Polly's eggs and . . .
LIKE the first cuckoo in autumn, the first correspondent has surfaced to say that all her life savings are in Polly Peck and isn't the City a terrible place? All of them? Nothing in building societies, life assur- ance, unit trusts, investment trusts, no spread of risk at all, every penny bet on the wonder-working Turkish fruit-packer? I fear that she suffers, not only from polypexia, but from Barlow Clowes Syn- drome: heads I win, tails it must be someone else's fault. I pity her plight, but I have never been able to take Polly serious- ly, as a company, as an investment or now as a disaster. It is a monument to Asil Nadir's powers of persuasion. I know only one financial journalist who reads prospec- tuses for pleasure, laughing heartily. Years ago, I asked him to go and see Polly in Cyprus, and his account of the dusty and bullet-scarred warehouse would have put off the most sanguine investor. (It certainly put me off.) Even he, though, was ulti- mately persuaded by Mr Nadir, and be- came his most regular supporter. Slowest to be convinced were the investing institu- tions — finally and typically buying into Polly at the top of the market because, at that price, it had become too big to be left out. It was a dim sort of argument for buying anything, but even the dimmest institution knew better than to put all its eggs in one orange-box.
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