here may be fewer workers,
now or ever, returning to
the Square Mile, but the
sculptures have come.
Launched in its 10th edition
this week, London’s annual summer
show Sculpture in the City has never been orange and pink, the
more welcome in bringing a sense of “Stack” is a reminder of
human scale and enlivening the monot- how far we are from expan-
ony of high-rise glass and steel with col- sive sunset skies. Tebbenhoff
our, texture and idiosyncratic interven- instead abbreviates and
tions at street level. abstracts the romantic sub-
Starting at the Gherkin, I slipped into lime in industrial materials.
a cul-de-sac just behind St Mary Axe Casting “Stone (Butch)”
and met a quartet of abstracted gravel directly from rock crevices at
and limestone figures, a fraction taller Godrevy Point in Cornwall,
than life-size and arranged in slight gra- Roseanne Robertson brings
dations of height, from the classically the sea to the metropolis,
graceful to the lumpen, bumpy, summoning stone, water,
indented and hollowed out. This is landscape, body in a strange
“Reactivity” by young Danish sculptor equilibrium of voids and sol-
Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen. ids, dark spaces in the mar-
The gossamer delicacy with which she gins and bright light. Some-
handles earthy matter, the twin sugges- thing of the formal balance
tions of geological remnants and the spi- and robust fidelity to materi-
rals and coils of fabric clinging to the als of Barbara Hepworth is
body as in ancient Greek drapery, the here — they have been paired
rhythmic flow between the figures — all together at the Hepworth
would be exquisite anywhere, but in the museum in Wakefield.
shadow of the Gherkin the organic Robertson’s aim for this
shapes and tactile appeal are affecting. fluid figure — an uneven, lop-
If the city’s skyscrapers are emblems sided shape in painted jes-

New forms
of dynamism, ambition and global iden- the back entrance of the Leadenhall monite poised on curving steel legs — is
tity, “Reactivity” stills time, and asks us Building (Richard Rogers’ “Cheeseg- to reclaim “a natural space for Queer
to reactivate more contemplative urban rater”). Rothschild’s trio of aluminium and Butch identity from a history of
encounters. She finds, and wants to slatted structures, spray-painted black being deemed against nature”. Before
offer, “a great calm in communication on the outside, grading to purple, green, reading this, I saw in “Stone (Butch)”
and being with physical objects and red within, lean into each another to not identity politics but a pair of wings, a

materials”.
‘It’s not about looking or
projecting or storytelling.
It’s about being present
with an object’
After so long living virtually, a domi-
nant theme in this year’s selection is our
relationship with the material world,
with urban grit particularly.
Several works spin art from junk.
Tatiana Wolska cuts, perforates and
thermo-welds recycled plastic bottles
into elongated blood-red biomorphic
forms sprawling through Leadenhall
Market; they imply environmental
catastrophe.
“Rough Neck Business” is Mike Bal-
lard’s loosely geometric interlocking
abstractions sourced from green hoard-
ings from Olympic Park and blue ones
from Hackney Wick. In the quiet garden
of St Botolph’s churchyard, the horizon-
tal clumps in Alice Channer’s “Burial”
appear to be rocks, surreally stretched
out to the length of a human body; in
fact they are moulded from concrete
remains gathered from London’s demo-
lition sites, then cast in Corten steel — a
palimpsest of the city’s shifting fabric.
Bram Ellens’ “Orphans” is a comic
of London life
group of boulder-like, multi-angled
ovoids, each constructed from scores of
discarded paintings sourced from thrift
stores and undertakers. Shown from the
back as a field of imageless tacked-to-
gether planes, it is hardly a work to
cheer a painter, though it celebrates a
melancholy resourcefulness.
In a flair of placement, this stands on
Cullum Street, in front of the stunning
Art Nouveau Bolton House, dating from
1907. The artwork’s haphazard geome-
try plays against the building’s blue and
white tiled facade, arched windows and
lovely foliage frieze, rare and mesmeris-
ing in themselves.
Architecture is the bonus of Sculpture
in the City: stopping you in your tracks,
defamiliarising, inviting discovery, each
work enters into dialogue with nearby
buildings and, more broadly, with the
city’s dense, eclectic medieval-to-Geor-
gian-to-contemporary streetscapes.
Eva Rothschild achieves this marvel-
lously with “Cosmos”, which stands by
form one unit “like a set of disruptive
gates”, she says.
At three metres — human scale —
“Cosmos” in this setting wittily con-
denses, repeats and varies aspects of the
225-metre Cheesegrater’s open/closed
grid structure, slender tapered con-
struction, ladder frame, steel bracings
and coloured stripes, including the
bright orange exposed lift racing up and
Clockwise from down. In both the building and the
main: Jake sculpture, minimalism meets pop cul-
Elwes’ ‘Latent ture, sharp geometry is muted into enig-
Space’ at 120 mas of light and form, the fixed appears
Fenchurch flexible, provisional.
Street; Almuth Like most serious sculptors, Roth-
Tebbenhoff’s schild’s interest comes back to the body:
‘RedHead “We inhabit ourselves quite fully when
Sunset Stack’ in we encounter the physical artwork. It’s
Mitre Square; not about looking or projecting or story-
Tatiana telling. It’s about being present with an
Wolska’s object that is equally taking up space,”
untitled work in she has said. It is also a lament for
Leadenhall diminishing global space: “Cosmos” is a
Market; Jun T vision of a hemmed-in world, its ele-
Lai’s ‘Bloom ments coexisting in high tension. Roth-
Paradise’ schild’s presentation at the 2019 Venice
outside biennale was “The Shrinking Universe”.
Fenchurch Almuth Tebbenhoff expresses some-
Street Station thing similar in “RedHead Sunset
Nick Turpin
Stack”: an irregularly shaped column, a
mere outline, placed like a disembodied
toy beneath Mitre Square’s dizzyingly
high towers. Constructed in steel,
coated in hot zinc and painted red,
musing on nature-versus-culture, an
expression of freedom, flight, release.
This is altogether an optimistic exhi-
bition, a treasure trail of small joys. Out-
side Fenchurch Street Station, “Bloom
Paradise”, Jun T Lai’s giant painted lotus
flowers, is a symbol of regeneration.
Elisa Artesero’s poem “The Garden of
Floating Words” (“You’ve Gone/ Touch-
ing Leaves in the Moonlight”), a blue
neon levitating in the foliage of a small
planter, is about enjoying a moment —
ethereal, ephemeral.
None of the works in Sculpture in the
City are here to stay, none are iconic
statements; the pleasure is rather the
unexpected interactions between
works, places, people. In “Metal Man —
Deeper Together, Deep Travel Ink.
NYC”, Laure Prouvost’s “video heads”
on metal-silhouette bodies wait to send
out messages — “Come with us”; “This is
the best thing you have seen for a long
time” — to passers-by, distilling the gen-
eral flâneur’s vibe.
It is wholly different from the experi-
ence of rural sculpture parks, where
monumental pieces stand proud and
bold against open skies, yet nature
always wins and remains the chief
attraction. Here in the beleaguered
post-pandemic city, sculpture trans-
forms, cheers and heals.
sculptureinthecity.org.uk

Web’s beginnings for sale as an NFT

The Art Market | TFAG extends financing; Mehretu breaks records for Artsy; Masterpiece Online shrugs off longer lockdown; Périnet collection at auction. By Melanie Gerlis

I
f anyone understands the power of
technology it is Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the world wide web. He
has created what might be the peak
non-fungible token — containing
the original source code for the web.
The 9,555 lines of code, written
between October 1990 and August 1991,
are part of a token that also includes
Berners-Lee’s digital signature, now on
the Ethereum blockchain. The scientist
describes the NFT phenomenon as “the
ideal way to package the origins behind
the web”.
It may not exactly be fine art, but
Sotheby’s will auction Berners-Lee’s
NFT via its website between June 23 and
30 to benefit the scientist’s charitable
initiatives. Bidding will open at $1,000
but can be expected to overexcite to
much higher levels. Cryptocurrencies
are, naturally, accepted.
Purchase financing — when money is
advanced to buy assets — is mostly
associated with the car industry but is a
growing area of the art market too. From
this month, The Fine Art Group has
extended its loan book to people who
want to buy at public auction.
“Since the pandemic, we have seen
increased demand as people want to
retain more personal liquidity. It makes
sense to offer the service to buyers at
auction as well as on the private market,”
says Freya Stewart, chief executive of art
finance for TFAG.
Qualifying works are those with a low
estimate of more than $1m, Stewart says,
and she cites two paintings in the
forthcoming London sales that have
caught her eye: Bridget Riley’s “Zing 2”
(1971) at Christie’s on June 30 (est
£1.8m-£2.2m) and Laurence Stephen
Lowry’s “Going to the Match” (1928) at
Sotheby’s on June 29 (est £2m-£3m),
which chimes nicely with the ongoing
Euro 2020 football tournament.
Stewart is less convinced about
lending money up front to buy NFT
works. This is not so much a comment on
the art, she says, but the unrealistic
prices at which they are selling given
their attraction to owners of virtual
currencies. “I am sceptical of the crypto
premium,” she says.
For qualifying works, TFAG will lend
between 40 and 50 per cent of value,
with rates between 6 and 7 per cent per
annum. Loans are currently offered for
Sir Tim Berners-
Lee has put the
original source
code for the web
up for sale as an
NFT to fund
charitable
projects — Ed Quinn
between six months and two years,
though Stewart says they would be
prepared to extend this on a work that
was “performing” well. She confirms
that there is demand, too, from clients of
Pall Mall Art Advisors, a US business
bought by TFAG last month. Sotheby’s
has also started offering six-month
loans, to go towards works in its selected
sales, valued from $400,000.
The online marketplace Artsy has
scored a double record with Julie
Mehretu’s “Dissident Score” (2019-21),
which sold for $6.5m last week (est $3m-
$4m). It marks the highest public price
for the artist and for the online-only fine
art platform.
The painting was made to benefit the
Art for Justice Fund, set up by the
philanthropist Agnes Gund to reduce
prison populations across the US and the
racism that drives this. Artsy waived its
sales commission, usually at least a 10
per cent surcharge at this price level in
the industry.
Dustyn Kim, Artsy’s chief revenue
officer, says the sale marks a
“watershed” moment for the platform,
which launched in 2012. “It was an
honour to be the chosen partner for this
auction and evidence that, since the
pandemic, buyer and seller psychology
has changed. The ability to transact at
such price points has laid to rest any
lingering doubts about offering work
online,” she says. Mehretu’s work was
offered on Artsy between May 26 and
June 10 and had six bidders from across
the world compete in its final hours,
Kim confirms.
England’s lockdown has
been extended by another
four weeks but the
background to Masterpiece
Online, which runs from June
23 to 27, shows how far we
have come since last year. The
cross-category fair’s physical
event in London has been
cancelled for the second time
running but, as galleries are
open this time around, it can
still generate in-person
activity.
“This year is a campaign for
what people are doing
physically,” says chief
executive Lucie Kitchener. Julie Mehretu, ‘Dissident Score’ — Tom Powel Imaging
Recommended gallery tours — either
across categories or within specialist
fields — will be available via videos and
should also help the fair’s digital-only
visitors to negotiate its 127 exhibitors
(masterpiecefair.com).
“It can all be a bit daunting otherwise,”
Kitchener says.
Several galleries have works from
Masterpiece Online in their actual
spaces. At Dickinson, these are spread
across the Atlantic. Johann Zoffany’s
“Ulysses Seizing Astyanax from
Andromache” (c1758-59) will be in its
London gallery; Frederick Childe
Hassam’s “Woman Reading (Portrait of
Nellie Dubois Boyle)” (1885) will be in
New York, “with much more besides” for
in-person visitors, promises Emma
Ward, Dickinson’s managing director.
Christie’s Paris offers a prized
collection next week of 61 pieces of
mostly African and Oceanic art. These
belonged to the jeweller, gallerist and
collector Michel Périnet, who died last
year. Alexis Maggiar, Christie’s head of
African and Oceanic art, says the
collection is particularly rare as it spans
such a wide area, encompassing western
and central Africa as well as Easter
Island, Papua New Guinea and the
Solomon Islands.
Many of Europe’s best-known 20th-
century artists, notably Picasso, were
heavily influenced by tribal sculptures
and masks. Top lot of the Périnet sale is a
Fang head from Gabon (est €2m-€3m),
whose first recorded owner was the
Fauve artist Maurice de Vlaminck. This,
like the majority of Périnet’s items, is
dated to the 19th century, though the
auction also features a much earlier
piece — a Dogon-Nongom figure from
Mali that Maggiar dates to the 11th
century (est €150,000-€250,000).
Buyers in this previously niche field
have widened internationally as part of a
more cross-category mindset, he says.
Some collectors from Africa have
entered the market too but, Maggiar
says, “not enough yet, it would be my life
goal to see more”. The whole collection is
estimated to fetch between €17m and
€23m on June 23.
19 June/20 June 2021
Joe Biden was elected promising to remake —
and decarbonise — US energy. Derek Brower
reports from the communities that have long
lived on the profits of fossil fuel extraction.
Photographs by Brandon Thibodeaux
T ‘My hope is that one
o write a story about the
political, cultural and eco-
nomic upheavals that
might result from Amer-
ica’s quest to burn less fossil
fuel, I had to burn a lot of it myself.
In April, I flew to Bismarck, North
Dakota, and found a shiny white Audi
Q3 waiting for me in the rental parking
lot. I was there to find out how Ameri-
cans living in communities that depend
on the extraction and sale of fossil fuels
are faring after last year’s brutal crash in
oil prices. And to find out how they feel
about their new president’s far-reaching
clean energy revolution.
I wandered from shale oilfields in
both the Dakotas to wind farms in Wyo-
ming, from patches of desert ear-
marked for green mega-projects to sky-
scrapers in Houston, a city pumped
through and through with oil profits.
Two weeks of road from chilled north-
ern prairies to the steamy Gulf Coast.
Miles driven: 3,112. CO2 equivalent
burnt: 1.24 tonnes.
Joe Biden won the US presidency after
months of vowing to render the world’s
largest economy emissions-free by
2050, to crack down on fossil fuel pollu-
tion, to eliminate carbon from the
power sector in 15 years and to electrify
the automotive fleet of the country that
perfected the V8 engine and proselyt-
ised the SUV. Democrats say Biden’s
plan can fight climate change and create
a bounty of new jobs at the same time.
The plan also puts the US in the van-
guard of a global energy transition many
hope will sunset the petroleum era.
From Wall Street to Frankfurt, investors
are shunning oil and gas and favouring
renewables. Goldman Sachs says spend-
ing on clean energy could amount to
$16tn in the next 10 years, as much as
the rising economies of Brazil, Russia,
India and China together spent on infra-
structure in the century’s first two dec-
ades. Forecasters, including the Interna-
tional Energy Agency, now say new fos-
sil fuel projects aren’t necessary to meet
the world’s energy needs.
All of which is a head-spinning
reversal for anybody working in Odessa,
Texas, Williston, North Dakota, or
many of the other places I visited on a
road trip across seven states dotted with
decades of accumulated energy infra-
structure. Former president Donald
Trump’s proclaimed era of American
“energy dominance” has given way to
emboldened activists, investors, regula-
tors and politicians.
Perhaps that’s why my voyage
through these fossil fuel-dependent
communities often felt like tracing a
front. I met Americans fighting to hold
back an energy transition, some fear-
ing its impact, and others battling to
speed its progress. Sometimes, all in
the same place.
NORTH DAKOTA
‘We went from an
ageing state to one of
the younger ones’
The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is
no stranger to upheaval. Between 1947
and 1953, the US Army Corps of Engi-
neers dammed the Missouri River that
bisects this part of North Dakota, creat-
ing Lake Sakakawea and a hydropower
plant and displacing some 90 per cent of
the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara
(MHA) Nation, the native Americans
who live here.
Today, another form of energy domi-
nates Fort Berthold’s rolling prairie. The
reservation sits atop the Bakken shale
rock unit, one of the world’s most pro-
lific oil-producing geological forma-
tions. It was here that drillers launched
the American shale oil revolution just
over a decade ago, making the US the
world’s biggest crude producer and
upending geopolitics. Before last year’s
oil price crash, North Dakota was pro-
ducing almost 1.5m barrels a day, more
daily oil than the whole of the UK.
Mark Fox is the leader of the MHA
Nation. The walls of his office in New
Town, Fort Berthold’s administrative
centre, are adorned by a framed bow
★ FTWeekend
On the front line of the
US energy revolution
Raul Alvarado, and quiver, as well as memorabilia from
an oilfield Fox’s time in the US Marine Corps. We
worker, near talk about the flood in 1953, the new US
an oil derrick he secretary of interior Deb Haaland — the
maintains in first Native American appointed to a
Hobbs, New federal cabinet post — and oil, which has
Mexico restored some of what was lost by the
tribes on Fort Berthold 70 years ago.
Before the drilling boom a decade ago,
the reservation’s main source of income
was its casino and federal payments.
Annual oil revenue in the past few years
has provided as much as 85 per cent of
the tribal budget. “It’s buildings, schools
. . . medical health insurance for the
first time for our people,” says Fox. Oil
money also helped when the coronavi-
rus hit the 7,000-person reservation last
year. Whatever their initial concerns,
Fox says his people want shale develop-
ment to continue. “My hope is that one
day we no longer depend on the federal
government ever again.”
For Fox, the challenge of a shifting
national energy agenda has already
arrived. In April the MHA Nation sided
with an oil company in a thorny dispute
with the Standing Rock tribe, which has
been seeking to shut down a Bakken oil
pipeline. The Standing Rock say the
pipeline, which ships most of the MHA
Nation’s oil, is endangering its water.
“We respect Standing Rock’s rights to
Oil pump jacks
pepper the
landscape across
west Texas near
Midland, as do
wind turbines
say ‘we don’t want an oil pipeline . . . ’
That’s their right,” says Fox. “But we
also have a right.”
The dispute echoes the broader
debate over America’s energy sector.
Fossil fuels cause harm, but also pay for
medical facilities in indigenous com-
munities. North Dakota’s oil advocates
make the argument for the rest of their
state too. “The Bakken brought almost
a rebirth,” says Ron Ness, head of the
North Dakota Petroleum Council in Bis-
marck, the state capital. “We were clos-
ing schools. And for the last decade
we’ve been building schools. We went
from an ageing state to one of the
youngest ones.”
The pandemic has complicated mat-
ters further. In 2019 the state’s oil reve-
nue hit almost $4bn. Now, Ness reckons
as many as a quarter of the 60,000 or so
people working directly or indirectly in
the shale patch have left following last
year’s crash. Some analysts believe the
Bakken is in terminal decline since it is
cheaper to produce oil elsewhere and
because of the reticence among inves-
tors to pay for new drilling.
In Bismarck, Ness blames Washing-
ton. Pictures of Donald Trump hang in
his office as he tells me that Biden and
his clean energy agenda have put a chill
on his state’s oil business. “When you
wake up every morning and you feel like
the federal government is out to get you,
there’s a significant impact,” he says.
“Every conversation I have is ‘climate
this, climate that’.”
WYOMING
Down in the canyons
cottonwoods whisper
From the heart of the Bakken in Willis-
ton, I head through Montana and into
Wyoming, another emerging front in
America’s energy transition. The state is
famous for its huge skies, snow-capped
peaks, deeply conservative politics and
hydrocarbons, especially coal. But the
Cheney dynasty’s adopted state also has
wind — powerful, persistent and, for the
right investors, profitable.
Standing on a ridge in the Sierra Madre
range in Carbon County, I look out. In the
valley to our north is Rawlins, a prison
town; just east of there is the hamlet of
Sinclair, renamed after its almost 100-
year-old refinery. I’m on ranchland
belonging to the Colorado billionaire
Philip Anschutz, an investor in energy
projects, newspapers and entertain-
ment, including the Coachella festival.
Some time in the middle of this dec-
ade, this land will host a thicket of wind
15
turbines, as many as 900 in total, with
enough capacity to power one million
homes. Eventually, a planned high-
voltage, direct-current transmission
line will stretch to Nevada, California
and Arizona. Including $3bn for the
power lines, it will all cost $8bn.
Bill Miller, who runs the Anschutz
Corporation’s Power Company of Wyo-
ming, is an oilman and rancher and
Anschutz, his deep-pocketed boss, is
no tree-hugger. But both are on board
with Biden’s climate plan. “Society has
spoken,” Miller tells me. “Society has
said, ‘I want to stick with renewable
day we no longer
depend on the federal
government ever again’
Mark Fox,
leader of the MHA nation,
North Dakota
energy’. You may not agree with every-
thing that society is saying but they’ve
spoken in a big way.”
Wyoming, which provides two-fifths
of the coal mined in American power
plants, is uniquely exposed to the fed-
eral government’s plan to eliminate car-
bon from the electricity sector. Coal is
the dirtiest fossil fuel, emitting twice as
much CO2 when burnt as natural gas
and enormously more than renewable
sources of electricity. The state’s bounty,
mostly found in the prolific mines of the
Powder River Basin, is in peril.
The decline has been under way for a
while, another outcome of the shale rev-
olution that unleashed a surge of cheap
natural gas production that has steadily
eaten into coal’s share of power genera-
tion in the US. Wyoming’s coal output
last year was just 218m short tons, about
half the level of a decade ago. Employ-
ment in the sector has fallen by about 30
per cent in the past five years.
But taxes on coal, oil and gas still sup-
ply about half Wyoming’s general
spending fund and entire communities
rely on coal income. It’s hard to imag-
ine Gillette’s well-appointed town cen-
tre, with its chic pizzeria and hipster
brewery, without considering the
money indirectly poured into the local
economy by mining a few miles down
the road.
Coal also has a cultural grip on Wyo-
ming. “Coal is as much an identity for a
community as it is an economy,” says
Shannon Anderson, a staff attorney at
the Powder River Basin Resource Coun-
cil, a pressure group that has advocated
for responsible mining for about as long
as Wyoming has been plundering its
coal seams. “But the past is not our
future,” she says. “We have a carbon
problem. We have to get on it. If we
don’t, we’re going to be in big trouble.”
In Wyoming’s capital Cheyenne,
authorities are trying to prop up the
sector. Governor Mark Gordon has cre-
ated a fund to fight lawsuits against
other states seen as standing in the way
of Wyoming’s attempts to export the
fuel. The state also funds research into
other uses for coal, from carbon-fibre
to graphene.
“We’re in for a bumpy ride,” Gordon
tells me. “This [presidential] adminis-
tration really is dedicated to trying to
figure out ways to limit the production
everywhere of fossil fuels.” But wind
power isn’t the answer, he says. “I think
most people look at wind as if it’s
benign.” But it can destroy pristine land-
scapes and the process to make the tur-
bines is itself energy intensive, he
argues. “None of this is fuzzy, warm but-
terflies stuff.”
Along with coal, Wyoming is blessed
with some of the best windpower poten-
tial in the US. Developers have already
pounced. West of Cheyenne, a thicket of
turbines has sprouted on the high
plains. The Biden administration argues
that a renewable electricity revolution is
not just necessary to avert global warm-
ing, but good for the economy. “When I
hear the words ‘climate change’ I hear
the word jobs,” the president is fond of
saying.
But in rural Wyoming, some people I
speak to are not worried about climate
change and are downright sceptical of
the jobs claims. A comment made by
John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, crops
up in conversation repeatedly during
my trip. Trying to assuage fossil fuel
workers’ fears earlier this year, Kerry
suggested that those losing jobs in coal
and oil “can be the people who go to
work to make the solar panels”. Terry
Weickum, mayor of Rawlins, the town
near the big new wind project in the
Sierra Madre range, sums up the views
Continued on page 16
16 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Spectrum
It’s never
W
hat looks like fraud, distracted and for a pension. As with a 10-visit pass, on an annual
feels like fraud but isn’t multitasking. She Thaler and Sunstein membership and with an auto-
fraud? What about a applied via a mobile well know, nudges renewing monthly subscription.
been so easy company website that
pops up when you
phone, her browser
preloaded with credit
can also be used to
“make it easy” to do
The monthly consumers had more
flexibility — and paid for the privilege

