CITY AND SUBURBAN
Attali and finally over the top and out a bank, an ego-trip, or neither?
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It seems to be open season for shooting my foxes. First Norman Lamont and now Jacques Attali, with everybody's finger on the trigger. His gift for incurring enmities was all his own. Long before there was a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, he had maddened the great banking house of S.G.Warburg with an unsolicited life of the founder, based on half an hour's acquaintance and alleging that the Bank of England was once gov- erned by Sir Norman Montagu. When he came to the EBRD, he had an office in the Bank and let the Governor know what he wanted. A merchant banker asked him to lunch and got a visit from his bodyguard, come to check out the dining-room. A commercial banker, after dealings with him, looked forward to the joys of retire- ment when the two men need never meet. An investment banker rang me up from Melbourne to call M. Attali 'a raging rat- hole'. Two years ago I voiced some of these doubts about the new bank and its presi- dent. 'To Anglo-Saxon minds [I wrote here in April 1991], he seems difficult and even eccentric. It is hard to find out what is in the president's mind at any one time. His command structure, notable for its absence of shackles, does not help them. Quite a few people got the impression that they would be M. Attali's right hand man.' (Ernest Stern of the World Bank has now been given that impression twice over.) The private jet and chef came early, and so did the tennis-ball logo, designed by schoolchil- dren and judged by a Japanese couturier. M. Attali's acolytes were encouraged to live in style — the more they were paid, the more of their rent they could charge to expenses. After that, an order for white marble was neither here nor there. I posed the question: is this a bank or an ego-trip? The up-to-date answer is, probably: neither.
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