Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Not for the first time, I felt the lack, in English, of letter closings available to the French. How fitting it would have been to end with

Je reste à votre disposition pour toute précision complémentaire et je vous prie d’agréer toute l’expression de ma très haute considération.

I pulled away from the Kyrgyz. ‘Please excuse me for a moment,’ I said. I got out my phone and e-mailed Mrs Ted Wilson,

Nice running into you today. May I buy you a coffee? I have information regarding Ted that may be of interest to you.

Mrs Ted Wilson did not get back to me. I sent her a follow-up e-mail (which also got no reply) letting her know that in any case I would be at Al Nassma café, on Level One of the Mall of the Emirates, at 11 a.m. on Friday. Dubai Mall, which is newer, has more buzz and glitz than the Mall of the Emirates, but I have a soft spot for the latter’s staid, almost déclassé vibe, which is most pronounced in the textiles and home furnishings section, where Al Nassma is to be found. Al Nassma specializes in chocolate made with camel’s milk. Camel-milk chocolate not only tastes good but works as an icebreaker and talking point.

I arrived early, carrying a copy of Philanthropy , the magazine for philanthropists. I am not strictly a philanthropist, but I am an officer of the Batros Foundation and try to keep up with what’s going on in the giving industry. It must be confessed, I was hoping the publication would make me look good, or at least philanthropic, in the eyes of Mrs Ted Wilson.

I don’t think it’s very wrong of me to dwell with a little pride on my part in the founding of the Batros Foundation.

Very early into my new job, I noticed that my e-mail inbox was the terminus of chaotic requests for alms, handouts, loans, donations, etc., received by the family. Sandro was the chief forwarder of these requests. He might add,

pls do something for this man his mother was my mother’s friend

or

$3,000????

or

tell him to screw himself.

I had (and have) no authority to make ad hoc payouts from the Batros Family Office (Dubai) Ltd account. When I formally requested, on Sandro’s behalf, the consent of Eddie and Georges to the withdrawal of small charitable sums from the GEAs, I got no reply. No doubt they figured Sandro could easily make the payments from his own funds. Yet it seemed to me that there had to be a way lawfully and conveniently to give effect to the Batroses’ benevolent intentions. I advised that the family consider setting up a private foundation, with clearly defined purposes and powers and criteria, as an effective and potentially tax-efficient vehicle for their giving. There was no answer. Some weeks later, I got a call from le père Batros.

This was a surprise and a big deal. It was Georges Batros who’d transformed the family business, a venerable if smallish shipping agency with offices in Beirut, Tripoli and Latakia, into the vast international concern known and trading as Entreprises Batros. The story of his commercial adventures was told in his self-published ghostwritten memoir, La vie est belle , in which he described as a series of very lucky breaks his successful forays into one market after another (marine-insurance agenting; automobile insurance for developing countries; exportation and distribution of generic pharmaceutical products to French-speaking Africa). Perhaps his biggest coup was Banque Batros S.A.L., a specialist in custodian services for Middle Eastern and West African clients founded in 1984: in 1996, he sold the bank (Batros interest: 32 per cent) hook, line and sinker to an American consortium for 440 million USD. The memoir did not mention it, but the family’s real-estate portfolio has grown in value (if my back-of-an-envelope calculations are correct) by at least 160 million USD since the mid-Eighties; and now Eddie is making new fortunes, notably by betting big on agricultural holding companies in Argentina and Brazil. I have no reliable way to estimate the total value of Batros assets, but I would guess that it’s not less than half a billion USD. (If the financial crisis had a negative effect on the family’s wealth, I have not heard about it.) I cannot be any more specific. I’m not really sure where all the money comes from and what it all comes to.

Georges, a little fellow who looks like Charles Aznavour, gave me a signed copy of La vie est belle at our very brief first meeting. This took place on his fuck-off yacht, the Giselle . Named for his deceased mother, it was moored in Beirut harbour most of the year and, according to Eddie, was where Georges now spent most of his time, playing cards and shooting the shit with his crew and old pals. My dedication read, Bonne chance, fiston .

‘ Fiston, écoute bien ,’ he said when he called me in Dubai.

I did as instructed. The next morning I packed a bag, got into the Batros Gulfstream 100 (‘ l’autobus ’, in the family slang), and flew to Antalya, Turkey. From there I took a two-hour taxi ride to Finike, a small coastal town. The Giselle , too big for the marina, was anchored well offshore. A crewmember collected me in a rubber dinghy, incidentally trying to break the world water-speed record. Waiting at the top of the boarding ladder was Georges Batros. He wore a naval peaked cap, shorts, and no shirt. ‘OK, yallah ,’ he said to the captain. To me he said, ‘Welcome aboard,’ and he kissed me on both cheeks.

Somebody took my bag, somebody took me to the dining deck, somebody made me a gin and tonic. I didn’t want a gin and tonic, but what the hell. It was good to have got out of the desert, and I’d never been on a private cruise or visited this part of the ancient world. The yacht, or ship, slipped past aquamarine inlets and between small islands where wild olive trees grew out of grey and white rocks. The littoral mountains, precipitous and forested, were beautiful. A cool breeze blew. I inhabited the World of Rolex.

And yet I was jumpy. Why? Because I am not a total dope. I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of equating beautiful surroundings with a beautiful state of affairs. When, in Beirut, Eddie introduced me to his father, he said, ‘You’re going to like him. He’s mellowed a lot since the old days.’ People who are said to have ‘mellowed’ always make me nervous. Meanwhile I had already figured out that to even begin to understand the Batros family you had to understand the money. The Batros sons are highly remunerated (salaries, bonuses, stock options, employment benefits) but many of their largest capital assets — houses, boats, lump sums from the GEAs, interest-free loans, etc. — have essentially remained in the gift of their father, who is the majority shareholder of Batros Holdings Ltd (incorporated in the DIFC), which in turn wholly owns the Batros subsidiaries, of which there are more than fifty, which in turn own who knows how many sub-subsidiaries. Georges still controls most of the money, is what it comes down to.

He joined me. He had undressed and wore only a white towel, around his waist. He unknotted the towel and draped it over the seat of his chair. Now he was naked. A pharmacologistical young woman (‘ Une lesbienne ,’ Georges later whispered) began to shampoo his hair. Most of the ultra-HNW individuals I’ve met are idiosyncratically demanding, and everyone is familiar with the larger-than-life, I-make-my-own-rules display of power, and I understand from Ollie that gratuitous domestic nudity is prevalent among the rich and famous as a kind of very authoritative informality. But even though I had willingly entered into the company of Georges Batros and maybe ‘on some level’ had sought him out, I began to feel that my situation was objectionable as well as precarious. I had no idea how long I was expected to stay on this boat or why I’d been summoned. The Giselle , I knew, was making its annual odyssey from Beirut to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where Mme Batros (née Alice Rourke, in Mullingar, Ireland) was already summering in the Villa Batros, a magnificent clifftop mansion with a private jetty. Where was I supposed to get off? Piraeus? Portofino? Surely there is more than a trace of false imprisonment about hospitality from which there is no escape.