to spend, search for the government agency that

issues driving licences, and charges a
handsome fee for forwarding your
spend, spend details to the real website?
Personal finance campaigners have
been complaining about such sites for
years, but I think there is a broader
lesson to be drawn about the way we
spend our money these days. Between
outright fraud and honest commerce
there may be a sharp legal line — but
economically and psychologically the
distinction is a gradual blur.
I worry that we now live in that blur,
spending cash without clearly
perceiving what happened. The
pandemic, with its shift to contactless
or online spending, has served to
catalyse the process further.
Consider the scam-adjacent website:
the principal service it provides is to
solve a problem it has paid to create —
namely that the official website isn’t
as prominent in web searches as it
might be.
The near-valueless service, however,
is described unambiguously and the
website states plainly that it is not an
official site. So who would knowingly
use such a service? My wife recently
did. And it is self-evident that my wife
is a person of the most refined wisdom
and discernment. So how did this
Tim Harford calamity occur?
My wife handed over about £100 for
nothing of value because her
Undercover economist technology made it so easy. She didn’t
notice the disclaimer because she was
card details. On such a
tiny screen, hints of
trouble pass unseen.
We’re warned to be
careful of the small
print, but on a mobile
phone, all the print is
small print.
This is why I argue
such websites exist on a
continuum. There’s the
outright fraudster who tries to panic
you into sending thousands of pounds
to avoid ruin or prison. Then there’s a
blue-chip website such as Amazon,
which undoubtedly provides a real
service, but would be delighted to
make it easier for customers to spend
impulsively.
Amazon famously secured an absurd
patent on “one-click” online retail
ordering in 1999. (Steve Jobs, with
typical foresight, immediately licensed
it for Apple for a miserly million
dollars.) That patent has now expired,
but Amazon is still keen to make
spending effortless. Every time I use
my phone to check the sales rank of
my book on the Amazon website —
roughly every 27 minutes — Amazon
urges me to download its app. I don’t
doubt that the app would work better,
which is why I don’t want it.
In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler
and Cass Sunstein urge regulators and
companies to “make it easy” for people
to do the right thing — such as pay
taxes, sign up as an organ donor or save
other things, too —
such as send money
to a near-valueless
licence-application
service.
The logical
extreme is the
endlessly renewable
subscription.
Claire Merchlinsky
Alongside the
familiar bills for
utilities, internet, mobile phone and
mortgage, our household subscriptions
include services as varied as an online
yoga resource, access to all the Star
Wars and Marvel movies, a Patreon
campaign, wine, Amazon Prime,
We’re warned to Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop,
be careful of the apps for mindfulness, language
learning and productivity, two
small print, but cloud storage services, unfettered
on a mobile phone, access to BoardgameArena and a
music bot on Discord.
all the print is Some of that will of course be
small print incomprehensible, I’m sure; 15 years
ago it would have been not just
incomprehensible, but unimaginable.
Yet not only are we paying for all this,
we’re paying without a clear idea of
when or how much the payments
are, or even the method of payment
we are using.
In a classic article from 2006,
“Paying Not to Go to the Gym”,
economists Stefano DellaVigna and
Ulrike Malmendier compared
consumers paying for health club
membership in three different ways:
— but they did not use it. Instead, they
stayed subscribed for longer, paid
nearly twice as much per gym visit and
typically took more than two months
to cancel after their final gym
appearance. All these online
subscriptions are plugging into
something that health-club owners
have known all along.
So what should we do? On the FT
Money Clinic podcast, I recently
advised a listener who felt guilty that
she was spending impulsively online,
and often regretted and returned the
purchases. One suggestion I had for
her was that instead of buying
immediately, she should instead write
down each item on a spreadsheet, to
revisit at the end of the month. She
would have time to reflect, and she
would also see the cumulative price tag
for all her temptations.
My thinking was that by making the
spending harder, slower and more
conspicuous, she might gain some
degree of control. It was only
afterwards that I realised how directly
this advice was swimming against the
commercial tide. Harder, slower, more
conspicuous? Companies have long
wanted spending to be fast, easy and
barely worth a thought. Thanks to
the miracles of modern technology,
they are closer than ever to realising
their desires.
Tim Harford’s latest book is
‘How to Make the World Add Up’

On the front line of the US energy revolution

Continued from page 15
of many when he tells me, “I don’t know
anybody who can quit eating today and
start 10 years from now when that job’s
available”.
COLORADO
Pueblo pins hopes on
a future in renewables
The border between Wyoming and
Colorado is a political divide as well as a
geographical one. By the time I reach
Boulder, the Rockies’ quintessential lib-
eral redoubt, the helmetless Harley rid-
ers of Cheyenne have been replaced
with middle-aged men in Lycra cruising
along leafy lanes on $10,000 bicycles.
Colorado is my halfway point en route
to New Mexico and Texas. In its own
way, it too is grappling with a transition.
The state wants to slash emissions by 80
per cent by 2030, among other targets,
eliminating coal-fired power generation
to do so. It won’t be easy, but Colorado’s
economy has other strings to its bow,
including the array of research insti-
tutes, tech companies and corporations
that cluster in the greater Denver area.
Not to mention the skiing.
In North Dakota and Wyoming, I was
struck by the anxieties this transition
was causing. But in Denver, even a local
oil and gas executive I meet for iced cof-
fee on a warm Saturday morning seems
keen on Colorado’s approach. The state’s
oil companies are ready to embrace the
shift, he says, even getting involved in
community solar and other decarboni-
sation efforts.
A few hours later, I reach Pueblo, a
city in southern Colorado’s high desert,
where steel manufacturing and coal
generation were once economic main-
stays. Now, a quarter of the people live
below the poverty line.
Morgan Bazilian, head of the Colorado
School of Mines’ Payne Institute, had
told me about Pueblo’s emergence as an
energy transition paragon. Just west of
Interstate 25 outside the city, you get a
glimpse of why: huge white wind tower
parts are stacked outside one of the
world’s largest wind power manufactur-
ing sites. It’s now one of Pueblo’s major
employers. As local coal plants are being
decommissioned, the city is plotting a
future as a solar and renewable energy
hub. “In Pueblo, the energy transition is
creating jobs and boosting the local
economy,” Bazilian wrote in a recent
study of the city.
NEW MEXICO
At the sharp end
of the drilling ban
The lunar landscape of New Mexico is
unique, even in the US. The high-
altitude desert inspired Georgia
O’Keeffe’s paintings, but most non-
Americans probably came to know it as
the backdrop for Breaking Bad.
Raul Alvarado carries a Springfield
XD-M 40 handgun in his truck. He
drives 300 miles a day around oilfields
checking on pump jacks and other facil-
ities belonging to his employer, Texland
Petroleum. “There’s a bunch of crack-
heads around here,” says Alvarado,
explaining his firearm. “They steal our
copper.”
We are in Hobbs, in Lea county, stand-
ing on top of some of the most produc-
tive oil-bearing rocks on the planet. This
is the west end of the Permian Basin, an
area spanning almost 90,000 square
miles from Lubbock, Texas, in the north
to the Rio Grande in the south. I have
come to meet a local politician, Alexis
Martinez Johnson, a conservative
Republican running for mayor of Santa
Fe, capital of the Democrat state. As she
and I chat beside a nodding pump jack,
Alvarado checks the machinery.
This kind of activity — oilfield work in
general — is about to cease in New Mex-
ico thanks to the Biden administration’s
moratorium on federal drilling, accord-
ing to Johnson. She says that will have
severe consequences for her state. The
pause was a signature early policy of the
administration, showing the Trump-era
oil and gas free-for-all was over.
But the cost is significant, says Jeff
Wilhelm, who runs a company handling
Permian drillers’ waste water. “The
moment I saw the legislation around
federal property I remember having a
conversation with my partner saying,
‘What are we going to do?’,” he tells me
in Midland. “No one will ever appreciate
[the impact] of the regulation until you
have to lay off someone you worked
with for 10 or 15 years.”
This week, a Louisiana court
approved an injunction against the mor-
atorium, although analysts said the fed-
eral government had other methods to
continue the leasing pause. Even some
of Biden’s fellow Democrats now doubt
the efficacy of the strategy. In New Mex-
ico, federal lands account for more than
half the state’s oil output and fund about
20 per cent of the state’s spending.
New Mexico’s Democratic governor,
Michelle Lujan Grisham, has pleaded
for the policy to be reversed. Not sur-
prisingly, Johnson isn’t buying it. Alvar-
ado paints the picture in more sombre
tones. “You think that storm in the
can almost smell the crude. The desert
here has been ravaged by American oil.
Industrial detritus — flares, derricks,
silos, tanks, petrochemical plants, man-
camps, rigs — spills for miles into the
mesquite and shinnery oak-covered
scrubland.
While North Dakota’s Bakken is
entering a twilight, the Permian is show-
ing signs of recovery after 2020’s price
crash. Every oil and gas producer worth
its salt, from BP to ConocoPhillips, has a
piece of the Permian pie. The region
produced 4.5m barrels a day in May. If it
were a country, the Permian would be
the world’s fourth biggest oil producer.
And yet, anxiety about the future is
widespread here. The price debacle
showed that even the mighty Permian
could be brought low by the whims of
the Saudis. And, in November, a French
buyer of American natural gas cancelled
its long-term contract to ship supplies
from the Gulf Coast to Europe because
of concerns that fracking was too dam-
aging to the climate.
It was another sign of the times and a
warning for the future. If shale opera-
tors want a market for their oil and gas,
they will need to clean up their act. Wall
Street is demanding the same. So the
Permian’s deepest-pocketed producers
are trying to overturn widespread scep-
ticism about their attempts to become a
little greener.
Bruce Johnson, who runs EnXL,
another oilfield services provider in
Midland, says environmentalists have
taken against the oil sector and refuse to
listen. “We’re the demon and the left
doesn’t like us.”
Already, February’s devastating elec-
Clockwise from White House was bad,” he says, refer- tricity crisis in the state — when plung-
top left: Wes ring to the Capitol riots in January. “If ing temperatures and a rare snowstorm
Burnett in his office they shut down the oil here in New Mex- froze up some power providers, leading
in Odessa, Texas; ico . . . whoa, you can see a lot of angry to the deaths of more than 150 people —
wind turbines near New Mexicans.” has taken root in the popular imagina-
Midland, Texas; tion in west Texas as the fault of wind
Alexis Martinez TEXAS turbines that failed at the crucial
Johnson in Hobbs, moment. In fact, it was natural gas sup-
New Mexico; Not yer granddaddy’s plies that failed, leaving the state’s
a mural in highly deregulated electricity network
downtown Midland. Lone Star state woefully short.
As I enter the Permian Basin from the Yet despite these tensions, larger solar
Below: a pump jack north near Lubbock the first signs of and other green projects are now
beneath power lines energy production are wind turbines becoming as much a feature in west
near Midland. towering over cotton and wheat fields. Texas as gas flares. Last year, Oberon, a
Texas, for all its reputation, is a clean- 180MW-capacity array built just south-
Photographed in energy superpower. A fifth of the state’s west of Odessa, came online. Just up the
Texas and New electricity was supplied by renewables road from it is the most ambitious of
Mexico by Brandon last year, and Texas leads the nation in these clean energy projects, a $7bn plan
Thibodeaux wind power generation. But further from Houston-based Nacero to make
south, around Midland and Odessa, you gasoline from natural gas that would
otherwise be flared in the Permian.
Driving me out to see the patch of
hardscrabble desert just north of the
highway where the plant will be built,
Wes Burnett, director of economic
development for the Odessa chamber of
commerce, can’t hide his enthusiasm.
“We couldn’t be happier. The invest-
ment, the company, what it’s going to do
for everybody,” he says. “It’s the biggest
project we’ve ever had.”
TEXAS
A Houston landing
President Biden’s decarbonisation plan
promises to do something else: dot the
nation with charging points so Amer-
ica’s drivers can permanently switch to
electric vehicles. But I didn’t see many
on my trip. In fact, I saw more peeling
Trump-Pence signs than Teslas. Until I
reached the self-proclaimed oil and gas
capital of the world. Houston must be
home to more fossil-fuel millionaires
than any city on Earth.
But if the first few days of my road
trip, up in the Bakken, showed me how
distant the discourse in Washington
about a clean-energy transition felt
from the people who actually produced
the energy, the final leg showed the
opposite. Renewables might have a bad
name in Gillette, Wyoming, or Hobbs,
New Mexico. But in upwardly mobile
circles in Houston, clean energy is just
energy. And if there is money to be made
in solar or wind, investment will follow.
A few days later, in a former Fiesta
food hall in the city’s Midtown area,
Juliana Garaizar shows me around
Greentown Labs. This is North Amer-
ica’s largest clean energy incubator,
headquartered in Boston. This particu-
‘I don’t know anybody who
can quit eating today and
start 10 years from now
when that job’s available’
Terry Weickum,
mayor of Rawlins, Wyoming
lar facility rents out space — and labora-
tories — to cleantech start-ups, every-
thing from desalination to “virtual
solar” distributors. Garaizar just opened
its Houston branch.
A group of young entrepreneurs sips
hard seltzer and craft beer and talks
about ideas with older executives from
companies such as Baker Hughes, an
established oilfield services company
currently grappling with its future in the
energy transition.
“If we want to solve climate change,
we need to be in the energy capital of the
world,” says Garaizar. “There’s no way
we could solve that from the east coast
and west coast only.” Among Greentown
Labs’ partners for this launch are estab-
lished clean-energy providers as well as
companies whose names adorn fences
next to pump jacks and flares, including
BP, Shell and Chevron.
Houston is a city built on oil money,
and its white collar professionals are not
resisting the energy transition. Kay
McCall, a former private equity energy
investor who now heads the non-profit
Renewable Energy Alliance, told me
much of her work is now advising oil
and gas professionals about how to find
employment in clean energy. “People
want out,” she says. “They don’t like
having to explain to their kids what they
do. It’s a real thing. It’s a tsunami and it’s
largely driven by millennials and those
younger than them.”
One of those millennials is Dakota
Stormer, an ex-Shell employee who left
this year after creating carbon-tracking
app Footprint. He believes the climate
strikes movement led by Swedish teen
Greta Thunberg has reached — and con-
verted — corporate boardrooms atop
Houston’s skyscrapers. He doesn’t men-
tion Biden or new federal rules. “Even
conservative groups are starting to see it
as an opportunity instead of something
to fear,” says Stormer.
His optimism was something I hadn’t
much encountered on the road. It all felt
a long way from Fort Berthold, North
Dakota. And I still didn’t know if Amer-
ica was ready to embrace a global energy
transition, or fight it.
Derek Brower is the
FT’s US energy editor
19 June/20 June 2021
Observations
George
Bass
Being a campus security
guard in these times
offers fear and grace
in equal measure
Y
ou’re gonna die,” one of my
mates texted, followed by
the Edvard Munch scream
emoji. When I clicked on
the link, I saw what she
meant: according to the Office for
National Statistics, male security
guards were the professional group
most at risk of dying from Covid-19.
I forwarded the link to the other
blokes on my shift, then went back to
opening doors with my elbows and
checking hallways for the nearest wall-
mounted sanitiser. It was June 2020.
After three months of being on duty in
a pandemic, my palms were already so
dry that I could have sanded down
decking barehanded.
I’d never even heard the words “key
worker” until the first lockdown last
year, let alone understood that I could
be one. Nurses and supermarket
workers, sure. But security staff?
In lockdown, key workers have had
privileges and faced dangers. During
the first wave, my daughter could still
go to school because I was a key
worker, while most of her friends
suffered weeks of amateur tutoring by
distracted parents. On the other hand, I
had to do a job where physical contact
with strangers was a daily inevitability.
Like other employees who can’t clock
in from the sofa, the virus has never
been far from my mind. Early on, when
we thought transmission by objects
was a high risk, I worried because I
touched a thousand door handles each
shift and signed out so many keys to
cleaners and contractors that my
hands smelled metallic, like I’d
emptied a fruit machine.
I’ve worked as a security guard on a
university campus in the south of
England for 14 years and I’ve been a
licensed bouncer for seven. We work
24/7, getting involved in everything
from first aid to fights to blocked
drains to nocturnal essay advice to
pulling drunk students out of hedges.
Since Covid struck, the role has been
even more varied than normal.
Almost as soon as the pubs were
forced to close, we were on the lookout
for ninja booze dealers trying to sell
alcohol to the students still on campus.
At the same time we were having to
argue with lecturers claiming
“emergency access” to collect their
ergonomic keyboards.
A few night guards on our campus
were shot at with fireworks launched
by bored local teens on e-scooters. “It’s
worse than Basra,” one ex-squaddie
half-joked, especially with the added
risk of infection as you chased the kids
away from the halls of residence.
Universities fully reopened on May
17 this year, but by then it was almost
the end of term for most students, so it
has stayed fairly quiet. Now guards like
me are wondering how many
outbreaks we’ll get come September
when the new wave of freshers arrives
or whether life will go back to a
semblance of how it was pre-Covid.
In many ways, being a security guard
and bouncer is the role I was destined
for. As a teen, I realised one day during
a physics lesson that I didn’t have the
focus for my dream job (astronaut).
My back-up dream job — lighthouse
keeper — got phased out the year I left
school. Security guard/bouncer
seemed a pretty good match. I could
shed some light on a rough landscape,
see the ships in safely.
My mate’s text briefly made me
wonder if I’d made a mistake. But I
couldn’t wrap my head around the
science. Why was our Covid death rate
— 74 per 100,000 men in England and
Wales at the start of the pandemic —
higher than that for workers we
Tap, eat, repeat — is Japan finally ready to order in?
Tech world Will services such as Uber Eats up-end
the nation’s ready meals culture? Leo Lewis reports
I
n June last year, I had a revealing
chat with Ryo Miyake, the Japanese
fencer who won a medal at the 2012
London Olympics and was now ped-
alling an Uber Eats beat in Tokyo.
Mostly, we discussed the zeitgeisty
weirdness of his new job: had it not been
for the pandemic, Miyake would have
been busy preparing to carry a nation’s
sporting hopes before a home crowd.
Instead, with no training camp to live in,
he suddenly needed cash for rent and
University
challenge
assumed were most exposed to the risk
of infection, such as frontline NHS
staff? Female nurses were 15 per
100,000, male ones 50. Perhaps they
were the ones getting the best
protective equipment, fastest.
One important factor may be the
high number of security guards from
black, Asian and other minority ethnic
(BAME) groups: 26 per cent, versus 12
per cent of all workers, according to the
Trades Union Congress. Research has
shown that BAME groups are up to
twice as likely to die from Covid than
white people like myself.
“The ONS themselves made clear
that there were a range of factors that
might make a person particularly
vulnerable to the virus, such as age,
underlying health conditions and
ethnicity,” says Michelle Russell, acting
chief of the Security Industry
Authority, which regulates the UK’s
private security industry.
figured that the cycling and food haul-
age would keep him in shape until the
Games were back on.
The solution, he said, felt natural.
Times had been changed both by plague
and by tech. The booming business of
Uber Eats — and food delivery in general
— was being propelled by Covid-19 and
the closure of offices and restaurants
accelerating the rise of a tech-enabled
gig economy that Japan might otherwise
have taken much longer to embrace.
★ FTWeekend
Illustrations by Leonard Beard
Russell highlights how security
officers have been “on the front line in
the battle against the Covid crisis” in
hospitals, in vaccine and testing
centres, keeping food chains going, in
warehouses and premises. “I recall last
year walking through a very empty
Covent Garden on the way to a meeting
— the only people I met on the way
were security officers,” she says.
The figures for dead male security
guards from March to December were
even worse: 101 per 100,000 men,
against 31 deaths per 100,000 for the
general population.
One of the risks we’ve encountered
on campus is navigating the
boundaries around providing welfare.
Previously, on getting a lecturer’s late-
night email asking if we can unlock a
music room so that a stressed-out
student can relax with some drum
practice, we’d have been happy to help.
Now this means co-ordinating with the
housekeeping rapid-response team to
‘A few students see if they’re able to sanitise the block
before and after use.
hosted some very Right now, every morning after
raucous “study picking up my radio, master keys,
bodycam and face mask, I check the
bubbles”. Others database of quarantines in halls of
saw their mental residence. We need to know which
level of personal protective equipment
health suffer for to wear should we be called to an
following the argument or a lockout in university
accommodation. Even those basic
rules and going things have become complicated.
without company’ One day last year an aggravated
mum gatecrashed the campus,
desperate to collect belongings from
her daughter’s room. The girl had
returned home just before the first
lockdown and had been living out of a
rucksack for months. The visitor ban at
the time meant that the mum should
have been asked to leave the grounds.
But seeing how lockdown was
Continued on page 18
Miyake revealed that his Ubering had omy. (In September, Germany’s Deliv-
upturned his assumptions about how
Japanese people eat. The nicest houses
ery Hero launched in six Japanese cities
under its Asian brand Foodpanda.)
in the poshest areas, he noted, always When the FT spoke to DoorDash’s
seemed to place the minimum orders chief executive, Tony Xu, about the ven-
for the cheapest grub. The bountiful ture, he used the now familiar phrases
trays of high-end sushi and tempura of foreign companies entering Japan:
went to the shabbier apartment blocks. emphasising the country’s big economy,
Miyake’s observations seemed all the the delicate dance around why this gold
more relevant last week when Door- mine is still untapped and the humble
Dash, the US leader in home food deliv- refusal to dictate what might be the
ery, announced that it was launching in “right” answer for this market.
Japan and targeting a market where this Many others, in different industries,
business is still in its infancy. have used versions of this on their way
DoorDash will compete not only with into Japan, from retailers such as Wal-
the established likes of Uber Eats and mart and Tesco to banks and telecoms
domestic specialists such as Demae-can groups that have ultimately retreated.
and Rakuten, but also with others that There are, of course, success stories —
have turned up recently with plans to Apple and McDonald’s stand out — but
conquer the world’s third-biggest econ- recent years have posed a broad ques-
The west’s awe
of Russian
spycraft is
misplaced
Simon Kuper
Parting shot
E
ighty years ago this week,
Germany’s imminent
invasion of the Soviet Union
was an open secret around
the world. The UK Foreign
Office’s Weekly Political Intelligence
Summary had been talking about it for
two months. Soviet spies kept warning
the Kremlin too. Unfortunately, Joseph
Stalin didn’t believe them, recounts
Owen Matthews in An Impeccable Spy,
his gripping biography of Soviet agent
Richard Sorge.
The head of the USSR’s military
intelligence, Filipp Golikov, was
enabling Stalin: knowing that his five
predecessors had been shot, Golikov
tried to show the boss only pleasing
information. When a report
nonetheless reached Stalin on June 17
1941 saying that “all preparations by
Germany for an armed attack on the
Soviet Union have been completed”,
the dictator scrawled on it in blue wax
pencil: “You can send your ‘source’
from the headquarters of German
aviation to his fucking mother.” Five
days later, Germany invaded.
Russian spies and saboteurs remain
hyperactive today, whether it’s
attacking defectors abroad, offering the
Taliban bounties to kill US personnel,
interfering in western elections or even
hacking sport’s World Anti-Doping
Agency. Yet now, as then, the benefits
are dubious. Russian spies seem to
blunder even more than their western
counterparts. In fact, they provide a
case study of the inefficiency of
authoritarian regimes. Especially in
knowledge sectors, the authoritarians
aren’t half as good as democracies
sometimes imagine.
Dictatorships overspend on paranoia.
If you pour money into espionage and
recruit foreign agents motivated either
by communism or venality, you will
discover some secrets. Soviet spies in
1941 knew about Hitler’s plans and the
western allies’ atom bomb project.
Stalin used the atomic intelligence —
but only because he wanted to believe
it. As the British KGB double agent
George Blake (subject of my recent
biography, The Happy Traitor)
discovered after fleeing to Moscow
in 1966, “if the intelligence service
gave information that didn’t match
the boss’s view, then either that
information wasn’t passed on, or it
was changed so that it did match the
boss’s view. So he was never correctly
informed.” The whole Soviet system
worked that way, Blake said.
Then there is the tendency of spy
agencies to go off the rails, especially in
countries without democratic checks.
Russian spy services possess money,
information and licence to kill. They
are also competing with other Russian
spy services. The GRU, Russia’s
military intelligence agency, probably
suspected that poisoning the defector
Sergei Skripal in an English cathedral
city would enrage western countries
but may have cared more about
outdoing rivals.
Illustration by Harry Haysom
tion of whether foreign tech companies
can achieve regular success in Japan
where their bricks-and-mortar counter-
parts have struggled.
In DoorDash’s case, much will hinge
on whether it has entered Japan at a
time of anomaly, or of an incipient shift
in behaviour — will food delivery, for
example, emerge from the pandemic as
a long-term preference of the elderly, or
the offspring of the elderly ensuring
their parents eat well?
For now, the situation seems enticing:
after more than a year of drastically
diminished sales, food vendors are look-
ing to delivery apps to revive their dan-
gerously diminished fortunes.
Working-age customers, meanwhile,
are using this tech to overcome disrup-
tions to a fragmented dining ecosystem
centred on the provision of food (eat-in
restaurants, supermarkets and other
stores geared to ready meals) near their
place of work or near the other end of a
17
Spectrum
In any case, authoritarian spies are
rarely subtle analysts of democratic
countries. In 2014, the GRU seems
to have swallowed the ludicrous
proposition that Nato would accept
Ukraine as a member and use the
Ukrainian port of Sevastopol as a naval
base, says Matthews. These beliefs may
have encouraged Russia’s invasion of
Crimea that year.
Even when Russian spies seemed to
hit the bullseye, helping Donald Trump
get elected US president in 2016, there
was probably an element of fluke.
Interviewing people close to the
Kremlin in Moscow two years later,
I was told that the GRU’s involvement
in election-meddling was run by
underlings, who merely hoped to
weaken Hillary Clinton. Trump’s
victory stunned the GRU.
In Europe, nuisance-making by
Russian spies often subverts Russia’s
own best interests. A canny Russia
would lean on historically friendly EU
member states such as Greece or the
Czech Republic to push its agenda in
Brussels. Instead, Russian spies excel at
alienating allies. Most spectacularly, in
Even when Russian
spies seemed to hit the
bullseye, helping Trump
get elected US president,
there was probably an
element of fluke
2014, GRU agents blew up a Czech
arms dump, killing two people, in the
hope of stopping weapons reaching
Russia’s enemies.
Angry European and North
American countries have expelled 309
Russian diplomats and other officials
in just over four years, calculates Le
Monde newspaper. Matthews says the
spying activities “have horrifically
damaged Russia’s strategic position in
the world”. The regime in Moscow may
understand this. In a possible echo of
Stalin’s purges, Igor Korobov, the GRU’s
chief when Skripal was attacked, died
eight months later, aged 62.
Yet even now, says The New Yorker,
senior people in both the Trump and
Biden administrations suspect GRU
agents of “aiming microwave-radiation
devices at US officials to collect
intelligence from their computers and
cell phones”. Officials have fallen ill,
and Washington is angry. As the US
national security official John Demers
noted last year, Russia keeps “wantonly
causing unprecedented damage to
pursue small tactical advantages and to
satisfy fits of spite”.
The west’s inferiority complex vis-
à-vis authoritarian regimes probably
peaked in 2020. While Trump was
mishandling the pandemic, China kept
deaths down and Russia pretended to.
Today things look different:
democracies have outdone their rivals
in producing and administering
vaccines; there are plausible
suggestions that Covid-19
leaked from a lab in Wuhan;
and Russia’s own continued
mishandling of the virus has
become clear — its excess
death rate during this
pandemic is about 50 per cent
higher than the US’s. Our awe
of these poor, corrupt
dictatorships is misplaced.
More columns at ft.com/kuper
commute. The resumption of office
work may not break the general appeal
of food delivery, but it may herald a
practical cliff edge.
The biggest issue that tech has not yet
proven it can overcome here is one of
capacity. Restaurants supplying Uber,
DoorDash et al are doing so because
Japan’s professional kitchens (which are
generally small) have ended up having
excess capacity due to Covid-19. When
those restaurants start filling again,
many kitchens could quickly find them-
selves unable to meet orders.
As for Miyake, he wondered whether
a return to normal commuting would
highlight the oddity of the role he had
found himself doing and the speed with
which Japan was now embracing home
delivery: “I’m sure that a lot of the
things I deliver, it would be quicker for
people to get it themselves.”
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia business editor
18 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Food & drink

