From Russia with love

Tuesday, Moscow, Irish pub, no Guinness. I last slept on Sunday night before leaving for Moscow on Monday evening and arriving in the early hours today (now yesterday at the time of publication). I could have kipped down in the transit lounge but chose instead to “do” Moscow in a day.

I turn up on the doorstep of an old friend, Neil Buckley, the FT’s Moscow Bureau Chief who opens the door in his pyjamas as if he does this all the time. I’ve known Neil a long time. He has just become a father for the second time and seems to be taking the new arrival in his stride. Well he can because the baby is back in the UK with his mum awaiting his visa. A few weeks old and he already has a passport. I hope the passport control people can tell it’s the little guy in the photograph.

The cabbie who brought me from the airport must have been a getaway driver before turning to taxis. He drives as if the rest of the road users are competitors in some big urban grand prix. Indeed he takes the chequered flag.

I ask him for a receipt and he proceeds to write what looks like a comprehensive précis of War and Peace. It’s the first receipt I’ve ever had in paperback. All that precious time won on the road is lost in the paperwork

Neil shows me how to use the Metro. I try to memorise things in the street: the advertising hording that looks like football jerseys on a washing line – that’s where we turned right. The station stops are in Cyrillic script so I count the stops and try to memorise the artwork at each of the stations.

He’s going to a conference so I leave him not far from the Kremlin. The Kremlin only takes about an hour – all that Russian history knocked off in a few camera shots. I stand in the road to get a cathedral in the frame. A policeman with a hat the size of a dinner plate blows his whistle in shrill sharp, bursts. He talks “whistle,” the language of officialdom everywhere, possibly because it is so easily understood. I translate this particular series of blasts as “get off the road and back behind the fence if you know what’s good for you.”

Red Square takes marginally less time than the Kremlin, I photograph St Basil’s Cathedral from every conceivable angle, onion by colourful onion. It’s easy to overdose on onion towers in Moscow. The Gum store is not what it was. You can buy things there these days.

There’s time to pop down to the Pushkin Museum that has one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. The Degas pastel drawings, the “Blue Dancers” and his “Nude wiping herself” are stunning. So is the Renoir “nude sitting on a couch.” No-one, not even Rubens, could do flesh like Renoir could do flesh.

There is Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard”, Matisse’s goldfish, Picasso’s “Young Acrobat on a Ball” and Monet’s “Luncheon on the grass.” I can’t think of another gallery anywhere that has this quality of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art concentrated together.

I call back at the FT office for my shoulder bag that weighs almost as much as my luggage after I stuffed my hand baggage with heavy stuff in a bid to escape excess baggage charges. I’m going fishing in Mongolia and fishing means a lot of gear. There’s not much room for luxuries such as clothes.

I’m wondering if I’ve seen the last of my bags. Even the Aeroflot woman at the check in desk in London seemed to have little faith that it would pass smoothly through transit in Moscow. “A lot gets lost,” she said reassuringly.

At the airport I ask the taxi driver for a receipt. This time it’s Anna Karenina. Where else could bureaucracy demand a record of payment that reads like a book plot with a twist at the end?

Money down the tube?

I spend most of my working hours these days, writing, thinking and speaking about work. But for many years at the Financial Times I worked on corporate investigations. In fact it would be true to say that I joined the newspaper with something of a jaundiced attitude towards the City.

Late in 1987 when I joined the editorial, the City had been indulging itself in a financial feeding frenzy that ended on Black Monday, October 19, when stock markets crashed around the world. By the end of the month the value of UK shares had fallen by more than a quarter.

This was the age of the yuppie (young urban professional), parodied by the comedian Harry Enfield with his character "Loadsamoney" who would brandish bundles of money to advertise his obnoxious behaviour.

Whether or not my attitude was justified is a matter of debate but any illusion that the City was populated solely by gentlemen brokers working to the principal that "my word is my bond" was destroyed by the subsequent scandals at Lloyds, Homes Assured, BCCI, Polly Peck and the Maxwell Corporation.

This was the era when the City discovered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history - a cure for Alzheimer's disease. The treatment involved a lengthy trial for insider trading. Little wonder, then, that Ernest Saunders, the former chief executive of Guinness, is the only living beneficiary of this sophisticated remedy. He had shaken off the symptoms of "pre-senile dementia" after serving just 10 months of a prison sentence that had been reduced from five to two-and-a-half years by the time of his release from Ford open prison.

So why should I mention any of this now? Well I'm wondering as we enter the closing years of the decade just who among the current stars in the corporate firmament are going to transform their businesses in to imploding black holes in to which shareholders' investments, pension funds and undeserved reputations will disappear? We can only imagine the flurry of headlines, political recriminations and told-you-so columns penned by those same supine dogs who always fail to bark.

I have one or two ideas but why not do your own spotting? Watch out for those companies that have risen from nowhere, particularly where the chief executive is perceived to possess the Midas touch. Look at the ultimate ownership and evidence of offshore registration or financing.

Is there an elaborate corporate structure with obscure shell companies? If so, ask yourself why it exists and beware the silver tongues who justify such arrangements in the name of tax efficiency. It is no co-incidence that many tax havens are also noted for their secrecy.

Another feature of the markets in the coming year or two may be the fall out from the most recent manifestation of the kind of irrational exuberance that characterised the dot com boom at the end of the 1990s.

There's a new twist this time. On the last occasion the internet business was novel and untried. People threw money at ventures that spent millions trying to grab market share on the strength of their marketing spend rather than on the quality of their service.

This time companies are buying businesses that have grabbed apparent market share (but not earnings). I'm thinking here of ITV's £120m acquisition of Friends Reunited and Google's $1.65bn purchase of YouTube.

I'm wondering whether either of these acquisitions will amount to anything more than a money sponge. Both Friends Reunited and YouTube are communities of interest. But are they great businesses? Do their communities represent a market in any real sense any more than the membership of the Boy Scouts, The Women's' Institute and the Church of England?

Millions of people choose to go to church every Sunday, but their church membership and church going habit does not amount to a commercial enterprise. Why should the behaviour of those who post on YouTube be perceived any differently?

Good luck to the founders of YouTube and Friends Reunited. You have found your place in the sun. I hope that the purchasers of your businesses find lucrative markets among those researching their family trees and those tracing old school friends. But I doubt that they will. People have traced their old school mates and moved on. Interest in family trees will wane.

The problem for YouTube meanwhile is its ubiquity. The internet population is a fickle community that moves locust-like from trend to trend. In their own ways these sites have proved remarkable, transformational communities, phenomena of their time. But are they built to last? Let's wait and see.