Whatever happened to Sir Richard Evans?

Eric Ellis

1 March 2008

Eric Ellis tracks down the former chairman of BAE Systems amid the wintry steppes of Kazakhstan, where he is trying to introduce Western notions of corporate governance

He was tapped in 2006 by the country’s omnipotent ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev to chair what rapidly emerged as Kazakhstan’s biggest company, a newly created state holding company called Samruk. ‘I was introduced to Nazarbayev on one of his early trips to the UK by Tony Blair while I was still at BAE,’ Evans explains. That meeting led to BAE helping to restructure aviation in Kazakhstan and buying 50 per cent of a new airline, Air Astana, which is a joint venture with Samruk.

‘The President was pressing hard for me to come, and he wore me down. I was over here on a review of the airline, we had lunch at the palace and he said, “We want to talk you again about Samruk,” and there and then at that lunch, after a previous nine months’ warm-up, I said, “Fine, OK, I’ll do it.” I don’t think I could’ve said yes had I not seen a lot of them and got to know them quite well.’

Anchored by the state oil company KazMunaiGas (KMG), which had previously been a playground of Nazarbayev’s billionaire son-in-law, Samruk’s $40 billion portfolio equates to about a third of the Kazakh economy. Its payroll totals more than $300,000. All that makes Evans notionally more powerful than most ministers in Nazarbayev’s cabinet.

‘There’s a danger of being treated as a cabinet minister,’ he agrees. ‘But the problem is, if you allow it to happen, then the damned organisation becomes another ministry. It’s a really serious issue. It would be very easy for Samruk to become a super-ministry and all it then does is simply put another layer on top. It’s a constant fight to stop it happening. I cannot afford to engage in politics — and it’s not my politics anyway.’

With oil prices high, KMG may be spark-ling but the rump of Samruk is a largely dysfunctional mélange of beloved Soviet-era monopolies — telecoms, railways, utilities, airports, Caspian shipping, even the postal service — with a governance culture that Brezhnev would have recognised. That Astana still has a Lenin Street suggests that despite the otherworldly modernism of this new capital, just 100km from Siberia, some things remain deeply resistant to change. Privatisation is an aspiration for the Samruk satellites, but it’s still a long way off.