Hot fizz: the

rise of English
sparkling wine

Jancis Robinson
Wine

E
nglish Wine Week begins
on June 19. It has taken a
while for the country to
embrace native ferments,
but English sparkling
wine is now fully respectable.
The sommelier at The Dorchester,
one of London’s grandest hotels,
In practice, a blanc de blancs from
Champagne or the UK is most likely
to be made from Chardonnay, the
dominant pale-skinned grape in
both places. The biggest surprise of
our tasting was how well one
exception to this rule performed.
Three of the wines were made by
many years ahead of it. Equally
good, and more delicate than the
Ridgeview magnum, was Blanc de
Blancs 2013 from the pioneer of
English champagne taste-alikes,
Nyetimber, whose very competent
fizz I first had in the 1990s.
Since there have been so many

Keep
recently chose Rathfinny’s 2015
fizz, grown on the South Downs
near Brighton, to precede a special
dinner. Those attending a pre-
season “friends and family”
performance of The Marriage of
Figaro at Opera Holland Park were
veteran English winemaker Peter
Hall, who planted Seyval Blanc
vines in his Breaky Bottom
vineyard near Lewes in 1974. Back
then, the imperative was to have
grapes that would ripen in much
cooler English summers. Seyval
new entrants in the sparkling wine
business, vintage-dated wines are
the most common. (Two of the
blanc de blancs we tasted were as
young as 2017.) The extensive
Rathfinny estate was first planted
in 2012, so the earliest crop will

’em peeled
treated to Gusbourne’s 2016
sparkling wine before the overture.
And only last March, James Max,
the FT’s Rich People’s
Problems columnist,
suggested it was time to
ditch champagne for
English fizz.
A recent blind tasting
Food photography by Andy Sewell
of far too many English
sparkling wines — plus
have seven bean plants, tall and ready to three champagnes, to see
Recipe |A summer dish by Rowley Leigh to reward flower, and I can look forward to per-
haps one and a half more bean feasts.
if we could distinguish
them — proved just how
Notwithstanding my first sage’s opin- competent those who
the effort of growing — and peeling — broad beans ion, I shall persevere because broad make wine sparkle in
beans are a holy grail to both gardener England are. There was
and cook. Besides, most things taste bet- no aggressively frothy
Blanc is a hybrid grape specifically have been in 2015; owners Sarah
bred to ripen early and was the and Mark Driver have not had time
most-planted variety in England to build up the stocks of reserve
wines used by many
champagne blenders to
add depth to wines from
the most recent vintage
— a common problem for
British wine producers.
So it is notable that
the talented winemakers
at Nyetimber were keen
to launch non-vintage
blends once they had
built up reserves of older
wines for blending
purposes. The first
release of their non-

A
friend, one more experi-
enced in the vicissitudes of
growing vegetables in
southwest England than I,
last year uttered the ulti-
mate sacrilege. “I’m not sure it’s worth
bothering with broad beans,” she
declared. “Not really worth all the faff.”
Though shocked, I knew what she
meant. My own crop last year — from 12
plants sown in spring and three months’
watering, weeding and tying them to an
elaborate network of bamboo canes —
amounted to precisely one and a half
dinners’ worth of beans.
This year was going to be different.
Another friend told me to plant them in
autumn. Obediently, I sowed 16 Aqua-
dulce seeds and they all germinated per-
fectly. By December I had 16 healthy
plants about three inches high and I dili-
gently covered them with a film of fleece
to protect them from the cold.
By January, the fleece had stunted
their growth and many had fallen over.
They looked ill, some mortally so. “Take
it off,” said the same adviser. “They’ll be
fine.” The vicious frosts of February and
May (of all times) finished off the sick-
liest invalids, plus a few others. I now
ter when harvested an hour before, and mousse and the balance
nothing makes the heart swell with of the elements was
pride quite so much as bringing in a mostly superb. Yet the
decent crop of vegetables that you have wines were also
practically begged to grow. delightfully varied.
Some growers claim their broad beans The teams responsible
are so tender that they need no peeling. for Krug and Dom
Others even claim they can eat them in Pérignon tend to limit the
their pods. But broad beans should be as number of champagnes they taste
big as your thumbnail and in my kitchen in a single session to 10 and 15
peeling is the order of the day. Many respectively, but my English tasting
young people in the household have was organised by an obsessive.
learnt this to their cost. In fact, they I knew that Nick Baker of online
have quickly become more skilled in the retailer The Finest Bubble had an
peeling than I am in the growing. But say inexhaustible thirst for champagne,
not the struggle nought availeth. but it seems that this applies to any
good sparkling wine too.
He invited me and fellow Master
vintage Classic Cuvée,
based on 2011 blended
with ingredients from
older vintages, was
launched in 2016.
It will be interesting to
compare the quality of
Illustration by Leon Edler
the vintage-dated wines
until the craze for producing tasted in this first session with the
sparkling wines in the image of 17 non-vintage blends lined up for
champagne meant it was overtaken our second session.
by Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The lone blanc de blancs
Seyval table wine can taste champagne in our blind tasting, a
pretty neutral but Hall conjures 2012 from grower Yann Alexandre,
didn’t stand out from all the English
Average crop levels are wines and indeed seemed a bit tart
and less persistent than many of
much lower in English them. As Bampfield reminded us,

Broad bean and tuna salad

A fresh take on the trattoria classic of
beans and tuna. Good-quality tuna in
olive oil is essential, the oil being used
to dress the potatoes. Quartered hard-
boiled eggs can be added and the tuna
swapped with anchovies to give it a
niçoise touch. Serves 4-6
Ingredients
500g new potatoes
1 lemon
1kg broad beans
500g cherry tomatoes
6 spring onions
250g tinned tuna
1 red chilli
A few sprigs of parsley
Method
1) Wash and scrub the potatoes and
cover with cold water in a saucepan.
Add plenty of salt and bring to a
simmer. Cook until tender, for around
30 minutes, and leave to cool (drain
and refresh in cold water if you’re
pushed for time).
2) Bring a large pot of water to the boil.
Peel the lemon and cut the peel into
small dice. Place in a sieve and blanch
of Wine Richard Bampfield to help
him assess about 90 English
sparkling wines because he wants
in the water for 30 seconds, then
refresh in cold water. Pod the broad
to expand his online range. They
have been divided into three
beans and drop them in the boiling sessions and this first one, he
water for one minute. Drain and refresh assured us, was the most ambitious.
in plenty of cold water. Using thumb We tasted 23 vintage-dated blanc de
and forefinger, pinch off the skins and blancs, followed by 18 vintage-dated
collect the bright green beans in a bowl. rosés. At the end, as I beat a retreat
3) Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and he suggested opening more bottles.
season the cut flesh with salt, ground Because of the number of wines,
black pepper and a drop of red wine I’ll confine myself to the blanc de
vinegar. Slice the spring onions and blancs, from when my taste buds
chilli and pick the parsley leaves. were at their sharpest. I find a lot of
4) Slice the potatoes and arrange on people are confused by the term
the bottom of a serving dish, dressing blanc de blancs, which simply means
them with the oil from the can of tuna. a white wine made from pale-
Season with salt and pepper. Likewise skinned grapes, so it could, strictly
season the broad beans and pile on top, speaking, be applied to almost all
along with the cherry tomatoes. Break white wines, sparkling or not. But
up the tuna on top of the salad and in a sparkling context it is used to
sprinkle over the lemon zest, chilli and distinguish from blanc de noirs, or
spring onions. Douse in plenty of olive white wines made from dark-
oil and a good squeeze of lemon. skinned grapes, where the skins are
More recipes at ft.com/food-drink kept in contact with the juice for as
short a time as possible.
vineyards than in
Champagne — which
may well result in more capable
flavourful English wines one feature of British sparkling
effervescent magic from his vines,
perhaps helped by their great age.
Each of his cuvées is named in
memory of a friend or relative, and
the star of our tasting was that
named after his great-great-uncle
Koizumi Yakumo, better known as
19th-century travel writer Lafcadio
Hearn, who gave the west early
glimpses of Japan. I wrote:
“Definitely not trying to taste like
champagne but like a superior
English fizz. Lots of energy.”
The magnum of Ridgeview
Limited Release 2009 was also
excellent, even if it seemed ready to
drink now, whereas the Breaky
Bottom Cuvée Koizumi Yakumo
2010 tasted as though it still had
average crop levels are much lower
in English vineyards than in
Champagne, which may well result
in more flavourful English wines
of ageing longer. Certainly
wine is its longevity — perhaps
boosted by relatively high acidity.
The UK’s comparatively cool
climate has traditionally resulted
in such tart base wines that wine-
makers routinely encouraged the
conversion of harsh malic acid into
softer lactic acid. But in recent
balmy years, this so-called
malolactic conversion is often
avoided as unnecessary.
What is abundantly clear from
the collection of wines I tasted is
that the UK’s sparkling winemakers
have nothing whatsoever to be
ashamed of. It doesn’t have to be
champagne, folks!
For Jancis’s pick of English sparkling
white wines, find this column online
at ft.com/jancis-robinson

University challenge danger signs. My girlfriend is a key

Continued from page 17
impacting both her and her daughter’s
welfare, we broke out the wipes and
visors and gave them passage.
Outside of nine-to-five, it’s security
staff who deliver food parcels to
anyone on the student residents list
who is isolating (even if we couldn’t
get an online shopping slot ourselves).
We don our grocery delivery outfit —
visor, sanitiser, plastic apron,
gloves — then grab essentials from the
refectory freezers.
Gallows humour has always been one
of the most important ingredients of
my job. You can’t talk a stoned student
off a scaffold tower and have him insist
he’s doing an astronomy practical
without seeing the funny side.
But sometimes the humour won’t
shut off. When I was reading the death-
stat text to my girlfriend, our six-year-
old daughter overheard me joking
about my cremation arrangements
(specifically, at which point I wanted
“Movies” by Alien Ant Farm to play)
and asked me if I was really going to
die. “Well, everyone dies sometime,” I
replied. “Being alive forever would be
boring.” I was stalling for a more
comforting answer.
“But will you die of Covid?” she
asked.
I showed her how good I was at
washing my hands.
“So why will guards die?” she said.
I had to think before I answered that
one. Even with scientists and the ONS
on the case, I still couldn’t give a clear
answer. Industry publication This
Week in Facilities Management
speculated that our deaths could be in
part due to “encountering conflict
when trying to enforce Covid-19
guidelines”.
The main conflict we’ve encountered
so far is parties. Students taking health,
social care or teaching degrees were
allowed to remain on campus during
lockdowns. Most of them behaved
themselves — you can’t get out of bed
for a dawn placement if you’ve been up
until 4am crushing empty beer cans
against your forehead. But a few hosted
some very raucous “study bubbles”.
Others, more worryingly, saw their
mental health suffer for following the
rules and going without company.
It’s a good job I come from a
household that’s well trained to spot
worker in a school for kids with special
educational needs; some of them have
been dealt a grim hand. She often
comes home with deeper bruises than
me because social distancing goes out
the window when you’re trying to stop
an unsettled child from attacking his
classmates. Luckily, we’ve developed a
couple’s coping strategy. When you get
in from work, you’ve got 10 minutes to
get it off your chest. Whoever’s less
bruised makes the tea.
If a year on the frontline of a
pandemic has taught me anything, it’s
about the importance of setting
examples — specifically, who we let set
examples. I was as browned off as the
rest of the country when Dominic
Cummings, then chief adviser to prime
minister Boris Johnson, refused to
apologise in May 2020 for having
broken lockdown with a jaunt in his
car. Lockdown seemed to fall apart
after that. Within days, we were seeing
more people on the campus CCTV.
I’m supposed to set an example in
my job. In future, I’ll make sure I take
my cues less from people who’ve got
the power to dodge accountability and
more from my fellow suckers left to
clean up the mess. Covid has made my
responsibilities as a guard even clearer.
Maybe our increased duties over the
pandemic will make others see us
differently. This March, there were ugly
scenes when security at Chelmsford
Tesco were overwhelmed by a
maskless shopping spree. I hope regard
for key workers improves, especially as
lockdown restrictions are lifted, but
also that frontline staff go back to being
less visible, rather than punchbags for
people’s frustrations.
It’s summer now, but I can feel
September approaching: virtual open
days are taking place and our estates
team is carrying out repairs ahead of
student arrivals. If I’m on duty come
moving-in day, I’d love to chat with the
freshers and tell them that, despite us
looking like armour-plated traffic
wardens, we are here to look after
them. One lesson we can all take from a
year of stop-start lockdowns is that
humans are fast adaptors. If someone
had told me two years ago that I
couldn’t get my shopping without a
bikini on my face, I’d have assumed it
was a student union SHAG Week party
gone wrong. (That’s Sexual Health
‘Our six-year-old overheard
me joking about my
cremation arrangements
and asked me if I was
really going to die’
Awareness and Guidance.) But as I
escort another technician into our
medical training block, or carry a box
of visors for lecturers, I’m confident we
can get through Covid. It’s not like we
haven’t faced deadly viruses before.
“On average, there have been three
pandemics per century for the last five
hundred years,” says Laura Spinney,
author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of
1918 and How it Changed the World. “The
1918 flu killed many more people than
the first world war, but that wasn’t
really known at the time. Most of the
pandemics through history have been
utterly forgettable; Covid-19 is the first
to happen after the internet revolution.
“There won’t be one morning when
we wake up and think, ‘Hooray! It’s
over!’” says Spinney. “But life will
gradually shuffle back to something
approaching normality.”
I’m not sure what normality might
look like, but there’s a mantra I’ve been
using whenever I wake up low on
energy: glass half full. Despite the
apparent death risk and the students
who set off fire alarms and having to
wear a mask for 13 hours a day, I really
enjoy my job.
I get to help people. I get a selection
of torches to play with. And I’m not
back on a building site trying to share a
portaloo with three hungover Scousers.
In those days, I’d curse the fact my
brain couldn’t handle Nasa’s entry
requirements and I couldn’t escape into
deep space. Now when I’m surrounded
by a hundred hangovers after shots-
for-a-pound night, space is just a
memory. Covid has taught me what
I’ve long suspected: we’re all here to
look out for each other and the human
touch goes a long way. Just don’t forget
to pick up your mask first and keep the
windows open.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ 19

