Whatever happened to Sir Richard Evans?

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

‘The prime issue for me, coming here,’ Sir Richard says, ‘is to begin a serious programme of corporate governance, brought into Samruk and carried down into the national companies and the economy. This is a country that has a scarcity of human capital [it has only 15 million people, spread over a million square miles of land]. There are high-quality people, but because of the history, it is exceedingly short of people who’ve got Western and commercial business experience. The big challenge is to develop that experience, and that is a generational thing.’

Evans’s brief is part business leader, part troubleshooter, part teacher, part PR man. He presents as a useful Western suit who can open doors in the City. ‘Most people ask me, “Where the hell is Kazakhstan?” Central Asia for the West ceased to exist for 100 years, it just disappeared off the map. But now it’s increasingly coming back, people are paying a lot more attention and understanding that some of these places are going to be the key economies for the 21st century. The opportunities for this country are phenomenal and to be a part of it is hugely challenging.’

His appointment is also a message that unlike the hermit tendencies of many neighbours in the region — including, increasingly and alarmingly to many, Vladimir Putin’s big bear to the north — Kazakhstan is open for Western business.

Primarily though, Evans’s job is to transform Samruk into an efficient ‘sovereign wealth fund’, the buzz-term du jour to describe the cash-rich investment agencies, often hailing from emerging countries such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Singapore, that share with Kazakhstan a distinct absence of pluralist democracy, and are now busy bailing out subprime-torpedoed Western banks.

Given the preponderance of President-for-life Nazarbayev’s relatives in corporate Kazakhstan — a widespread trend among the old apparatchik families who continue to rule the Central Asian ‘Stans’ of the former Soviet Union — cynics have inevitably suggested that Evans was hired to chair ‘Nazarbayev Inc’. After all, this is a president who has been described as one of the original oligarchs: he has held all but absolute power since shortly before his country gained independence from Moscow in 1991, and has been widely reported by corruption monitoring groups such as Global Witness to have salted away $1 billion of oil revenues in a Swiss bank account. (The newspaper in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s second city, that first published this claim was sent a decapitated dog with a message pinned by a screwdriver plunged into its carcass: ‘There will be no next time.’ The editor fled to Russia after finding the dog’s head at her home.) Nazarbayev is also embroiled in ‘Kazakhgate’, a criminal case against American businessman James Giffen, who stands accused in the US of paying $78 million in kickbacks to Nazarbayev and associates to secure oil deals for US companies.