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MY SUCCESSORS I suppose I shouldn't leave this memoir without making some comment on my successors, at least up to the point where I severed my official connection with the bank around 2000. I have no intention of naming names unless this becomes necessary to protect the innocent. They were a mixed bunch and there are only a few generalisations possible. In the first place I found that the closer they were to a civil service background the easier they were to deal with and the more they fitted in to the Bank's board. Now you might say I would say that wouldn't I, and I would and did. But there were some things that made a desk officer's job easier, and more effictive. The civil servant types were open in sharing information and were team players, and, after all, we were all on the same team. Or at least that's what I thought at the time. In some cases I found that they had carried over from their previous existence the idea that knowledge was power, which, of course it is. But when you're playing on a team it is for sharing and I very much resented not being fully informed at the outset and then being dragged in at the last minute when my endorsement for some proposal was required, and I had not had time to think it through. During the first year, when I was on the board myself, I felt a bit like the Blessed Martin de Porres of my youth. You will remember that he was blessed with the gift of bilocation (now presumably trilocation at least following his ascent to full sainthood). I was my own desk officer and that suited me fine. The only problem was the day job and I could not give Board business the attention it merited with the result that an excessive burden was falling on my Danish Director who was full time resident. I had the Alternate Directorship, which covered a three year term at the end of which Denmark and Ireland switched Director and Alternate and so on for the rest of eternity, or however long the Bank lasted. The Government were prevaricating in nominating my full time successor for the remaining two years and things were getting a bit hairy. No doubt they had their eye on the Directorship for a political nominee, and so it proved. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I warned them that if we were not pulling our weight, the very favourable arrangement we had with the Danes would come under pressure, and rightly so. In the event they conceded the post to a civil servant for the remaining two years as Alternate, with the firm instruction that we were to ring the alarm bell well in time for them to think about a nominee for the Directorship. And that was that for then. So at the end of my first year, I was off the Board and my only EBRD travel from then to 2000 was to the four AGMs I attended, and, of course my trip as a Director's assistant to Lithuania. I think I survived reasonably well, despite one Director complaining me directly to my Minister (and Irish Governor for EBRD). I had established a practice that the Irish board member would contribute a section to the brief I prepared for the Minister attending the Annual Meeting. This served two purposes. It gave us at home a summary version of Ireland's involvement with the Bank during the year but from the perspective of the Director's chair, so to speak. This was an area of particular interest to the Minister as it summarised, inter alia, the extent to which Irish consultants were successful in tendering for Bank projects. And we were, at that time, punching above our weight. This section of the brief also served me as part briefing for the rest of the year until the next Annual Meeting. It was only one section of a fairly comprehensive brief that I prepared and was as much in the Irish member's interest as in mine. However, this particular Irish board member figured that it was a useless piece of work and there was no reason for him to waste time on it. If we wanted such a section we could do it ourselves. Weren't we in almost daily contact with the Irish constituency at the Board and at the end of the day presumably we were able to read all the reports that the Bank published. True up to a point, but neither I nor my section were a full-time backup support for the Board member. In fact we were run off our feet with other matters. I told him that I did not agree. I thought it was a very useful exercise, but that it was his call. If he didn't want to provide it then that was that. I'm not sure what the psychology following that was but very soon after I was passed a document from the Minister consisting of a draft section for the brief but annotated to the effect that this was a foolish waste of time that I was insisting on. The Minister was seeking my comments on this, which he got. The text was included in the brief and that was the last I heard of that one. Somewhat inconsistently, I thought, the same Board member thought he should be writing the Minister's speech for the Annual Meeting. I was told that this was the practice in a number of Board constituencies. Well, it had certainly not been the practice in ours. The Minister's speech was tuned to a broader perspective than that of the Board. It covered the whole gamut of our relationship with the Bank, and, while any material supplied by the Board member would get due consideration, the call was ours. And that's the way I played it. It did strike me as a little odd though, that, on the one hand a Board member considered it was not appropriate for him to provide a report from his own perspective for insertion into the Minister's brief, while, on the other hand, he wanted to write the Minister's speech, which covered a wider perspective. Ours not to question why ... just do the job as best we can. USA SHARE The USA insisted, from the beginning, on having the largest individual shareholding in the Bank. I think this was around 10%. I never really figured out what this was all about until much later, years later, in fact, when I finally took over responsibility for the Bretton Woods institutions. For a state that didn't want to pay in a "floating currency" in case it cost them more than they originally thought, it did not make sense for them to be trying to pay more than anyone else. Their larger shareholding would not really carry with it any material advantage. The likelyhood was that the EU with its majority shareholding would outvote them on any significant issues of dispute and significantly split formal voting in the Board was unlikely to be a regular occurrence anyway. My subsequent conclusion was that the reasons for the USA seeking the largest single shareholding was:
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