The capitalist case

for taxing business
Janan Ganesh
Citizen of nowhere

American photographer Jessica
SNAPSHOT Wynne’s Do Not Erase captures the
visual workings of mathematicians in
producing formulas and illustrating
‘Do Not Erase’ their thoughts. “I am interested in
learning about the moment of
by Jessica Wynne discovery, the epiphany of solving
a problem,” she says. “Some
mathematicians spend a lifetime
on one problem and are never able
to solve it, while others break
through, find the truth, and reveal
an elegant mathematical proof.” For
all their sophistication, there is an
almost primitive look to these
chalkboards, with Wynne herself
likening them to ancient
hieroglyphics or cave paintings —
priceless human knowledge in its
rawest form.
Cheyenne Darko
‘Do Not Erase’ is published by Princeton
University Press
A
true winner would have
shorted the stock
beforehand. This week,
with the moral authority
that comes from abs you
can cut sushi on, Cristiano Ronaldo
cleared two bottles of full-fat Coke
from a news conference desk and
hailed agua instead.
Censure from the most followed
human on Instagram would sting any
company. So would the subsequent
$4bn hit in market value. But few are
quite as self-doubting as Coca-Cola. Its
“2020 Business & Environmental,
Social and Governance Report” (yes,
two “ands”) is an 82-page apology for
its core product, if not commerce itself.
At this point, it is natural to contrast
the piety of the modern corporation
with its rococo tax schemes. (Sure
enough, Coke has had fiscal issues with
the feds.) But I no longer see the first as
incompatible with the second. It is
better understood as an outgrowth of
it. The rise of “CSR” and “ESG” — how
cant loves an acronym — mirrors the
gradual decline of the effective
corporate tax rate.
The rationale of the C-suite is
transparent: what we deny the
common purse, we redress, or at least
muddy, in other ways. It is not just guilt
revert to a time when the production of
things that people want, and the
sharing of the proceeds with
government, was a social good. In that
sense, a tougher tax regime is a
reinforcement of capitalism. Few
things commend the recent G7 accord
on the subject more. Few things make
the opposition of supposed
conservatives weirder.
1984, the least prescient thing
Orwell ever wrote, misread the
trajectory of the left. The coming force
was not the state, which even in Russia
peaked around the time of publication.
It was the Gramscian march through the
institutions. And the result would not be
totalitarian, just cloying and priggish.
It follows that higher,
better-enforced taxes
spell the end of the
simpering corporation
A harmless manifestation of this is
the workplace-as-group-therapy. Call
me British, but my expectations of an
employer are that they send the
monthly wire transfer and meet the
statutory minimum on paid leave and
humanitarian crisis response and
“alternatives to incarceration”. It
resembles the programme of a political
party (one, to be clear, I would vote for)
and at times the bill of rights of a nation
state. Even if you can live with the tax-
starvation of government, who believes
this Napoleonic range of activities is
good qua business? Who thinks it is, in
the old sense, sustainable?
Christopher Hitchens had a response
when the well-meaning but vapid
stuck up for believers who don’t
proselytise or act on the meanest bits
of scripture. “All you’re saying is that
these people are so nice they’re hardly
religious at all.”
This is CSR all over. The gist of it is
that a business is good precisely to the
extent that it does not act like a
business. Job creation, innovation,
consumer choice: these become givens.
In its own please-like-us report, Nike
assures the grown adults who buy its
silly shoes that at least 1.5 per cent of
gross revenue goes on “community
impact”. The implication is that
employing people does not impact a
community.
As an intellectual concession, this is
vast, and corporates have gone along
with it as cover for stiffing the taxman.
The injury to the state is aired well

The beauty of that makes a multinational speak the

argot of the cultural left. It is not just
naïveté that induces a bank to hire
the unquiet mind phalanxes of grifting sustainability
consultants. It is calculation. A sly fox
is throwing hounds off the scent.
If I am right, then it follows that
higher, better-enforced taxes spell the
the like. If they help me through a
tough moment, they can expect
reciprocal loyalty. What I don’t want is
to enter a pastoral communion with
them or together remake the world.
Far creepier is the truly messianic
enterprise. Coca-Cola wants its US
workforce to “align with” ethnic census
enough. It is the disservice to
capitalism itself that builds insidiously
over time. The immediate cash saving
is not worth the long-term fouling of
the atmosphere in which business
must operate. The obvious way out
of this trap seems expensive. It is, in
fact, a bargain. Render unto Caesar

Jo Ellison
end of the simpering corporation. In data, like a Singaporean housing block. what is Caesar’s.
essence, business will buy the right to Microsoft’s CSR mission seeks
live the uncommitted life again. We can immigration reform, better janan.ganesh@ft.com

Trending

I
have spent the past weeks in the
company of people who are losing
— or have lost — their minds. In
Sinéad O’Connor’s autobiography
Rememberings, the 54-year-old
singer looks back on a life marked by
child abuse, abandonment and long
spells in the sanatorium. Her most
recent spell of madness — according to
her own diagnosis, a menopausal-
induced psychosis following a
hysterectomy for which she was ill-
prepared — found her in and out of
institutions for a period of six years.
Large tracts of her life are for her
forever hazy; she wrote the book in two
sessions, either side of her time in the
“nuthouse”, as she calls it.
Yet the woman once sent into
cultural exile for ripping up a picture of
Pope John Paul II while performing on
Saturday Night Live is still brilliantly
lucid. She skewers the industry that
cast her as the “crazy lady” with
devastating insights, and in her
madness reveals a woman who seems
impervious to guile.
Likewise, in his latest Netflix special,
Bo Burnham: Inside, which he wrote,
performed, directed and edited, the
comedian explores the anxiety he
developed following his lightning flash
to fame, and his suicidal feelings, which
he mostly puts in song. A comic savant
who found international recognition as
a teenager streaming YouTube
sketches from his bedroom, Burnham
recalls a millennial Tom Lehrer. Inside
is an interior odyssey in which he
harmonises mental illness, the culture
wars and the experience of the
pandemic with pitch-black humour
and strangely universal themes: my
favourite is a sketch in which he
agonises over his decision, in junior
school, to dress as Aladdin for a
birthday party and whether he will be
exposed for cultural appropriation by
the social media mob.
Lastly, in The Father, Florian Zeller’s
directorial debut, the French writer
directs Anthony Hopkins towards an
Oscar in an adaptation of his own play
about Alzheimer’s, filling the screen
with a Polanski-like foreboding to
create an atmosphere in which the
audience, like the protagonist, feels
anomic and confused.
Though some of these projects were
conceived and even executed before
Covid, they make up a body of
creations that will surely be judged
within the genre of “pandemic art”.
Watching The Father, the stage play of
which was first produced in 2012, I
found Zeller’s depiction of entrapment
frighteningly familiar — he captures
perfectly the horror of mindless
repetition and inhabiting a quickly
shrinking world. Sinéad O’Connor
writes with striking clarity about the
agoraphobia she now feels having spent
a long period in solitude, and how
despite her best efforts to try to
socialise she would rather be at home.
These studies of psychosis
resonate more powerfully
than the hoopla of our
return to normal life
Bo Burnham ends his special by
dramatising his exit from the
claustrophobic space in which he has
laboured for a year on his material, only
to be found cringing before a spotlight
when he tries to leave the door.
Ironic, maybe, that these studies of
psychosis, misery and brain
malfunction should have resonated far
more powerfully than the clanging
hoopla that is now accompanying our
return to normal life. I shuddered as I
read New York magazine’s exhortation
on “The Return of FOMO”, a recent
cover story dedicated to the return of
the pre-pandemic social anxiety that
you might be “missing out”.
“FOMO might have gone into
hibernation for a while,” writes
Matthew Schneier, “but we may now
be on the way to a new golden age as
we try to make up for the year we lost
by doing more than ever . . . The city
runs on FOMO, a connoisseurship of
opportunities and possibilities; the
catechism of “Did you get invited, are
you on the list, can you get a table?”;
the performance of plans.” Eurgh.
While Sinéad O’Connor left me feeling
quite euphoric, the anticipated buzz of
being on the right list made me
suddenly depressed.
In the US, or maybe it’s a particularly
New York mindset, the pandemic is
now regarded almost as old news.
“Now that Covid is behind us . . .” have
read numerous emails from my US
colleagues in recent weeks. America, it
is assumed, has vaxxed the virus out of
mind. For the more robust of
constitution, we can now anticipate a
#hotgirlsummer like no other. If the
new underground advertising
hoardings are to be believed, we will
now commence a roaring summer in
scenes reminiscent of Lin-Manuel
Miranda’s new film musical In
the Heights.
For now, I’m far more comfortable in
the company of outcasts. The
“nutjobs”, as O’Connor gives herself
permission to describe herself, have
something far more interesting to say.
This long pause on production has
allowed for powerful introspection. I
hope that this will be the moment in
which some great new works are made.
After all, Alfred Hitchcock’s genius
as “a visual poet of anxiety and
accident” can, it is suggested in Edward
White’s new biography The Twelve Lives
of Alfred Hitchcock, be attributed to the
fears he developed as an adolescent in
the first world war. Paranoia and a
terror of almost everything provided
him with the fuel to fire some 50 films.
And as the pandemic meme reminds
us, Shakespeare produced King Lear in
a plague year, possibly while under
quarantine.
Is Bo Burnham destined to be our
Covid Bard? Maybe not, but Inside is a
brilliant study of the social-media-
scrambled mind. Likewise, with her
own portrait of “madness”, O’Connor
becomes this year’s most unlikely seer.
jo.ellison@ft.com

The FT Weekend Festival is back — live and in person

After two effervescent digital
festivals, we are looking forward
to welcoming you back to
Kenwood House Gardens in
London on September 4.
We are thrilled to announce
that novelist Ian McEwan will be
speaking to historian and FT
contributor Simon Schama about
his life in writing, while Professor
Sarah Gilbert, leader of the
Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine
project, will discuss lessons
learnt from the pandemic with
FT science editor Clive Cookson.
There will be a chance to listen
to composer Max Richter, as
well as wine tastings, food
demonstrations and much more.
For passes, programme and
details: ftweekendfestival.com

Chess solution 2423 1 Qxd5! exd5 2 Rdh1 followed by 3 Rh8+! Bxh8 4 Rxh8 mate.
20 ★ 19 June/20 June 2021
Saturday 19 June / Sunday 20 June 2021

Cape escape City dwellers flock to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard — US PROPERTY PAGES 3 & 4
Follow us on Instagram @ft_houseandhome

The fight to halt climate change

can start in our own back yards.
Jane Owen on letting go of the emerald
green lawn and weed-free borders to
make her garden ‘climate resilient’

F
rom Versailles formality to
Derek Jarman’s romantic,
rebellious yard in southern
England, gardens involve per-
suading and controlling
nature. And as our understanding about
climate change grows and we come to

Call of
accept that insect life may be more
important than weed-free borders, and
carbon sequestration a higher priority
for soil than a rose garden, our changing
ways of controlling and persuading our
gardens are affecting their appear-
ance. I’m not talking about the profes-

the wild
sional gardens run by hot-and-cold run-
ning gardeners, so much — this all starts
in our own backyards.
There have been moments on my
journey to coax various gardens into
bio-rich climate-change resilience that I
have been tempted to throw in the
trowel — or at least reach for chemicals. I
have persevered, mostly without chem-
icals, and the result is a style that can
loosely be described as “shaggy”.
Three years into renovating our cur-
rent Oxford garden and some visitors
assume, wrongly, that I have a devil-
may-care approach. Our alleged lawn,
for instance, is an abomination by con-
ventional standards.
The philosopher and gardener Fran-
cis Bacon observed in 1625, “Nothing is
more pleasant to the eye than green
grass kept finely shorn.” Far from being
“finely shorn” ours is mown high, at
about 4-5cm max. As for grass, I reckon
it accounts for about 25 per cent, the rest
being made up of Bugleweed, dande- into the atmosphere during their pro- composts have improved since the
lion, buttercups (all sorts), daisies, duction, and their application reduces 1990s, when I started using them. And
plantain, scarlet pimpernel, Black biodiversity. “Perfect” lawns need irri- homemade garden compost is thera-
Medick, clovers, chickweed, silverweed, gation. The only time I’ve irrigated is peutic for garden and gardener alike.
field woodrush, feral asters, speedwell, when I’ve re-seeded bare patches. When I need to relax, I close my eyes
cowslips, oxlips, ground ivy, cranesbill, I mow and therefore incur the envi- and think about my compost systems:
celandine, moss, bluebells and snow- ronmental cost of the mower manufac- the wormery slowly and silently trans-
drops. The orchard stays unmown, ture and fuel. And as the grass cuttings forming our fish skins and cooked vege-
apart from paths, until late July. rot, they release carbon into the atmos- table remains into dense nutrient-rich
Our polyfloral lawn gets no irrigation, phere. On the other hand, compost compost. The wormery runoff or “tea”
no scarification, no chemical fertiliser, heaps need nitrogen-rich green mate- is also an excellent plant feed.
herbicide or pesticide and it supports Then there are compost heaps for
far more living things than a conven- ‘Replacing a lawn, which is kitchen and garden waste that do not
tional grass monoculture. Even if our attract vermin. This year’s, a layered
(Clockwise grassland’s carbon sequestration cre- a biological desert, with confection of dry leaves, lawn cuttings,
from main) dentials don’t match Montana’s, which more varied vegetation egg boxes, non-invasive weeds and veg-
Jane Owen in cap-and-trade carbon offsets, they offer etable peelings is heating up nicely. It’s
her garden, the benefits of any thoughtfully culti- provides a refuge for twice reached a couple of metres high,
and some of the vated lawn, as Stephen Porder, Ful- myriad species’ only to subside to a metre as composting
plants: a bee bright scholar and assistant provost for gets to work, reducing the bulk down to
on an echium; sustainability at Brown University, a dark, rich mulch.
a Zephyrine Providence, explains: “The world is fac- rial, such as grass cuttings, in order to A couple of months ago I added mulch
Druine rose ing a loss of species unprecedented in rot down. And garden compost adds from our 2019 heap to the base of a yew
planted over tens of millions of years, and one of the organic matter to the soil which feeds and beech hedges, and to the roses, hel-
Jane’s father’s main drivers of that loss is disappearing subterranean fungi and microorgan- lebores and delavayi tree peonies which
ashes; a Mallard habitat. Replacing a lawn, which is a bio- isms and increases fertility and water- are rewarding us with bursts of small,
drake, logical desert, with more varied vegeta- retaining properties of the soil. scented, crimson flowers. They’d have
a regular visitor; tion provides a refuge for myriad spe- Which brings me on to compost mak- thrived on chemical fertilisers but the
the vegetable cies in our increasingly paved over, ing. It is in line with the UK govern- long-term side effects would have
garden; wisteria. homogenised, and biologically depau- ment’s announcement that it will ban degraded the soil and reduced its car-
Photography by perate hometowns.” peat from garden compost by 2024. By bon-capturing properties.
Howard Sooley The chemical controls needed to get leaving peat in situ it can continue to
for the FT rid of moss and “weeds” release carbon store carbon. Peat-free commercial Continued on page 2
2 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

House Home
Make a Now that the weather has improved,
I am much looking forward to lots of
colourful brands
stand out: Hot
interesting bits
and bobs (useful,
Its website declares that the owners
like to think that used objects have a

midsummer
picnics, drinks, lunches and dinners Pottery and yes, but fun and soul and stories to tell, and they collect
in our garden. Any tips on where to Vaisselle. Hot unique, too): pale and play with styles, colours and eras.
find the best tableware? Pottery is a blue storm All very up my street.

day’s dream After a dismal May, I could not be

London-based
ceramics company
lanterns from
Germany, We need to
There is not much nicer than a tray
laden with drinks placed at the foot of

of a picnic
more excited about the prospect of
eating outside. “Outdoor dining”
sounds rather grand. Yes, I love the
idea of a midsummer banquet under
the stars, trestle tables heaving with
summer produce.
But I find that it’s often the smallest
moments that give the greatest
pleasure: hurrying into the garden in
pyjamas as soon as I’m out of bed, cup
of tea in one hand, desperate to check
on the roses; a pre-supper gin on folding
chairs among the nasturtiums and
sweet peas, the sound of clinking ice
cubes and birdsong floating on the air.
Of course, for those of us based in
the UK, summer weather can be
precarious, so it’s always worth making
the most of the sun when it deigns to
grace us with its rays. I’m all for
grabbing anything you already have in
the cupboards, but it is useful, I think,
to have a good kit of tableware and
glassware that is more durable than
your standard staples.
Plus, sidestepping practicality, we
need to celebrate this summer, even
if we end up only able to make merry
Luke Edward Hall in our back gardens. I advise getting
your best plates out and setting your
summer table with style.
Questions of taste I am a fan of Liberty’s current range
of tableware, and in particular two
that specialises
in traditional
splatterware,
handmade by
artisans in Puglia.
I’ve always loved
splatterware, but
the usual range of
colours leaves me feeling bored.
Hot Pottery, on the other hand, is
splattering all sorts of fun colours
on plates, platters and bowls: orange,
lilac, green.
Vaisselle, also London-based,
produces its ceramics in Spain. I love
its Eat Me plate, which comes painted
with a 16th-century Spanish-inspired
pomegranate design in a shockingly
brilliant shade of lemon yellow.
For picnics, I want enamel tableware.
Look to Oxford’s Objects of Use,
a modern-day hardware store that
sells everyday household tools,
conscientiously sourced from around
the globe. It has a particularly excellent
range of enamelware, all made in
Ukraine. I love the mugs, jugs and
bowls, which come in a variety of good
colours, are dishwasher safe and
should, I imagine, survive even the
rowdiest of summer picnics.
If you’re planning lots of outdoor fun,
Objects of Use offers plenty of other
campfire tripods
and Dutch ovens
to go with them,
sets of skittles
made in Botton
village in the
North York Moors
National Park.
These are made by the community’s
own managed woodland or timber
recycling programme. The wood shop
is one of the longest established
workshops at Botton, a Camphill
centre founded in 1955 to offer
supported living opportunities to
adults with learning disabilities and
other special needs.
What else? Lisa Corti, the Milan-
based home textile emporium, designs
beautiful and highly colourful pieces
that are block-printed in India. The
brand is particularly known for its
tablecloths. I like its Tiger Flower
design very much: a riot of blue
and yellow flowers and lilac
leaves on a dull orange
background. Just the ticket for
a summer lunch table.
As for glassware, think
vintage. I like old lemonade sets,
such as those available from
Objects Inanimate in Manhattan.
I’m a big fan of this new online shop.
a tree, or a basket stuffed with
celebrate this strawberries in long grass, à la Charles
summer, even and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited.
I’ve been eyeing up Belgian interior
if we end up only designer Jean-Philippe Demeyer’s new
able to make merry birch veneer tray for the Swedish brand
Svenskt Tenn. It’s a riff on his modern
in our back gardens classic design of various illustrated eyes
on shimmering gold fabric.
Talking of picnic baskets, any old
one will do. I’ve bought several
charmingly bedraggled rattan versions
from eBay in the past, one with wine
compartments and a couple large
enough to house a five-course dinner.
I do, however, have my eye on an
(Above left) upgrade: a willow number from Marni,
Splatterware by the Italian fashion brand, that has
Hot Pottery; recently launched Marni Market, a
(below) picnic collection of limited-edition home
basket from accessories at Matches Fashion on
Marni Market Carlos Place in Mayfair. The basket has
black, red and blue sections and is
probably the chicest basket I’ve ever
come across. All I want to do this
summer is stuff this lovely basket with
baguettes and fizz and saunter on down
to the closest river. Cin-cin!
If you have a question for Luke about
design and stylish living, email him
at lukeedward.hall@ft.com. Follow him
on Instagram @lukeedwardhall

