Few were expecting much of a showing from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt or the UAE at the 2022 World Cup. Keep this up for a bit and there’ll be no one playing in Qatar, the sweltering home of the tournament that Fifa fixed. The whole shooting match will have to be moved elsewhere.
It would be a result, too, even if the latest diplomatic bust-up in the Gulf has nothing to do with football. The flare-up, rooted in the historic conflict between the Saudis and Iran, is ostensibly over terrorism.
Yet the timing is instructive: barely a week after The Donald visited Riyadh. Emboldened by his joint-denouncement of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, the Saudis and their allies have picked their moment to try to isolate Qatar, a nation it reckons too indulgent of Tehran. And, of course, many would find the Saudis’ posturing over terror funding deeply hypocritical.
That, though, is not today’s point. Whatever the ramifications for football, there’s a lesson in all this for Brexit Britain. Assuming she’s still in charge, Theresa May insists she’ll simply “walk away” if she doesn’t get what she wants out of the EU. But what exactly will she be walking into with her “no deal’s better than a bad deal” mantra?
Only in April, Mrs May embarked on a shameless sales job in Saudi Arabia: offering to rip up the London Stock Exchange’s rulebook to accommodate a secondary listing for Saudi Aramco, the local oil outfit with the $2 trillion price tag. Alongside LSE boss Xavier Rolet, she kicked around allowing Aramco to float just 5 per cent of its shares rather than the requisite 25 per cent. What harm a bit of rule-breaking for the Saudis, buyers of all those BAE Systems Typhoon fighter jets?
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Lots of harm, as it happens, given the precedent it sets. Yet, even if you argue that Brexit Britain must be pragmatic, things still get tricky. Mrs May also needs inward investment. And who better to provide that than the home of a $335 billion sovereign wealth fund: Qatar? It’s already one of the UK’s top investors, with stakes in the LSE itself, Sainsbury’s, Barclays and British Airways owner IAG. It owns Harrods, the Shard and half of Canary Wharf, too.
Mrs May is also relying on Qatari LNG for 30 per cent of our gas imports. And she’ll expect Qatar to cough up for that £17.6 billion third runway at Heathrow, the airport in which it holds a one-fifth stake. But, is a Britain outside the EU single market really going to be able to cut every deal it wants with everyone, regardless of wider geopolitics or the latest intervention from Donald Trump? It looks a bit of a stretch.
So, good luck simply walking out on our 27 EU trading partners. As the latest Gulf ruckus shows, that could prove a spectacular own goal.
Russian putsch
Now we know what Viktor Vekselberg is up to. The Russian oligarch attempting a management coup at gold miner Petropavlovsk isn’t simply trying to oust chairman Peter Hambro and three non-execs for the fun of it. No, the man behind Renova Asset Holdings has a cunning plan. Or so says Russian daily Kommersant.
It reckons Mr Vekselberg, whose Renova vehicle owns 23 per cent of Petropavlovsk, wants to merge the company with his own Kamchatka gold miner. How much easier that will be, too, if he succeeds in nominating two representatives to the board, alongside two more put up by his comrades in arms: the M&G Debt Opportunities Fund and Sothic Capital, together with 15.7 per cent. The showdown shareholder meeting is on June 22.
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And, who knows, perhaps the deal makes sense, even if that depends on the price Mr Vekselberg attaches to Kamchatka. It produced 5.1 tons in 2016, less than half that of Petropavlovsk, which is presently valued at £265 million. Maybe he’ll be generous, but you wouldn’t bet on it: investors typically get shafted by related-party transactions.
That may be only stage one, too, of this Russian putsch. Kommersant suggests Mr Vekselberg’s long-term aim is to merge the combined group with Highland Gold, the rival miner backed by Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, which is valued at £493 million. Hence, maybe, one of Mr Vekselberg’s two Petropavlovsk nominees: none other than Chelski chairman Bruce Buck.
Growing outflows
Another day, another exodus from Genel Energy, now up to three directors in four days. And this time the latest two include co-founder Nat Rothschild, a man whose foray into Iraqi Kurdistan oil proved almost as much fun as his exploits with Bumi’s Indonesian coal.
True, no one predicted the collapse in the oil price or the rise of Isis when he pitched up in 2011. Yet the exit of its 8 per cent shareholder at today’s AGM could spoil one bit of drama. The board was split 4-3 over the bonus for chief executive Murat Ozgul, paid £1.52 million last year despite losing 89 million barrels of oil — or writing them off the reserves. Mr Rothschild, fellow departee Simon Lockett and Umit Bilgin are thought to have voted against the package, only carried with the casting vote of chairman Tony Hayward, who’s also off.
Mr Rothschild was so annoyed he was threatening to vote his stake against the remuneration report, not what you’d usually expect from a director. Less fun now he’s leaving.
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Flight of fancy
First a tunnel, then a “gentle slope”, now stilts. Heathrow’s plans for building its third runway around the M25 get more ingenious by the day. One thing, though: how come transport secretary Chris Grayling approved the project when no one knows where the runway’s actually going?