Inside Call of Climate-resilient trees

the wild
Continued from page 1
On one level this is parochial stuff:
activity on our one-and-a-quarter acres
in Oxford isn’t going to make much dif-
ference either way. But the knock-on
Homes in the tropics effects of what we do and don’t do in our
Five striking properties on increasingly urbanised global society
the market in hot climes are incalculable.
Page 6 Bees and other pollinators sup-
port about 35 per cent of
agricultural land across
the world, according to a
2018 UN report. Our
half dozen or so bee
species buzzing
around the comfrey,
fruit blossom, lilac,
laburnum, tulip tree,
mulberry, bluebells and
Booming Brixton many of the flowers that
Gentrification in the heart of UK’s bloom in the “lawn” all help.
African-Caribbean community Then there is the soil. Sceptics
Pages 8 & 9 who need convincing about the draw-
backs of chemical soil conditioning and
feeding might look to China. According
to a report in The Economist in June
2017, the use of pesticide and fertiliser in
China almost doubled from 1991, and
that’s on top of pollution from smelting
and other industrial processes. The
Economist report continues, “a Chinese
government soil survey conducted
between 2006 and 2011, revealed that
one-fifth of Chinese farmland contains
higher than permitted levels of pollut-
ants some of which threaten food
Cloth of heaven safety.” This is bad news, it concludes,
A round-up of the best for a country that has 18 per cent of the
furnishings made with linen world’s population, but only 7 per cent
Page 10 of its arable land.
Healthy soil is home to roughly one
quarter of all species on earth. It is
packed with microorganisms as well as
invertebrates and insects. The connec-
tions between the living parts of the soil
are subtle and profound.
In his book Entangled Life, mycologist
Merlin Sheldrake explores the roles that
fungi and mycorrhizae play in plant
Down to a Tee nutrition, soil biology, soil chemistry
A new edition of a design and communication between trees.
classic stool — with a twist These themes appear in fellow scientist
Page 12 Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother
Tree published in May this year. She is
the heroine of Richard Powers’ novel
about trees, Overstory. The first two
books celebrate the mystery and impor-
tance of soil. A fourth, Dirt to Soil: One
Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agri-
culture, does the same from a farmer’s
perspective as he wrestles his family’s
chemically driven 5,000 acres in North
Dakota into no-till, organic nirvana. His
Mystical mansions no-till philosophy has won him a dedi-
The calendar houses built around cated following in the US and elsewhere.
the days and weeks of the year This focus on soil has inspired com-
Page 14 & 15 munities around the world including
(From top) Jane Soil for Life, a not-for-profit in Cape
with her wormery; Town which trains and supports people
Pamela the cat from low-income communities to create
patrolling the productive gardens on the sandy soil
meadow; rustic around the city.
coral from coppiced Healthy soil better withstands
hazel in the garden drought and flooding, a contradiction
Howard Sooley
explained by Mark A Bradford, profes-
sor of soils and ecosystem ecology at the
Yale School of the Environment:
“Sugars and amino acids that roots
and mycorrhizae exude . . . feed the
free-living organisms within the soil,
whose collective activities form the
macroaggregates that give soil the struc-
ture of fine and larger pores that retain
water in droughts, while providing
Gardens talk. If they effective drainage under wetter condi-
come out in a rash of tions which helps to ensure oxygen sup-
ply by leaving large pores with air.”
unexpected plants When we spoke earlier this week,
it’s because they Bradford celebrated the importance of
gardens, especially urban ones, in
enjoy hosting them adapting to climate change. In particu-
lar he talked about growing plants
appropriate to the area and of keeping
“armour”, or a protective layer of living
or dead material, on the soil.
In other words, it is sometimes virtu-
ous not to bother to clear leaf litter and
other dead plant material. Likewise,
fallen branches can be left for insect and
mammal shelters. I save my energy for
digging out the docks, bindweed,
ground elder and other less desirable
plants to which I might otherwise have
applied herbicide.
Garden resilience needs vigilance on
the part of the gardener. Gardens talk. If
they come out in a rash of unexpected
plants that’s because they enjoy hosting
those plants. So, unless the incomers are
unpleasant or dangerous, welcome
them in. Right now Alliaria petiolata or
garlic mustard is taking over our garden
and a lot of the Thames Valley. Many
regard it as a weed but I like its breezy
pale green foliage and white flowers. By
filling in gaps left by early-flowering
spring bulbs, the garlic mustard pro-
tects the soil. And it is edible.
Pest intruders, which used to be seen
off by sprays, dustings and pellets, now
require more grunt work.
Slugs, for instance, are a constant bat-
tle, particularly during this year’s rains.
Hollowed out grapefruit halves attract
slugs away from slug-attracting feasts
such as salad and tender curcubits.
Some of the time. The water-on nema-
tode predator is expensive and fairly
effective only when used at the correct
soil temperature. According to a recent
paper in Nature, caffeine kills slugs so
I’m chucking my husband’s coffee
grounds around the salad garden. And
I’m hoping that the newts, frogs, toads,
Mark Gush, leader of the Royal
Horticultural Society’s
Environmental Horticulture team,
has the following suggestions for
climate-resilient tree species in the
UK and similar climates:
c Crataegus laevigata
c Acer rubrum ‘Brandywine’
c Acer negundo ‘Kelly’s Gold’
c Amelanchier laevis ‘snowflakes’
c Aronia x prunifolia ‘Brilliant’
c Liquidambar styraciflua ‘palo alto’
(pictured)
c Populus x jackii ‘Aurora’
c Rhododendron periclymenoides
c Rhododendron viscosum
c Salix alba ‘Britzensis’
c Sorbus ulleungensis
‘Olympic Flame’
c Ligustrum ovalifolium
c Salix myrtilloides
c Chamaecyparis thyoides
More useful guidance can be found
here: rhs.org.uk/advice/gardening-
for-the-environment
hedgehogs, centipedes and ducks that
live in and around our pond are eating
the slugs and snails. (Hands up: I occa-
sionally use a few aluminium sulphate
slug pellets.)
Aphids are another constant enemy
and the battalions of ladybirds who
spent the winter in our house seem
reluctant to move outside. But birds eat
them and I squash them.
As our garden moves towards climate
change resilience, it may lack perfect
plants, “clean” beds and an emerald
green lawn but the butterflies and
insects hovering over our long grass,
cow parsley, cranesbill, buttercups and
blossom are quite as beautiful as colour-
co-ordinated herbaceous borders. And
they are optimistic harbingers for
the future.
Jane Owen is an FT Weekend
contributing editor. Follow her on
Instagram: @janejaneowen.co.uk

The home in 50 objects #47: print of the Great Exhibition of 1851

Coming up roses
Robin Lane Fox on a spectacular
year for the flower
Page 16
House & Home Unlocked
FT subscribers can sign up for our weekly
email newsletter containing guides to the
global property market, distinctive
architecture, interior design and gardens.
Go to ft.com/newsletters
This is one of a number of prints of
scenes 150 years ago from the Great
Exhibition — formally, the Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
All Nations 1851 — published by
London and Brighton company of the
day, Dickinson Brothers.
Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s
husband, had commissioned
watercolours of the exhibition from
artists Joseph Nash and Louis Haghe
for Dickinsons to reproduce, using the
new chromolithography colour
printing process.
From May 1 to October 15 1851, the
stage for the event was the Crystal
Palace, an engineering marvel by
architect Joseph Paxton set
in London’s Hyde Park.
In designing it, Paxton used skills
he’d developed in supplying
greenhouses to English nobility. Some
reports called it the largest
greenhouse in the world.
The print is of the grand British
Nave, which exhibited machines and
other examples of the nation’s
industrial and cultural prowess.
Other prints showed other displays.
The large India exhibit reflected on
the assumed glories of empire. The
US stand hinted at an alternative view.
Its machinery display indicated that designers. Intricate textiles from the minister Lord John Russell, a free
America’s own industrial revolution empire and elegant French furniture trader and social reformer at a time of
was making good progress. Could the were attractions for an expanding huge divisions of wealth.
former colony be catching up? middle class keen to decorate their But, steering attention from
Exhibition ticket sales reached homes in good taste. domestic issues, British governments
more than 6m. An initial entry price Albert had been a main mover in soon returned to exercising power
of five shillings (25p) was cut to getting the event staged. A strong through bombastic actions abroad.
one shilling to advocate of free Grandeur seen in the Dickinson
attract people of trade, he appeared prints gave way to the military folly of
modest means. This to view it as the best the Crimean War, 1853-56.
was still about a means of Britain Paxton’s Crystal Palace expensively
tenth of the average globally exploiting moved to Sydenham Hill, south
weekly wage. its industrial success. London, for sport and entertainment
The exhibition He had the use. It burnt down in 1936.
catalogue became a backing of the Peter Chapman
guide for Victorian Liberal prime museumofthehome.org.uk
19 June/20 June 2021
The Cape
escape
US property | An influx of buyers from New York
and Boston in Cape Cod has left locals priced out
— and tourism short of vital workers. By Hugo Cox
B
efore the pandemic, Brian
Coleman, a 40-year old mar-
keter working in New York
City, lived in a rented apart-
ment across the Hudson river
in Jersey City. But he had long dreamt of
buying a house on Cape Cod, the upmar-
ket coastal community about an hour
outside of Boston where he had holi-
dayed as a child and where his parents
still owned a second home. When home-
working released him from the need to
live near the office, he joined them there
last March, and started his search.
It ended in September with a three-
bedroom house in Sandwich costing
roughly $700,000 — “about the price of
a studio apartment in New York City,”
he says. Being on the Cape made search-
ing much easier than shuttling back
and forth from New Jersey, so the
pandemic brought the purchase for-
ward by roughly three years, he guesses.
“When I’m needed back in the office,
I’ll take a rental back near the city and
rent this one out.”
Coleman is one of many new arrivals
to Cape Cod since the start of the pan-
demic, a period that has seen home sales
and prices increase.
“We have seen a big uptick in young
families and young, single working peo-
ple moving to the Cape for their primary
home,” says Katie Clancy of local estate
agent William Raveis. “It’s a big shift for
what has always been a resort commu-
nity attracting mainly seasonal second-
homers and retirees.”
In the 12 months to May 2021, 6,430
homes sold on the Cape’s Barnstable
★ FTWeekend
County, up 25 per cent on the 12 months
to May 2019, according to the Cape
Cod and Islands Multiple Listing Service
(MLS). The median home price
was $518,000, up 28 per cent up on two
years ago.
Inventory has fallen sharply as most
people willing to sell their homes have
done so. Last May there were 1,978
homes for sale in Barnstable County.
One year later there were just 583.
The story is similar across the Cape’s
many different towns. Provincetown,
the Cape’s furthest and least accessible
spot, has for years attracted artists and
fisherman seeking its peace and
remoteness and now also boasts a strong
LGBT community.
Osterville and Chatham, located at
‘It’s a big shift for what has
always been a resort
community for seasonal
second-homers and retirees’
opposite ends of the Cape’s southern
shore, which both have long stretches of
meandering coastline, are popular with
those seeking waterfront homes. They
also house two of the Cape’s oldest and
most prestigious country clubs: Oyster
Harbours Golf Club in Osterville and
Eastward Ho! in Chatham.
“On the Cape, Osterville has long been
the place to see and be seen and makes
no apologies about this,” says Clancy,
(From top) adding that the area’s most prestigious
West Bay in spots remain the nearby islands of Nan-
Osterville; homes tucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Of 19
next to the dunes at homes for sale at the start of June for
East Sandwich more than $10m in the area, five are
beach, Cape Cod located on Martha’s Vineyard and two
Getty Images; Alamy
on Nantucket, with the remaining 12
located elsewhere on the Cape, accord-
ing to the MLS.
Chatham was once a spot where the
rich and famous could holiday incog-
nito. “They went there to drive a pick-up
truck, escape and get some rest.
Now there is newer money there,
with Bentleys parked at the end of
many driveways,” says Clancy. Today,
nearby Harwich Port offers a quieter
alternative.
For more affordable homes, buyers
will often focus their search inland and
to the west, employing a rough rule of
thumb that comparable homes get
3
House Home
more expensive the further along the
Cape towards Provincetown. Besides
Sandwich, Yarmouth and parts of the
town of Barnstable are popular with
millennial buyers on a tighter budget.
Many pick somewhere near one of the
two bridges that connect Cape Cod to
the Massachusetts mainland at Saga-
more and Bourne, putting them closer
to the metropolitan areas of Boston and
New York, and within an hour of Bos-
ton’s Logan airport on a good day.
The growing popularity of the Cape to
affluent buyers such as Coleman since
the start of the pandemic is having a
knock-on effect on housing affordabil-
ity for local residents. With increasing
prices and fewer homes available to buy
or rent, local workers are struggling to
find somewhere to live, just as Cape
businesses need them to staff the busy
summer season.
“When a rental is advertised there are
over a hundred inquiries and the price
tag is beyond the means of anyone mak-
ing less than $30 an hour,” says Alisa
Magnotta, head of the Housing Assist-
ance Corporation, a local non-profit that
helps people find homes.
Continued on page 4
4 ★
House Home
2 km
Gulf of
Boston Maine
MASSACHUSETTS
US Provincetown Truro
Barnstable
Sandwich Cape
Cod
RHODE
Osterville
Chatham
ISLAND Tisbury
Wesleyan
Grove
Martha’s Vineyard
©Mapcreator.io/©HERE Nantucket
Continued from page 3
While recent price rises make it
harder for local workers to buy, they
also reduce the stock of rental homes.
Many buy-to-let investors are selling up
to lock in a profit, but few are buying,
since higher prices mean the available
rental income has fallen as a proportion
of the purchase price. This exacerbates
a trend that predated the pandemic
with increasing numbers of landlords
keeping properties for short-term lets
during the lucrative summer season.
“Regular working people come in our
office looking for a place to live — their
‘The source of labour has
dried up so dramatically.
It’s a perfect storm for
Cape Cod’
longtime rental has sold and the new
owners want them out. With less than 1
per cent rental vacancy there is
nowhere to move. The closest rental
market with vacancies is over 50 miles
away,” says Magnotta.
Cases coming to the Corporation’s
homeless outreach team have increased
35 per cent since the start of the pan-
demic. “Many of the new [cases] have
jobs and are trying to find a place to stay
for the summer so they can remain on
the Cape,” she says.
The scarcity of affordable homes is
creating a pressing shortage of workers
for local businesses gearing up for what
could be record visitor numbers this
summer, as the US vaccine rollout con-
tinues and many international travel
restrictions remain in place.
According to Wendy Northcross, head
of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce,
local accommodation providers tar-
Since the pandemic, the
number of homes for sale
on Cape Cod has dropped
Inventory of homes for sale per month,
Barnstable County
3,000
2,000
1,000
0 Barnstable town is 1hr 20m drive from
2018 19 20 21
Source: Cape Cod & Islands MLS
geted 1.4m unique visitors for their web-
sites for 2021. By the end of April, web-
site traffic had topped 2.1m.
The demand from employers seeking
staff far exceeds the numbers looking
for work, according to Kara Galvin,
director of the local MassHire Cape and
Islands Workforce Board, a non-profit
focused on training and finding work for
local people.
“The source of labour has dried up so
dramatically. [They are needed] to
serve the demand that has exploded as
people are vaccinated. It’s a perfect
FTWeekend
(From top) cottages storm for Cape Cod,” says Northcross.
in the former The worker shortage has become so
Wesleyan Grove, pressing that businesses are preparing
now known as the to act collectively to address it. Plans
Campgrounds, on floated by the Chamber of Commerce
Martha’s Vineyard; include an employer-funded trust that
Commercial Street would develop affordable homes.
in Provincetown Not everyone is supportive. “There
Alamy
has been a lot of push back about how
beholden long-term employees would
be to their employers under such a
scheme,” says Northcross.
As for Coleman, he is likely to add
himself to the pool of second-home
i / BUYING GUIDE
Homebuyers in Massachusetts face no
state sales tax, but in Cape Cod’s
Barnstable county, the seller pays $6.48
per $1,000. So for a $1m property, the
seller would pay $6,480.
Annual property taxes vary across Cape
Cod: the charge for a $1m home in
Osterville is $9,100; in Chatham it is $4,980.
Boston, and about 4hrs from Manhattan.
owners renting their homes in the lucra-
tive summer season, when he moves
back to be nearer his New York office. “A
summer rental for a month would pro-
duce money for operating costs on the
house for a year,” he says.
As long as the economics favour
choices like this, the Cape’s current
housing affordability problem will
remain, says Magnotta. “There is no
quick fix, the only way beyond this crisis
is to change zoning to allow multi-fam-
ily construction and increase subsidy
for year-round rentals.”
19 June/20 June 2021
PROPERTIES
FOR SALE
CAPE COD AND
MARTHA'S
VINEYARD
B Family home, Chatham $1.499m
A five-bedroom house next to Eastward
Ho! country club in Chatham on the
eastern shore of Cape Cod. The property,
which measures 2,256 sq ft, was built in
1980 and comes with more than half an
acre of grounds. The home is available
through Compass.
B Beachside home, Tisbury, Martha's
Vineyard $10.15m
An eight-bedroom home dating back to
1896. The property, which overlooks a
pristine beach on the north shore of West
Chop, has six bathrooms and 0.6 acres of
grounds. Available through Christie’s
International Real Estate.
B Waterfront mansion, Osterville, Cape
Cod $12.25m
A seven-bedroom home in Osterville,
overlooking the waters of Nantucket
Sound. The property, which was built in
1900 and refurbished in 2018, measures
5,593 sq ft on 0.8 acres. Available through
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 5
6 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

House Home

Hot property
The tropics
K Villa, Santa Ana, Costa Rica
$5.295m
Where In Santa Ana, a suburb 6km
west of the capital San José, in
Costa Rica’s Central Valley. Juan
Santamaría International Airport is
17.5km away, about half an hour
By Maria Crawford by car.
What A single-level, architect-
designed villa with five bedrooms
and six full bathrooms. An
expansive glass-walled living space
looks on to a tiled outdoor pool.
Why The property’s immediate
surroundings create the sense of a
peaceful and private setting, yet
Santa Ana’s road connections
mean the capital and its amenities
are just 15-20 minutes away, and
the Pacific coast 45 minutes.
Who Luxury Portfolio

I Ruam Rudee Palace, Bangkok,

Thailand Bt1.5bn ($48.24m)

Where Near Bangkok’s Embassy

Row, an area dense with high-end
residences and hotels.
Suvarnabhumi international airport
is 26km to the east, about 30
minutes by car depending on the
city’s traffic.
What An elegant four-bedroom
home that was once owned by
Princess Yaovabha Bongsanid of
the Thai royal family, and served as
the residence of two Australian
ambassadors in the 1970s.
Generous wooden-shuttered
windows and glass doors open on
to a long, vaulted terrace and lush
tropical garden. B House, Saint Thomas, Barbados lily pond and drive lined with
Why The property is less than a $9.995m mahogany trees.
1km walk from the green oasis of Why The property, which
Lumphini Park, the city’s largest Where In the parish of Saint originated as an 18th-century
park and popular with local Thomas, 4km inland from the sugar plantation home, was
runners. The Royal Bangkok Sports island’s west coast and 8km north redesigned in 1971 by Oliver
Club, which hosts horse racing and of the capital, Bridgetown. Grantley Messel, the English stage designer.
has a golf driving range, and the Adams International Airport is After retiring from theatre Messel
RBSC Polo Club are also nearby. 23km, about 30 minutes by car. designed several homes and public
Who Sotheby’s International Realty What A main house, guest cottage buildings in the Caribbean,
and pavilion with a total of seven including Princess Margaret’s
en-suite bedrooms. The 5.5-acre home on Mustique.
grounds include a swimming pool, Who Chestertons

K Family home, Karen, Kenya K House, Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii, US

$2.25m $15.5m

Where On Mbagathi Ridge Road in Where In the Koloa district, a few

the upscale suburb of Karen, about minutes’ drive from Kauai island’s
17km or a 40-minute drive west of south coast. Lihue airport is 14
Nairobi. The city’s international miles or a 23-minute drive, with
airport is 45 minutes by car. direct flights to Honolulu and other
What A five-bedroom, three- US cities.
bathroom house with a striking red What A gated property with four
brick roof. An additional cottage bedrooms, five bathrooms and a
for one could serve as staff or guest cottage. Bedrooms have
guest accommodation. private outdoor showers, and there
Why The house is set in 3 acres of is a pool, yoga pavilion and hot tub.
gardens that include mature trees, Why Kauai is the greenest of
a vegetable garden, swimming pool Hawaii’s islands, and this house has
and pond. There is also a large views across the tropical landscape
covered veranda with forest views. all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Who Knight Frank Who Forbes Global Properties
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 7
8 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

House Home

Booming Brixton
UK property | Forty years on from the anti-
police riots, gentrification has encroached
on the heart of the UK’s African-Caribbean
community. Robert Wright reports

A
s Lee Jasper walks around
the streets of Brixton, south
London, he shakes his
head. On Coldharbour
Lane, once lined with shops
selling reggae records and West Indian
food, he gestures at a recently estab-
lished restaurant. It offers fashionable
“small plates” of Sicilian food for
between £6 and £11 each.
The business is operating in what
used to be the heart of Britain’s African-
Caribbean community, a few metres
from where some of the most violent
riots in Britain’s history broke out 40
years ago this year. Jasper, an often con-
troversial activist for black people’s
rights, looks at the restaurant and sighs, (Main picture) They have a particularly sharp edge in security staff. “It’s middle-class white
“Great but . . . ” before tapering off. Lambeth Town Brixton because it has been the intellec- people — a lot of rich kids coming from
The arrival of new restaurants and Hall, Brixton tual and spiritual centre of the UK’s Car- other areas now to Brixton.”
other establishments with a mainly ibbean population since shortly after Many newcomers, however, insist
middle-class white clientele reflects a (Above) inside the first organised group of migrants that they represent merely the latest of
cultural shift in large parts of Brixton in Brixton Market; from the Caribbean came to the UK on multiple overlapping waves of migra-
the four decades since the events of Lincoln Romain the Empire Windrush in 1948. Many of tion. They say they want to enrich the
April 1981 (which locals now often call (in apron) at the migrants were initially housed in area, not quash its distinctiveness.
an “uprising”) drew attention to the Brixton Cycles; nearby Clapham and came to Brixton Margaux Aubry, co-founder of
area’s deep-seated racial tensions. rights activist because of its labour exchange. Naughty Piglets, a restaurant serving
The past few years have brought a Lee Jasper In 2015, these tensions culminated in high-quality modern British cooking
surge of investment and development an anti-gentrification protest that led to from the site of a former chicken shop
that has produced what Jasper calls Photography the storming of Lambeth Town Hall and on Brixton Water Lane, says she and her
“continual demographic change” — a for the FT by to substantial damage to a branch of business partner Joe Sharratt decided to
gradual pricing-out of both black resi- Harry Mitchell Foxtons, an estate agents’ chain seen by locate their business in Brixton because
dents reliant on private-sector housing some as symbolic of the neighbour- of its distinctive atmosphere.
and of black-owned businesses. hood’s increasing unaffordability. The bistro, which opened in 2015, has
The changes have sparked an intense Cecil Reuben, a reggae music pro- won an entry in the Michelin Guide, the
and often angry debate about how far
‘The culture it’s got moter who has lived in Brixton since prestigious restaurant handbook. While
planning rules and landlords should be now is a different arriving in the UK from Jamaica aged 15 Sharratt has always lived in south Lon-
obliged to manage change and preserve in the early 1970s, says the area has “lost don, Aubry, like many of those who have
businesses, homes and other facilities
culture. It’s middle- its culture”. “The culture it’s got now is a founded businesses in the area in recent
for black people. The arguments are class white people kind of different culture,” Reuben says, years, is herself an immigrant; she was
similar to those raging in recent years in sitting outside the Hootananny, a pub born in Lyon. “We’re not here to make
urban areas across the industrialised
— a lot of rich kids and entertainment venue where he Brixton worse or better,” Aubry says, sit-
world, from Berlin to Brooklyn. from other areas’ organises concerts and provides the ting cross-legged at a table in the back
19 June/20 June 2021
room of the compact restaurant. “We
love Brixton and decided to live and
make a little food and natural wine
scene within Brixton.”
At the heart of the discontent is a
sense that the recent changes risk erod-
ing the achievements of Brixton’s Carib-
bean immigrants in the postwar dec-
ades. People from the West Indies came
to an area that had, after rapid, middle-
class development in the 1840s-60s fol-
lowing the arrival of rail connections to
central London, grown depressed and
run down. Brixton was attractive partly
because of the abundance of robust
Victorian houses that could be readily
turned into affordable accommodation
for large numbers of people.
Lincoln Romain, who grew up in a
West Indian home in Loughborough
Junction, on Brixton’s fringes, recalls the
sense of energy on Coldharbour Lane
when he first worked there in 1989 for
Brixton Cycles, a workers’ co-operative
(now on Brixton Road) of which he is
now the longest-standing member.
“There was a kind of excitement, a
nervous excitement,” Romain says of
Coldharbour Lane. “Some of the summer
days were, like, the best — everybody out
on the pavement just getting on.”
After a groundbreaking inquiry, Lord
Scarman, a High Court judge, blamed
the riots of April 10-12 1981 on the
heavy-handed policing of impoverished
black young men by London’s Metropol-
itan Police. Across England, forces
started to put greater emphasis on
“community policing” and understand-
ing better the people they were policing.
However, there were subsequent dis-
turbances in the area in 1985, after
police shot and injured Cherry Groce,
having burst into her flat. In 1995, after
Wayne Douglas, a 26-year-old black
man, collapsed and died in custody at
Brixton police station, there was further
trouble. Most recently, the area experi-
enced some unrest in 2011 in the wave of
disorder that followed the fatal police
shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham,
north London.
★ FTWeekend
In the 10 years to January 2021, the
average property price in Brixton rose
76 per cent to £578,368, according to
data from Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward,
a London estate agent. In Brixton Hill, to
the south-west, the average price more
than doubled to £599,198.
But the rising tide of property values
and increased investment has lifted few
boats in the least advantaged bits of the
area, according to Ira Campbell, co-
chief executive of the Marcus Lipton
Youth Club on the Loughborough Estate
in north-east Brixton. Its 1950s council-
owned high-rises still look poorly main-
tained. “Gentrification has been really
big over here, and it’s disproportion-
ately hit the black community — and
ethnic minority communities — hard,”
Campbell says.
Local young people feel dispirited
when they see middle-class families
paying £1m for houses on the same
streets where they live, according to
Campbell. “A lot of the people we work
with, they may have great aspirations
(Clockwise from above left)
Brixton Station Road;
Margaux Aubry of the
Naughty Piglets bistro;
Diana Nabagereka of Brixton
Village; gentrifying streets;
Maremma, on the site of the
old Montego Inn.
(Below) the ‘Children
at Play’ mural
but when they see the doors are shut to
them — they would never afford the
houses where they live — it makes it a lot
harder,” Campbell says.
Yet a visit to the Maremma restaurant
on Brixton Water Lane is a reminder
that the area has always been home to a
mix of classes and races and that the
changes are often complex. It operates
on the site occupied from 1975 until
2018 by the Montego Inn, a Caribbean
restaurant run by Bruce Stennet, origi-
nally from Jamaica.
Dickie Bielenberg, who started
Maremma with his wife Alice Sta-
ple, grew up near Brixton and recalls
encountering smouldering wreckage
and overturned cars as a 13-year-old in
1981 taking the bus to Dulwich Prep
school. “I remember very, very clearly
the sense of incredible injustice that I
felt at that time”, he says, “when I was
told by my parents that this was due to
the ability of the police just to stop any-
body based on nothing particular.”
Maremma rents its premises from
Stennet, now in his eighties, and Bielen-
berg purchases what he can locally. That
includes bread from the Caribbean-
owned Aries Bakehouse on Acre Lane.
‘Brixton is known for its
diversity. That’s the goose
that laid the golden egg,
and it’s being driven out’
Bielenberg also includes on diners’
bills an optional £1 “community charge”
that goes to local charities — including
the Marcus Lipton centre. There are
“huge, huge” numbers of people from
outside Brixton spending money in res-
taurants and, while some businesses
ensure that part of the proceeds goes to
local people, many do not, he says.
Hondo Enterprises, the investment
company that has owned many of the
prime sites in central Brixton since
2018, insists that it, too, is trying to nur-
ture black people’s entrepreneurship.
Hondo has faced criticism because of
the changed mix of businesses in Brix-
ton’s market arcades, which once traded
almost exclusively in fresh produce for
consumers with Caribbean roots.
Diana Nabagereka, general manager
of Brixton Village, one of the market
properties, points out that the market
has a preservation listing because of its
importance to Britain’s African-Carib-
bean population. As a result, Hondo has
agreed to protect the traditional sellers
9
House Home
of fresh produce by committing to turn
over no more than half its space to res-
taurants and bars. “It means there will
always be great produce — that diversity
to allow for old Brixton to still feel the
space is theirs,” says Nabagereka.
Meanwhile, the groups of African-
Caribbean men who still appear drink-
ing, smoking and listening to reggae on
summer evenings around Acre Lane are
a reminder that the area remains ethni-
cally and socially mixed. Pushed to the
Margins, a report on gentrification pub-
lished in May by the Runnymede Trust,
a race-relations think-tank, and Class,
the centre for labour and social studies,
put Lambeth fifth among London bor-
oughs for its rate of gentrification.
The report made the judgment by cal-
culating factors such as the rate of churn
in households and the decline in the
number of non-white households from
the start of 2010 to the end of 2016.
However, Adam Almeida, the report’s
author, says the area scored only “high”
rather than “severe” for the level of gen-
trification because Lambeth, the local
council, has not yet attempted in central
Brixton the type of wholesale redevel-
opment of council-owned housing that
has taken place elsewhere in the bor-
ough and London. Such projects are
often accused of driving out many origi-
nal residents or treating them poorly.
Still, Lee Jasper’s walk around Brixton
illustrates that there are genuine pres-
sures on black-owned businesses. As he
turns off Coldharbour Lane on to Atlan-
tic Road, he sees a sign announcing the
closure of The Baron, which claimed to
be Brixton’s longest-surviving inde-
pendent retailer, selling clothes to suit
the tastes of older African-Caribbean
men for more than 50 years.
“Brixton is known for its diversity,”
says Jasper, who first moved to the area
in 1985. “That’s the goose that laid the
golden egg and it’s being driven out.”
Ira Campbell, who was 11 at the time
of the riots, acknowledges that areas
such as his have seen some improve-
ments since 1981. “Forty years later,
you’d expect some change,” he says. But
he would like his community to benefit
far more from the prosperity that is just
around the corner. “We still have a lot of
institutional racism,” he adds.
Campbell insists that his area’s young
people will seize the new opportunities
if allowed. “Wec want to keep on being
optimistic,” he says. “And keep hoping
that things will get better and fairer.”
Robert Wright is the FT’s
social policy correspondent
10 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

House Home

M Paradise Cocoa heavyweight linen

by Utopia Goods £125 per metre
K Patchwork K Linen napkin & A pattern inspired by the rainforest
cushion cover placemat set by Gul canopies of Far North Queensland;
by Toast £65 Hurgel $690 for set of six suitable for soft furnishings and
A contemporary With embroidered drapery. utopiagoods.com
design handmade borders and seahorse
in India, available details, this set is
in two colour perfect for a
variations. toa.st summer tablescape.
en.gulhurgel.com

Cloth of heaven
B Marnie footstool
by Maker&Son £1,425
Shown in the Howlite
colourway, this
upholstered linen
footstool has piped
edge detailing.
M Studio chair in indigo by Buchanan Studio £2,394 makerandson.com
Using 1970s design as inspiration, this handmade chair is
upholstered in Belgian linen. buchanan.studio
Round-up | Linen is cool, crisp, classic — and can be put to uses
far beyond trousers and tablecloths. Selection by Roddy Clarke

M Graphic print linen tea towels by

Poketo £28 for a set of 2
Inject colour into the kitchen with
these bold designs. selfridges.com

K Summer rainbow
linen tablecloth by
Summerill & Bishop
£275
B Linen bedding bundle by A vibrant scalloped
Bedfolk from £139 design to add pizzazz
Available in four colours, this set to any table setting.
consists of a duvet cover and two summerillandbishop.
pillowcases. Handmade in com
Guimarães, Portugal. bedfolk.com

I Chaos rug by I Cellini Chalk

Audrone Drungilaite fabric by Romo
for EMKO from £2,853 £61 per metre
Referencing the This pure linen
aftermath of a good sheer fabric helps
party, this playful balance the
rug is made using natural light
leftover linen yarn. within a room. B The Beirut quilt by Zena Sabbagh
nidstore.com romo.com £325
Inspired by the geometric patterns on
many of Beirut’s buildings, this quilt is
handmade by artisans Souher Kaalaji
and Imade Zeynabe. ishkar.com
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11
12
House Home
A design classic
down to a tee
Interiors | The Fischli/Weiss Artek stool is a new
edition of Alvar Aalto’s 1933 design — with a twist
of existential humour, writes Edwin Heathcote
I
s my brain a poorly furnished
apartment?” It’s a question asked
by Swiss artist Peter Fischli, along
with “am I suffering from good
taste?” and “must I be ashamed of
having no opinion about most things?”
And 18 others that probe some of the
other corners of uncertainty.
And Fischli sort of answers some of
these questions in a new edition of one
of the most famous pieces of 20th-
century furniture, tweaked for a release
with the Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London and the manufacturer
Artek. The answers, it seems, are
mmm . . . yes and no.
The stool will be familiar, a design by
Finnish architect Alvar Aalto from 1933.
Made of the bent plywood that came to
be synonymous with Aalto’s work, it is a
simple, stepped-down design of a circu-
lar disk of a seat and three bent legs
screwed directly into its underside with
no complicated and expensive joinery.
It has been endlessly ripped off and its
lightness, versatility and stackability
have made it a staple of homes, co-
working spaces, museums and shops.
Together with Artek, the ICA
launched an artist’s edition of the stool
by Barbara Kruger in 2019. The US
artist, best known for collages and
big, graphic slogans, painted the legs
Endlessly ripped off, its
lightness, versatility and
stackability have made
it a staple of homes
Property Gallery
England
Monaco
★ FTWeekend
red, the seat white and emblazoned the
word “kiss” in big letters on the top.
“The effect, of course,” says Stefan
Kalmár, the ICA’s director, “is you sit on
it: ‘kiss my ass’.”
The edition of 600 proved a huge suc-
cess and completely sold out. “Barbara
was such a thing to follow on from,” says
Kalmár. “I was trying to think what is it
that represents this time we are living
through? With all its questions? So, I
asked Peter.” “These questions,” Fischli
tells me over the phone from Zurich,
“are for persons who are in doubting.
Those who doubt are great at theory but
not necessarily in actions.”
The genesis of the design, though, was
pure serendipity. “I’d got one of the
Kruger stools as a Christmas present,”
he says. “One day, I had a T-shirt I
needed to dry in the studio so I hung
it on the stool and it looked kind of
nice. But then there are so many
T-shirts with something written on
them that I thought how about an
introverted T-shirt? With the message
on the inside?”
The result is a slightly oddball stool
wrapped in a T-shirt with a question
printed on its label, a hard-lined mod-
ernist classic made amorphous by the
loose shape stretched around it. In some
photos, it looks a little like a deformed
elephant. Of course, the precise shape
is up to you. The instructions that
come inside the flat-pack box, which
resembles a pizza delivery box, are
admirably clear:
“9. Put it over the stool as you see in
the photographic image.”
“PS. If you want to wear it, turn the
T-shirt outside-in so the label with the
question is on the inside and invisible to
others; you can keep it for your secret.”
“I really liked Kruger’s design and
I didn’t want to do too much to it,”
Fischli says. “I wanted exactly the same
colours so it looks a little like we used
leftovers from the last edition.”
As a result in this edition too, the legs
are red, the seat is white. I asked Mari-
anne Goebl, the managing director of
Artek, about the stool itself: how does
this quirky interpretation fit into its
long history? “Already in the 1940s
there were versions of the stool in col-
France
(Left) Fischli/Weiss’s
new edition for
the ICA features an
inside out T-shirt;
(Below) ‘Am I
suffering from
good taste?’ by
Peter Fischli and
David Weiss
ours, in cork, with
flamboyant veneers,
even coloured formica,”
she says. “Alvar and
Aino Aalto co-founded
Artek and they were
instrumental in bringing
modern art to Finland
too. Art and design have
become two very separate
markets and we don’t pro-
duce art, but we do feel very comfort-
able at the intersection of the two.”
It’s a very simple product. Does the
art distract from that simplicity?
“It is the most elemental product,”
Goebl says. “It is a domestic helper, it
can be a stool, a bedside table, a step, a
seat, a display stand and you can stack
them and bring them out of the corner
when you have a party. It never looks
wrong in any space and it doesn’t
scream for attention.”
This seems to fit neatly with Fischli’s
added layer of introversion.
“[Fischli] didn’t change it much but
he tried to disguise it, which is typical of
his multi-layered work,” she says. “He is
such an acute observer of the quotidian
and this is such an everyday object.”
“I was thinking about respect,” says
Fischli. “I didn’t want to write some-
thing on the stool out of respect for a
piece which has cultural value. Or
The ‘Kiss’
The original ‘Stool 60’ version by
by Alvar Aalto Barbara Kruger
UK Office: +44 20 7873 4907 | US Office: +1 212 641 6500 | ASIA Office: +852 2905 5579
www.ft.com/house&home
Switzerland
19 June/20 June 2021
maybe I’m just faking respect.”
“If you work with a classic, you can do
two things. Either you can do an homage
or you can do a deconstruction. Since
this is a thing people can use in everyday
life, I wanted to leave it a bit untouched.”
With his partner in practice David
Weiss, who died in 2012, Fischli staged
an influential show at the ICA in 1988.
It was the platform for a film of their
most recognised work “The Way Things
Go”, a meticulous set-up of ad hoc
objects in a causal chain of unlikely
events in which an assemblage of
industrial and household items slowly
unravel; a still frequently imitated
mix of cartoonist Heath Robinson
and Rube Goldberg. Also shown was
“Equilibres”, similarly Dadaist assem-
blages of everyday items made into
eccentric art mobiles.
“I realised that I’m in a really good
context here [at the ICA],” Fischli says.
If you work with a classic,
you can do two things.
Either you do an homage
or you do a deconstruction
“When an artist achieves an amount of
success and becomes economically
independent, that value is created by
the institutions, like the ICA, although
the market takes the profits. It’s clear
that we have to support these places.
And I really love the café.”
On sale from July 1 and priced at
£1,200 in an edition of 252, the proceeds
from the stool will help the ICA to con-
tinue what Kalmár calls its “laboratory
of ideas”. He points out that the building
they are in was adapted by Jane Drew, a
leading Modernist architect and friend
of Alvar and Aino Aalto. The Finns vis-
ited the ICA with artist Richard Hamil-
ton and designer Sir Terence Conran in
the 1950s. The Mall site was rede-
signed by Drew in 1968, with a raw
interior of exposed steel beams and
corrugated metal, anticipating the
industrial aesthetic.
“This is not just another artist’s edi-
tion,” says Kalmár of the stool. “It’s com-
pletely functional.” “And the thing is
that it’s funny,” he says. “It’s a thing that
knows about itself in the world. It sits
somewhere between existentialist phi-
losophy and the completely banal.”
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture
and design critic
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 13

Property Gallery UK Office: +44 20 7873 4907 | US Office: +1 212 641 6500 | ASIA Office: +852 2905 5579
www.ft.com/house&home
Spain

England

England

England USA

France
14 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

House Home

Mystical
mansions
Architecture | Calendar homes sought to astonish
with their number games. Mark Ellwood finds that
many still survive with their unique puzzles intact

L
ast month, Kinmel Hall near
the coastal town of Abergele
in Wales sold for £950,000
with Allsop auctioneers. The
sale was £200,000 or so above
the expected price after multiple bids
from around the world, though the
eventual buyers were locals.
Kinmel Hall is an extraordinary
estate: 17.5 acres of land with an 80,000
sq ft Victorian mansion. It was built in
the 1870s by architect WE Nesfield for
Hugh Roberts Hughes, whose fortune
derived from copper mining on nearby
Anglesey. It was dubbed the Versailles of
Wales for its bombastic grandeur.
More interesting than its sheer size, their dominions, retinues in tow, and (Clockwise from altered those numbers so they no longer
though, is an overlooked detail of its take up temporary residence at such main) Kinmel Hall hold today.
design: Kinmel Hall is a calendar house, homes. “Entertain me,” the regent and in Wales sold It’s fitting, given the slightly fanciful
an architectural whimsy. Mansions of his or her entourage would demand — for £950,000 nature of these houses, that even this
that kind were constructed using and their host would stage plays and last month; story is disputed. The estate’s current
numbers that nod to the calendar: days games as distractions. Boughton House in custodian, the National Trust, claims it’s
of the week, or weeks of the year per- Houses and their decor became puz- Northamptonshire; more fiction than fact, propagated
haps, even the four seasons. In Kinmel’s zles, too, as another sop to bored architects took mostly by Vita Sackville-West, to whose
case, its facade features 365 windows courtiers wandering galleries and gar- their cues from the writerly imagination such an idea may
and 12 entrances. dens for days on end. motion of the have appealed.
This intriguing conceit emerged at the “Look at the portraits of Elizabeth, heavens — Dreamstime.com Other calendar houses followed that
turn of the 17th century in Britain, which are so laden with symbolism,” century, including Boughton House in
according to architectural historian Beckett says. “This was a group of indi- Northamptonshire. It’s a mansion based
Matthew Beckett, author of The viduals who were highly educated, had a on an older home that was radically
Country Seat blog. There was a calming good knowledge of history, religion and renovated by the 1st Duke of Montagu
of political turmoil, both domestic and metaphysics, and the house would be on a calendar template: seven court-
international, so nobles no longer felt part of a series of games played through- yards and 365 windows again, but also
duty-bound to build defensive out the day.” Astrologer-astronomer John Dee, for emergence of calendar houses coin- 52 chimneys and 12 entrances. About
castles. Instead, they could start com- example, wielded enormous influence cided with James’s ascent to the English the same time, silk merchant John
missioning homes. ‘This was a group of at the Elizabethan court; mystic sym- throne: Knole House, in Kent. The Jaco- Mitchell built a smaller version, Scout
The economy was booming, too, at bolism gained greater prominence with bean iteration, owned by the Sackville Hall near Halifax, in Yorkshire, with 365
least for the upper classes. But it was individuals who had a good the ascent of the Virgin Queen’s notori- family from 1605, is said to have fea- panes of glass; it still stands, albeit in
their lifestyle that probably helped give knowledge of history, ously superstitious successor, James I. tured 365 rooms, 52 staircases and need of restoration.
rise to the calendar house, Beckett sug- Beckett, like many architectural his- seven courtyards, but subsequent reno- The true heyday of this idea, though,
gests. Monarchs would ricochet around religion and metaphysics’ torians, says that a landmark in the vations of the still-standing house was in the 19th century. No wonder,
19 June/20 June 2021
given the surplus of nouveau riche
merchants keen to deploy their
fortunes in service of recasting their
heritage as noble rather than serf. They
reached back into history, reviving or
embellishing tropes from the past,
whether ersatz heraldic shields or calen-
dar houses.
Kinmel Hall builder Hughes was typi-
cal of this type, says Mark Baker, an
architectural historian with particular
expertise in Wales. Like Jacobean calen-
dar housebuilders, Hughes was keen to
appeal to the monarch; he revelled in his
nickname, HRH, and managed to wran-
gle a perch for one of his daughters as a
lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
“He was a bit of a Marmite character
— people either loved him or loathed
him,” says Baker of the magnate. “He
became filthy rich, almost overnight.
The family really wanted to become
part of society, but it was snooty and
difficult to break into the country
house set.”
★ FTWeekend
(Above) Avon Tyrrell House in the New Forest; (below)
the great staircase at Knole House in Kent — Andreas von Einsie
(Clockwise from Built in the 1870s, Kinmel Hall is late
top left) Victorian, but the style had proliferated
Eggenberg across the British Isles throughout that
Palace in Graz; century. Adare Manor, for example, in
Adare Manor in Ireland’s County Limerick, is now a
Ireland; hotel, but it was built in the 1860s with
Rose Hall in 365 windows, 52 chimneys, seven stone
Jamaica; pillars and four towers.
Balfour Castle That same decade in Cumbria, a mill
on Shapinsays owner commissioned the Tudor Gothic
Alamy
pile known as Holme Eden Hall. It fea-
tured elements nodding to all five cate-
Hughes had stumbled into such gories: 52 fireplaces and chimneys, 12
wealth when the longstanding heir to corridors, four floors, seven entrances
the family’s copper-based fortune died. plus 365 windows. When it was con-
As the closest male relative via the verted into apartments 18 years ago, the
female line, suddenly Hughes was thoughtful redeveloper created 12 flats,
richer than he could have dreamt — and naming each after a month of the year.
set his sights on establishing himself In Scotland, there is Balfour Castle on
among the elite. Kinmel was intended to the island of Shapinsay — seven turrets,
act as a social stepladder, its construc- 12 exterior doors, 52 rooms, and 365
tion and size on par with royal palaces, panes of glass making it a prime exam-
not to mention its quality: hand- ple of the Scots Baronial style finessed
finished hoppers, handmade bricks and by architect David Bryce. Avon Tyrrell
special slate for the roof, for example. House in the New Forest was a late
15
House Home
Victorian Arts and Crafts-style calendar
home, built by Lord Manners, an aristo-
crat who boosted his fortune via a brag-
gartly, but successful, wager that he
could buy, train and ride the winner of
the Grand National; he achieved that
goal in 1882.
The style appeared across the British
empire: Mona Vale in Tasmania, com-
pleted in the 1860s, was built by a newly
wealthy entrepreneur to impress the
royal family. In this case, it was a busi-
nessman from the Isle of Man who fin-
ished his calendar house just in time for
Victoria’s son to stop by on the first royal
visit to Australia.
Rose Hall in Jamaica has these ele-
ments, too, though it was built 60 years
earlier. The cashed-up sugar barons of
Kinmel was intended to act
as a social stepladder, its
construction and size on
par with royal palaces
that era, of course, were treated with
similar disdain as the industrial parve-
nus who followed — and so were prone
to similar cachet-boosting gestures.
According to Baker, there are exam-
ples of such homes beyond the bounda-
ries of Britain and its onetime domin-
ions, albeit sparingly. Most are estates in
central Europe, often emblazoned with
mystical or astrological symbols — Aus-
tria’s Baroque Eggenberg Palace, in
Graz, for instance, has 365 windows, 52
of which are on the main floor.
That centuries-old estate is in
move-in ready condition, unlike poor
Kinmel Hall, which preservationists
estimate will need tens of millions of
pounds in restoration; its new buyers
have committed to a historic refurb.
Baker remains hopeful for the future of
this dilapidated mansion. North Wales
property prices have been increasing,
he notes, as a result of the pandemic-in-
duced move to the countryside. He’d
relish the chance to become involved in
the rehabilitation.
“It’s so vast and has been chopped
around so much, we’re not even sure
whether it has 365 windows and 365
rooms,” he says, adding that it served as
a conference centre and school after the
Hughes family lost interest in the home.
Could there be a secret passageway
somewhere, to bump its tally to 366 —
a leap-year house — perhaps? “I’ve
never come across that, but at Kinmel,
I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
16
House Home
Coming up
Olivia Roses
This stunning variety proliferates in a hedge,
while others climb walls or sit in pots. In whatever
form, the rose is a flowery miracle close to home
R
oses are having another
spectacular year. Outside
the warmer parts of London,
their flowering season has
not been as early as in 2020,
but it has lost none of the vigour of that
year and the previous three. On June 7
I saw my first picture-postcard house
with roses trained tidily along its
whitewashed facade. The loosely
formed yellow flowers of Golden
Showers were on one side of the front
door and the double red flowers of
Crimson Cascade were on the other.
There is a profusion to Britain’s
climbing roses in June which is
unrivalled. Who cares if we are
locked down when we can travel short
distances, notice them and enjoy them?
Roses have been in gardens for
thousands of years, but they are not
standing still. I will look at three
examples, rose hedges, roses in pots
and red roses up walls. The first sounds
seductive: who would not like a rose
hedge, flowery, colourful and scented
when in bloom? It would not need to be
long: half a dozen yards would suffice.
Until quite recently I would have
directed you to that excellent group of
roses, the hybrid musks. They go back
to hybridising in Germany in 1904,
but took off in the 1920s with an
invaluable English clergyman, the Rev
Joseph Pemberton, who bred most of
the best. If you like “old” roses, the
musks now qualify, though they once
seemed the dawn of the new.
Pemberton’s marvellous silvery-pink
Felicia is one of the best, and the
self-describing Buff Beauty, bred by
an affiliated nurseryman, would have
joined it as my two first choices for
hedging up to 4ft or 5ft. Both flower
twice, but Buff Beauty tends to
develop mildew in autumn. They are
still good hedging choices.
I now know even better. Five years
ago, I planted the hedge that is my
pride of the moment. It is made up of
the pink-flowered Olivia Rose Austin,
named by the great breeder David
Austin in honour of his granddaughter.
It came on to the market in 2014 and in
winter 2015 I spaced bushes of it about
3ft apart down either side of a broad
paved path, making a double hedge
about 15 yards long. I was acting on the
advice of Austin himself and his
nursery’s managers.
I wanted, like many of you, a rose
hedge about 4ft high whose flowers
would be paleish pink. In the early
1980s Austin had suggested the scented
pink rose Ispahan, which ought to have
been registered as Isfahan, but was
misspelt. It was an excellent choice, but
although it flowered early, it flowered
only once. Temporary building works
required it to be moved and replaced,
whereupon I appealed to the maestro
yet again. He urged me to plant Olivia
Rose Austin, saying it was the best rose
he had so far bred. Without seeing it,
I obeyed and have had nothing but ease
and delight from it ever since.
It is in full flower now, but this
display is only the first of three before
late autumn. Other roses flower once
or sometimes twice, but Olivia Rose
★ FTWeekend
(Above) Olivia Rose Austin flowers
Austin, named for breeder three times a
David Austin’s year. It also
granddaughter, flowers looks smart
three times a year; (right) and exciting
climber Crimson Glory in spring
Alamy; GAP Photos/Maddie Thornhill
before the
flowers appear
because its young
leaves are a
coppery colour before
turning green. I have
done nothing to it since
planting it, no spraying, no pruning,
no feeding. It went into ground dug
to a depth of two spades and well
manured. In return it has done exactly
what was promised.
Until this year its flat-centred cupped
flowers hung down a little on their
stems. While thanking Austin for his
advice, I remarked on this apparent
failing but he said it would improve
after three years or so. Again, he has
been vindicated. This year, fewer of the
flowers are drooping, and so bumble
bees, the bees for pollination, have
been visiting it happily. Even passing
Robin Lane Fox Oxford professors have noticed the
scent, especially on a cool evening. It is
not as strong as Ispahan’s but it exists.
On gardens Unlike Ispahan it is a flowery miracle
for three months of summer.
Alternative
Austin
proposals
were his
white-
flowered
William and
Catherine, bred
for their royal
wedding day in
2011, and Princess
Anne, a rich pink, which
is deeper and stronger in
colour than pale pink Olivia Rose. Both
flower repeatedly and are my second
and third choices. They make the same
point, however. Roses have not been
standing still and the hybrid musks,
though still very good, are not now my
top choices for hedging.
What about roses in pots? Here
I have been old-fashioned since about
1995, and am now out of date. I planted
Camaieux, widely recommended for
the job, a pink, white and purple-
streaked Gallica rose that was bred in
1830. It grows only 3ft high and is good,
but once flowering. When my back is
turned, it always catches the black spot
disease on its leaves by mid-July. I am
dumping it in favour of the royal
couple Wills and Kate and the stalwart
Princess Anne. The latter is billed as
19 June/20 June 2021
“best for health” and “best for
flowering” in the Austin list. Those
credits are good enough for me. If you
have been too loyal to once-flowering
old roses in pots, plant them elsewhere
and move over to modernity.
What about that irresistible
specification, a dark red rose to grow
up a wall? Here, David Austin’s breeding
has less to offer. For years I grew the
tall Etoile de Hollande, a good scarlet
crimson, but it is a rose for high walls
only, eventually preferring more than
10ft in height. On a pale wall I have
enjoyed the superb Guinee, a truly
dark crimson, but it is not very
vigorous and catches bad mildew.
Since 2009 I have found a better
option in the deep scarlet band of the
range. Peter Beales launched
Highgrove, chosen for the Prince of
Wales’s garden, where it is indeed
If you have been too loyal to
once-flowering old roses in
pots, plant them elsewhere,
move over to modernity
excellent, beside the main doorway
from which the prince usually enters
his garden, I recall. On a smallish
non-royal wall it is excellent too,
quite loosely petalled in flower but
unmistakably scented. Usefully, it
reaches only about 8ft.
Another option is Crimson Glory,
launched as a climber in the 1940s but
newish to my horizon. The flowers are
beautifully shaped, being hybrid teas,
and have a fine scent. It needs a wall at
least 10ft high, but it flowers twice, very
freely first time round. My latest
rediscovery is more compact, needing,
like Highgrove, only 8ft-10ft. Called
Roundelay, it was launched in Australia
as a bush rose in 1970 but almost nobody
in Britain noticed it. In fact it has lovely
rounded, rather flat flowers with
wrinkled centres and a fruity scent,
some say of raspberries. It has just
been reintroduced in a climbing form
by Peter Beales nursery (classicroses.
co.uk) It certainly fills a gap. As a
relaunch, I count it as a new launch.
Twenty years ago, my best rose for
hedging, best roses for pots and these
lower-growing climbing reds were not
in existence or not much known. Like
their garden owners, roses have not
stood still. In this lovely year for them
we are ever more spoiled for choice.
Saturday 19 June / Sunday 20 June 2021
Antiques meet the next generation
Initiative | Masterpiece fair launches its online
edition and announces a new programme that
aims to support emerging artists. By Jan Dalley
M
asterpiece, the annual art
and antiques fair usually
held in a resplendent
marquee in the grounds
of Chelsea’s Royal Hospi-
tal, is launching an online edition for the
second time. Its 127 galleries, with offer-
ings ranging from antiquities to contem-
porary jewellery, Impressionist draw-
ings to Persian carpets, appear in virtual
form. Of the decision to go digital-only,
its director Lucie Kitchener says, “It’s all
about agility at the moment. We have to
weigh up what people are allowed to do,
and what they feel like doing.”
While she is “incredibly sorry” not to
be puttin on the fair in real life, with all
the buzz and atmosphere of the event,
she also has an eye to the advantages
and opportunities of the digital plat-
form. Beyond the undeniably improved
access — reaching “so many people who
can never get to the fair in its physical
form” — there’s much to be learnt, and
for the future, she says, “we have to har-
ness the good things even when we go
back to the things we’re missing.”
The restrictions of the pandemic have
not slowed her ambitions for innova-
tion, however. This year, a new project
dreamt up jointly with Royal Bank of
Canada (RBC), the fair’s main partner,
and Sotheby’s Institute, is a programme
aimed at support for emerging artists.
Rather than a prize or a one-off event at
the fair, the three decided on an educa-
tional support scheme which — through
a free-to-all online video presentation —
will offer artists a grounding in the
sometimes tricky practical and finan-
cial realities of the art world.
As Prue Thompson, head of market-
ing at RBC Wealth Management,
explains it, “We want to help young art-
ists make a proper career out of their
talent . . . help them with commercial
and financial literacy. Introduce the key
themes; give them the confidence to
ask the right questions. The bank can
M AST E RPI E CE | L ONDON A RT W EEK | E VEN TS | P EOP LE | N EWS
Glass act How the material has made it into the big time — PAGE 3
provide expert resources, and with Mas-
terpiece’s amazing art-world network,
and the great brand and educational
expertise of Sotheby’s Institute, we can
be committed to helping artists in the
next phase of their development.”
A project for emerging artists is, I sug-
gest to Kitchener, a slight surprise —
Masterpiece is essentially a secondary-
market fair, with a wealth of partici-
pants dealing in antiques, established
art of the past, historic artefacts
and more. It is the home of cross-genre
collecting, a mecca for those who like
to combine a Biedermeier cabinet with
an African tribal mask, or place
an ancient Greek fragment next to a
piece by Gaudier-Brzeska. Hardly the
first place you’d go to for new art and
cutting-edge artists.
‘Although we are all about
the established market,
we have to make sure we’re
feeding it for the future’
But Masterpiece is, she insists, “pas-
sionate about keeping one eye on the
future”. The project grew out of a desire
to establish “something that was perma-
nent and would really add value —
although we are all about the estab-
lished market, we have to make sure
we’re feeding it”.
Feeding the future of the art world
establishment, as she explains, involves
an educational ethos that also reflects
the corporate culture of RBC, which has
a successful emerging artists’ pro-
gramme running in Canada. Thompson
says that she took her UK model from
this. Masterpiece has a young collectors’
club, aimed at fostering people who
wish to buy art, sharing expertise and
experience, as well as an unusual vetting
mentee programme. “Vetting”, in the
Carl-Henning
Pedersen’s
‘Karon’s Båd’
(1989) — Die Galerie
Follow us on Twitter @FTLifeArts
world of art fairs, is the process of send- Above, from left: William Klein’s ‘Dorothy + white light strip’ (1962); Garry Miller’s
ing reputable independent experts ‘Coloured Seed 4’ (2020); Terry Frost’s ‘Stacked Red Pisa’ (1971); Giovanni Pieratti’s
around the offerings in the various ‘Kneeling Venus with Dolphin’ (1620s) — HackleBury Fine Art; Ingleby Gallery; 3812 Gallery; Anthony Outred
booths sniffing out anything phoney or
fake, or even just mislabelled: on this
programme people entering a career in
art can shadow the veteran vetters and
learn from them.
The new project, launching in Sep-
tember and aimed at recent art gradu-
ates in the UK, will give advice and
instruction in different areas — “things
people don’t necessarily talk about”
including promoting yourself, how to
value your work, getting a gallery, con-
tracts and fees, how to handle commis-
sions, IP in the digital era and more.
Both Thompson and Kitchener stress
that the scheme is in an experimental
phase: they hope to build a community
through free and accessible content and
by assessing need and results as they go
along. “An evolving programme”, is how
Kitchener talks of it, with a long-term
view that she says is shared by both RBC
and Sotheby’s.
So what, do each of these interesting
women think, is the real point of helping
artists with the practical and financial
aspects of the business they are enter-
ing? Given, that is, that so many artists
hate even to think of their art-making
journey in that way? With everything
that has happened recently, as well
as the rapidly changing and highly
demanding art world, Kitchener
believes, “We have given [the next gen-
eration] a lot of challenges, we need
to give them a lot of support. It might
sound a bit pious but I do think we
have a collective responsibility to make
a difference.
“It chimes with the ethos of many
organisations who are sponsoring the
arts. There’s an important shift. It used
to be that people might write a cheque
and then bring their clients along, and
that would be it. But now organisations
are wanting to make a considerable con-
tribution beyond the cash.”
Thompson agrees with this. RBC, she
says, always wants to connect its spon-
sorships to a wider community. In the
UK they also sponsor programmes at
the Old Vic theatre and, just recently, at
the Brit School for the Performing and
Creative Arts, as well as partnering with
the Prince’s Trust.
“People might roll their eyes at this
corporate mantra,” she says, “but we are
determined to make communities
thrive, and our clients thrive.”
When I ask about this once-unlikely
trio — only a few years ago, art fairs and
auction houses had little to do with each
other, and corporate sponsors were
often at arm’s length — Kitchener says,
“An awful lot of terrible things have hap-
pened [to artists] during this pandemic,
heartbreaking struggles — but a few
good things have come out of it. Includ-
ing the death of a few sacred cows.
People realise, we all realise I think, that
we’re stronger together than apart.”
Masterpiece online, June 24-27. Details of
the programme at masterpiecefair.com
2 ★
Collecting
London Art Week | This year’s event
sees galleries celebrate works across
the ages, with digital and in-person
initiatives, writes Gareth Harris
T
he organisers of London Art
Week (LAW) have come up
with some innovative ideas
to keep the event format
fresh. For this year’s itera-
tion running over a fortnight from July
2, more than 40 galleries across Mayfair,
St James’s and elsewhere in the capital
have organised exhibitions, talks and
special events both digitally and in real
life. The aim is to shine a light on art
from antiquity to the present day, with a
focus on Renaissance, Baroque, classical
and modern works.
This year, two new initiatives will
strengthen the hybrid platform. Arturo
Galansino, director general of Palazzo
Strozzi in Florence, will curate an online
show under the theme “Revolution and
Renewal”, featuring one work drawn
from each participant. Johnny van
Haeften gallery has, for instance, put
forward “Noli me tangere” by Jan
Brueghel the Younger (late 1630s,
priced at £175,000).
“This is entirely based on works and
objects provided by the LAW exhibitors;
the theme is ours but the choice is
Arturo’s,” says participating gallerist
and chair of London Art Week, Stephen
Ongpin. “We wanted a platform that ties
in with the 5,000 years of art history
represented by our exhibitors.”
The second new venture is a week-
long LAW “showcase” exhibition at the
gallery hub Cromwell Place located in
South Kensington. “Each exhibitor will
‘It gives us the opportunity
to work collaboratively, to
feel part of an artistic tidal
wave and to wow collectors’
A fresh format
contribute one work that effectively
sums up what they do. The idea is to
reach out to the people who live in that
area, encouraging them to come and see
the mothership galleries in Mayfair,”
Ongpin adds. The new satellite show
could also “attract a different and
younger crowd”, he says.
Ongpin is so taken with Cromwell
Place, he plans to open his own exhibi-
tion there at the same time, comprising
19th- and 20th-century landscape
drawings and watercolours by artists
such as Paul Cézanne and Lucian Freud.
This will coincide with his usual London
Art Week show in his St James’ gallery
(Stephen Ongpin Fine Art), focused on
drawings dating from around 1520 to
1988 with artists including John Robert
Clockwise from Cozens and Frank Auerbach.
top: Study for This year is evidently different in the
‘The Siege of wake of the pandemic, admits Ongpin.
Tortona’ (1866- During a normal London summer,
67) by Andrea numerous US collectors and curators
Gastaldi; ‘Iris would make the pilgrimage. “We’ll
Beerbohm Tree’ probably have fewer American visitors.
(1920) by What we can do is continue to show the
Augustus John; art market in London in the best possi-
‘Barges on the ble light,” Ongpin says.
Seine’ (c1950s) The UK art market is clearly going
by Fikret through a difficult patch in the wake of
Mualla; ‘The Brexit and Covid-19. “I don’t think we’ll
Bed’ (1965) by have a sense of how Brexit has really
Beryl affected the London art market for
Bainbridge — Todd another two or three years because the
White Art Photography; Philip
Mould & Co.; Stephen Ongpin
pandemic skews everything. I’m opti-
Fine Art; Ben Elwes Fine Art mistic, though. There is this underlying
Trading in history for 50 years
Charles Ede The gallery has specialises in antiquities from ancient
Egypt, Greece and the Roman empire,
seen radical change in five which has sold more than 30,000 objects
decades. By Dalia Dawood to museums and collectors globally. Yet
Tyndall claims that for her and manag-
N
ing director Martin Clist, dealing in
ear the fireplace in the home antiquities has changed. Adapting to
of British art dealer Charis shifts in tastes, digital developments
Tyndall sits a small, dark and the rise of contemporary art
material similar to a piece of has kept the gallery on its toes.
coal. On closer inspection, it An example this week is its
is actually a fragment of a 14th-century cross-platform events
BCE ancient Egyptian statue, depicting at the Masterpiece
the ear, wig and mane of Sekhmet, the online fair alongside
lion-headed goddess. “If you don’t know an in-person exhibi-
what you’re looking at you might think tion at its gallery.
it’s a piece of rubble,” she says with a Tastes and fashions
laugh. “The nonchalance of it can be have tilted towards
enjoyable. Only ancient fragments do smaller, more modest
that — it’s one of the reasons why they’re pieces — such as the
becoming incredibly popular.” trend for fragments
Tyndall is the director of established over whole objects —
London antiquities dealer Charles Ede, mirroring a cultural
which is celebrating 50 years in business. transition whereby
She talks to me on the phone from the “people aren’t as flash as they
Marylebone gallery, her anecdote about once were”. She compares 19th- and
the Egyptian fragment an example of the 21st-century homes, which have moved
way historic art collectors’ tastes have away from the former’s gilt-laden furni-
evolved, one of the “major shifts” she ture and scrolling acanthus leaves to
identifies that the gallery has encoun- today’s minimalist interiors. As in any
tered in its five decades. market, what’s in vogue will change, but
Fifty years seems like a drop in the unlike the contemporary art world’s
ocean for a commercial gallery that rapid movers and shakers, in antiquities
FTWeekend
it’s “a lot slower”. “You’re not suddenly does a gallery dealing in older art keep
going to find yourself owning something “up-to-date” when its works are strictly
deeply unfashionable!” the opposite? The answer is by collabo-
Pressure from collectors of old art rating. At Charles Ede’s joint booth with
demanding a greater transparency New York contemporary gallery Sean
about the provenance of objects is Kelly at the fall edition of Tefaf New York
another change for the gallery. Ideas 2019, the juxtaposition of their genres
about cultural heritage and owner- produced a striking visual mix. The gal-
ship are being interrogated leries paired a Roman marble draped
and challenged. “We’re fac- sculpture of Asclepius with works by the
ing questions that people Scottish abstract painter Callum Innes,
weren’t asking before,” whose process — “unpainting” his can-
Tyndall says. “People are vases using turpentine to remove layers
questioning how others of paint — Tyndall compares to creating
have behaved and how marble statues. “It’s the same principle
objects have moved. They of stripping something back to create
want proof that they haven’t what you want hidden within.”
been removed from their The recent trend for crossover collect-
country of origin in the last 20 ing, fuelled partly by genre-spanning
or 30 years.” fairs that have coupled the works of cut-
She notes that the gallery ting-edge artists with those of their
“keeps copies of absolutely ancient art forefathers, reflects changes
everything”, but adds, “there’s a in modern tastes. No longer do people’s
push to make [provenance] more collections tip heavily on one end of the
black-and-white but it’s difficult historic spectrum or the other; they
. . . everything Roman doesn’t come incorporate a broad range of eras.
from Italy. Geographical lines have been “Antiquities can bring a level of gravi-
drawn and we’re applying them to tas to a modern collection and contem-
ancient cultures. It’s also about the legal- porary art can bring a certain sexiness to
ities of trade. Objects were made to be an antiquity and keep it relevant so it’s
traded if they’ve left the country legally.” not just another broken sculpture. It
With new art innovations such as non- helps you to reimagine these pieces and I
fungible tokens (NFTs) emerging, how find that thrilling,” she adds.
sense from collectors, dealers and
museum curators that they’re all pas-
sionately invested in the markets which
our exhibitors represent, such as my
field of drawings. Events like London
Art Week can certainly help to scratch
that itch,” he adds.
The collective aspect is a boon as deal-
ers try to negotiate the “new normal”.
“This is part of the roadmap to normal-
ity, our spaces are not only commercial,
students and collectors visit us to learn
more about pieces, often to see muse-
um-level works, and speak to us about
their passions,” says Flo Horswell of
Sladmore gallery, which is showing
sculptural works depicting animals dat-
ing back three centuries by artists such
as Rembrandt Bugatti and Sophie Dick-
ens (“In the Summertime – Country Life
~ Wildlife ~ Sporting Life”)
There are other collegiate gallery
events centred on London’s traditional
blue-chip art district, so how does LAW
differ? “It has never been a marketing
exercise; it is a unique collaboration by
some of the world’s best galleries deal-
ing in art from antiquity to the 20th cen-
tury that presents . . . openings, talks
and the chance to speak to some of the
From left: ‘Greek head
of a male banqueter’;
‘Roman statue of
Asclepius’ — Courtesy Charles Ede
19 June/20 June 2021
best dealers and experts in the world,”
says Andreas Pampoulides, co-founder
of Lullo Pampoulides gallery.
Accessing such specialists is a huge
draw. “London Art Week is the ideal
platform because we can discuss works
of art with curators, collectors and other
enthusiasts in the gallery,” says Rachel
Elwes of Ben Elwes Fine Art (the gallery
does not participate in any art fairs).
The week is also about bringing to the
fore important new art historical dis-
coveries via scholarly research. Ben
Elwes Fine Art has built its special
LAW exhibition Literary Women: Writers
and Revolutionaries around a Carrera
marble bust depicting the Victorian
writer and nurse Jessie White Mario
(1832-1906), who played an instrumen-
tal role in the unification of Italy in 1871;
the bust is attributed to the American
sculptor Margaret Foley (1827-1877).
The gallery will also present a recently
discovered 1965 self-portrait of the late
novelist Beryl Bainbridge.
Lullo Pampoulides gallery is showing
a self-portrait by a French painter called
Ernestine Darbour, which was painted
in 1894 (“Self-portrait, aged 22, holding
a palette and a lily”, £38,000) “Part of
our gallery’s ethos is to show great art
even if it is by relatively unknown art-
ists. Darbour either wasn’t prolific or,
being a female artist, wasn’t as well doc-
umented or collected as her male coun-
terparts,” says Andreas Pampoulides.
Other talking points include a “lost
portrait” by the 16th-century Venetian
artist Tintoretto, available with Benappi
Fine Art gallery. The work is available
for a “six-figure sum”, the gallery says.
London Art Week has always been a
magnet for museum curators, fostering
important art world collaborations.
“Many are not aware of the very positive
relationships shared by curators and
dealers through events such as these,”
says Elwes. London’s National Gallery
and the Amon Carter Museum of Amer-
ican Art in Forth Worth, Texas, are
among the institutions who have
acquired works from the gallery.
Tomasso gallery will present Baroque:
Ancient to Early Modern in collaboration
with Galerie Chenel of Paris, reflecting
the international reach of London Art
Week. Fascinating items on offer
include a 17th-century French bronze of
the Infant Hercules wrestling a snake
that belonged to a Russian family of
Imperial diplomats (Tomasso).
“We want to focus on the Baroque as
an artistic vocabulary, not as a period,
which opens up the possibility of a dia-
logue between ancient and early mod-
ern art,” says Emanuela Tarizzo, direc-
tor of Tomasso gallery. The event might
even tempt a new generation of connois-
seurs. “We are trying to encourage col-
lectors that might not traditionally look
at pre-contemporary art,” adds Tarizzo.
Florrie Evans, director of the Fine Art
Society and a LAW newcomer, echoes
this sentiment. “It’s our hope that Lon-
don Art Week will provide some cross-
pollination with collectors who perhaps
have a core Old Master interest, but may
be curious to dip their toes into our par-
ticular aesthetic,” she says.
In its new Carnaby Street base, the
gallery will show a selection of ceramics
by the South African potter Hylton Nel
alongside a group of paintings by the
British Surrealist John Armstrong
(1893-1973), drawn from a single-owner
collection. “We will also present an
important late-period still-life by the
great Jewish artist, Mark Gertler (1891-
1939),” Evans says.
“London Art Week gives us the oppor-
tunity to work collaboratively with our
colleagues in the trade, to feel part of an
artistic tidal wave, ready to wow collec-
tors and enthusiasts with the joy of a
full-on art fest,” she concludes.
July 2-16, londonartweek.co.uk
Rapid moves towards the digital
sphere are more challenging. “We like
the tangible and analogue,” admits Tyn-
dall. As the pandemic ushered the art
world’s exodus to online quicker, busi-
nesses operating in antiquities and Old
Masters suffered the biggest losses.
Thankfully, being a longstanding gal-
lery has a certain clout that “really
helped” Charles Ede avoid a plummet in
profits, Tyndall confirms. “We have a
reputation, so people weren’t nervous
buying from us having never met us.”
The digital challenges they have faced
are more technical, such as selling
objects on a screen. The nuances of a pat-
tern on a Hellenistic vase, for example,
its size, the way light bounces off it, are
all lost in the flat pixels of an image
online. “Thank God there is Zoom!”
Tyndall exclaims, who uses the platform
to show her clients pieces via video calls.
A dealership trading in snippets of the
past must still look ahead. The key, for
Tyndall, is adaptability. “With every
change, there’s always room for you to
question your business conduct and
adjust it in a way that’s flexible.” She
believes studying the past through these
artefacts helps us to learn from it. “It
makes us look at ourselves, at the history
of man, and how we’ve treated each
other,” she reflects.
19 June/20 June 2021 ★ FTWeekend 3

Collecting

A clear
remains all-important in this still
relativelyy small world. Manyy contempo-
rary glass artists were trained in one of a
few historic centres — Venice, of course,
or the Czech Republic with its centuries-
old history of Bohemian glass and crys-

for glas
tal, hand-cut, painted, engravea d — or in
places that teach the same techniques.
Butt they are then free to reje
e ctt those tra-
ditions and experiment forr themselves.
Danish artist Trine Drivsholm, for
example, was trained in Venetian-
style glassblowing at Seattle’s Pilchuck
School of Glass. But she saysa her work
draws more strongly on her Nordic
cultural background.
Drivsholm’s work was shown at last
year’s Collect fair in London, which
hosted sixx galleries offering studio glass.
Masterpiece | Julia Sutherland The rich studio glass scene in Scandina-
via is on display at Masterpiece online
explores the rich craft of fair this week, where the work k of Tobias
Mohl, another Dane, can be seen at
Adrian Sassoon gallery. Mohl also says a
glassmaking, which is being that his work “is about using the V Vene-

showcased
w at the online fair Contemporary
glassmakers are pushing

O
ver the past 50 years, it has
been ceramics that have a
made the arduous climb
from lowlyy “craft” status to
full artistic acceptance.
These days
a , ceramicists can achieve rec-
ognition as contemporary artists and
their work sells for substantial sums,
while ceramics of the past are also being
reassessed and revalued.
Now w it is the turn of glass. Once purely
an artisan pursuit, glassmaking today is
very much considered a proper artt form
and in the past 20 years has grown inex-
orably in variety, sophistication and
imaginative reach. It is attractive to col-
lectors because prices are still relatively
affordable, and can begin fairly low —
although a piece by the great Czech
glassmaking duo Stanislav Libensky k main: ‘Five Part
and Jaroslava Brychtova was sold in
2007 for $480,000. Butt their astonish-
ing geometric works — exercises in light
as much as in glass — can reach four
metres in height and theirr pieces are in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
other collections.
The Libenskys k had separately begun
theirr experiments in glass as early as the
1940s butt began working together after
their marriage in the 1960s, at the same
moment as the Studio Glass movement
Clockwise from was getting under way in the US. Names
such as Harver y Littleton, widely consid-
Black Twill ered the “father” of the Studio Glass
Collection’ movement, Robert C Fritz and others
(2018) and ‘Ten were then establishing the idea that
White Twill glassmaking and blowing could be done
Collection’ in individual studios — rather than on
(2021) both by the ffactoryy floor — and tthat unique, non-
Tobias Mohl; functional pieces made byy a single artist
‘V&A Rotunda could achieve tthe status of sculpture.
Chandelier’ In fact, the American glass artist Dale
(2001) by Dale Chihuly, who began his career in the
Chihuly — Courtesy 1960s, describes himselff simply as a
Adrian Sassoon
“sculptor”. With his flamboyant crea-
tions — which include the mighty
snakes’-nest chandelier that hangs in
the entrance hall of London’s Victoria &
Albert museum, and the Yellow Chan-
delier in the Tower of David museum in
Jerusalem — he claims to have
a unequiv-
ocally moved objects in glass “into the
realm of large-scale sculpture”.
Studio glass has not only spread
across the world but shared its name —
it is now the usual term for all such
pieces — and important centres for f its
making range ffrom Seattle to Canberra.
There are museums of glass across the
world, and even a non-profit group for
collectors and curators called the Art
Alliance for Contemporaryy Glass, which
promotes the art form in the US, and the
Contemporaryy Glass Society in the UK.
New glassmakers are pushing the
boundaries of the form as hard as they
can. Mixing glass with otherr materials —
cane, brick, metals, wood — creates
dramatic new effects, and the cross-
pollination of ideas and techniques
between traditional centres and the
new thinking is visible in the work of
today’s artists.
Despite all this innovation, tradition
the boundaries of the form
as hard as they can
tian techniques in a Scandinavian
way . . . I have
a explored methods that
break away ffrom the traditional pat-
terns to discover a new
w and more organic
expression and style.” Mohl’s signature
pieces include the “Nest Bowl” (2019),
which mixes canework k with
h blown glass,
as well as multiple displays
a such as his
10-partt “White Twill” collection.
Masterpiece also presents a chance to
appreciate the full historic range of
glassmaking. Roman and Hellenistic
glass on sale includes a wonderful ring
cast from light green transparent glass
in Greece from the third-second century
BCE (att ArtAncient). Att that time, glass,
with its magical light-reflectingg proper-
ties, was a jewellers’ material as highly
regarded as precious metals. There are
18th-century Venetian pieces, and sev-
eral galleries such as WW Warner
antiques offer glass artefacts dating
from the
t 17th-19th centuries.
For both devotees and novice collec-
tors, whether it’s the historic orr the con-
temporary that attracts you, glass is a
medium to reckon with.
June 24-27,
7 masterpieceefair.c
r om
4 ★ FTWeekend 19 June/20 June 2021

Collecting

‘My collection
is an instrument
I delicately ask him about the
failed attempt to create an
extension to Geneva’s Musée
d’Art et d’Histoire. Designed
by French architect Jean Nou-
vel, the extension would have

of education’
his phone to show it to me.
Jean-Claude Gandur | The Swiss entrepreneur and His first art purchase as an
adult was a group of drawings
by Francis Picabia. But the
collector tells Georgina Adam about his quest to most important moment was
when, newly married, he and his
wife saw two pieces in an antiquity
find a museum to house his vast array of historic art dealer’s window in Paris. “The owner,
François Antonovich, came out. I said I
didn’t have enough money to buy them.
cost CHF131m (about
$146m), to which Gandur
would have contributed
some CHF40m (about
$44m). The agreement
included long-term loans of
some of his antiquities and
paintings, but by a narrow
vote, the people of Geneva
rejected the plan. It has been
reported, erroneously, that
he then gave up on the
idea of having a
museum.
Gandur is actually
happy to talk about this. “The negative Clockwise from main: Art collector have picnics . . . I told the then mayor of
side of this is my regret that Geneva and Jean-Claude Gandur with a selection Bordeaux, [former prime minister
its population did not understand what I of his ancient Egyptian art; ‘Umbria Alain Juppé], that if I have to sell kebabs

T
he collector is only a
moment in the history of a
collection!” So says the
Swiss entrepreneur, philan-
thropist and collector par
excellence, Jean-Claude Gandur. For the
last 40 years he has been amassing
works of art in five fields — archaeology,
the decorative arts, modern painting,
ethnology and African contemporary
art. In 2010 he put all 3,500 works into a
foundation to ensure they remain avail-
able to the public even after he is no
more. “I did not spend my life collect-
ing, for the works to be dispersed after
my death,” he explains. While a project
to install them into a Swiss museum has
floundered, he is actively seeking some-
where in France for their new home.
Gandur talks to me via Zoom from his
Normandy manor, a magnificent house
with its own chapel, surrounded by ver-
dant gardens. He is simply dressed in an
open-necked blue shirt. Behind him are
small antiquities: a seated Egyptian fig-
ure, Middle Eastern statuettes and a
pre-Columbian vase. He is affable and
talkative, but very precise: he uses his
phone to show me pictures of works
from his collection. It’s clear he knows
each piece well, talking to them on the
screen using the French informal “tu”.
French is Gandur’s first language, but
he also speaks English, Italian and
Arabic, the latter an inheritance from
his childhood in Egypt. He was born in
France but his haute bourgeois family —
Italian on his father’s side, Russian-
Ukrainian on his mother’s — soon
moved to Alexandria. Their life there,
however, came to an end after President
Nasser’s nationalisations which led to
the family moving to Switzerland in
1961. Gandur is now a Swiss national,
although currently domiciled in Malta.
He comes from a family of collectors
— “I grew up surrounded by paintings.
My grandparents had Impressionists,
works by Vlaminck, Marquet, Derain,
Dufy. They also had a pronounced taste
for chinoiseries, Ming vases and so on —
which I found, even young, completely
insignificant!”
As a boy Gandur definitely had the
collecting bug himself — at just six years
old, he amassed Coca-Cola bottle tops.
“Each time I opened a bottle I did it dif-
ferently and then I classified the tops
according to the way they were bent.
That was my first collection,” he
explains. Much later, he discovered and
bought a work by César, an assemblage
of bottle tops — and again, he pulls out
He said, ‘pay me back every month’. It was trying to do; there was an alliance Vera’ (1952) by Alberto Burri; to bring people in, I will do so! I want to
Below: works from the took me seven months to do so.” They between the far left and a certain bour- ‘Concetto spaziale’ (1956) by Lucio demystify art, I don’t want it just to be
collection include were Greek statuettes showing geoisie who were against the project, Fontana — Claudio Bader; Sandra Pointet; courtesy for the elite.”
‘Transparence’ (1929-30) Ganymede carried off by Zeus, and that and I was perceived as a foreigner trying Foundation Gandur
As we finish — with a number of topics
by Francis Picaba; first step led to a 20-year collaboration to get into ‘their’ museum,” he says. undiscussed, such as his collection of
statuette of Ganymede, with Antonovich which has resulted in a “But,” he continues, “the positive side contemporary African art — he talks
Greece, 3rd-1st century collection of some 1,250 pieces covering of this was that the model was not best about the future of the foundation. “I
BCE; ‘Piccola Estate’ the whole Mediterranean area, notably for the museum — and it would have am lucky to have a considerable for-
(1956) by Afro Greece, Rome and Egypt as well as mutilated my collection, they would tune,” he says. “I have made a legal
Sandra Pointet; courtesy Foundation Gandur
Eastern civilisations. only have shown a tiny percentage of agreement with my son and his family,
“I wanted to have a museum-quality paintings and my archaeology would that the bulk of my fortune will go to
ensemble, and to use the collection to have been submerged in their own support the foundation and continue its
explain the spiritual sources of Christi- beautiful collection.” work.” We have a final exchange about
anity and Judaism — how we inherited The result is that he has been pros- his 14-year-old grandson, who already
the Oriental tradition of deity. This has pecting French municipalities, although seems to have inherited the same col-
become almost an idée fixe with me — these efforts have currently been halted lecting bug. “He’s just as systematic as I
the link between antiquity and the crea- by the pandemic. He knows what he was at that age!” says Gandur proudly.
tion of Europe, the recuperation of Ori- wants: “The museum must have a beau-
ental gods.” tiful garden where families can come fg-art.org
Collecting, he explains, “is more than
just buying beautiful objects, my collec-
tion is also an instrument of education.”
Indeed, he organises numerous tours
for school groups and has also created a
‘When I started out
provenance, ethics, were not
mentioned . . . My greatest
fear was buying a fake’
separate foundation for children, aimed
towards helping young migrants.
Antiquities is the most fraught of col-
lecting fields today, and I ask about this.
“When I started out 40 years ago, prove-
nance, ethics, were not even mentioned.
At the time, my greatest fear was buying
a fake,” he says. “But in the 1990s people
started worrying about provenance and
countries started tightening up legisla-
tion. Then of course the biggest change
came with Isis in 2013. The risk then was
that you could be helping terrorism by
buying an object.” He adds, “I haven’t
bought anything from the Near East for
ten years.” He is a founding member and
chair of the ethics, governance and
remunerations committee of the
Geneva-based International Alliance for
the Protection of Heritage in Conflict
Areas (ALIPH).
Gandur established his own oil
trading company in 1987, working in
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle
East, and this led to his now considera-
ble wealth — and the opportunity to
extend his collecting.
“Until about 1990 I couldn’t afford the
paintings I wanted, then prices col-
lapsed in about 1994 and . . . ” he pauses
for dramatic effect “ . . . that was the luck
of my life. I started buying, buying, buy-
ing like a maniac! I had years to put
together a collection before prices
started going up again around 2002.”
This collection, of mainly French
20th-century painting, notably the Sec-
ond School of Paris, now numbers
around 1,000 works, notably focusing
on abstraction, CoBrA and narrative fig-
uration. “Most of the artists worked in
Paris or were French,” he says. “But I
also have the English artists Lanyon and
Heron and Italians such as Manzoni,
Fontana, Burri and Afro. My instincts
are more in the lyrical Latin tradition, I
have more difficulty judging, for exam-
ple, German artists.” He recounts with
pride that Bernard Blistène, director of
the Pompidou Centre, rates his ensem-
ble of paintings, in its field, as the best
behind the Pompidou and Tate.
Gandur’s objective for the foundation
is “museum quality”, both in the works
he has collected and the way they are
inventoried, displayed and lent. A thor-
ough and detailed website gives details
of each work of art, and the foundation
lends extensively as well as having part-
nerships with the Reina Sofía in Madrid
and various French museums.