Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (11 page)

Situated near the Elysée Palace, on the site of a former hunting lodge of Louis XIV, Laurent offers a form of lunchtime theatre in which the Parisian elite is both audience and cast. We are seated at one of the prime window tables, which feature curved banquettes that allow all
diners to face inwards and scan the room. I spot Serge Weinberg, chairman of Accor, the hotelier. A leading economist strolls over to chat. He is a friend of de Castries, but not all bonhomie is spontaneous at Laurent. ‘When two people are supposedly on bad terms and want to show the world they are speaking to each other, they come here – half an hour later it is in the press,’ de Castries tells me.

Laurent’s menu leans towards refined French classics, including frog legs and calf head. I opt for trompettes de la mort mushrooms served with egg on a Parmesan biscuit, followed by pigeon with a ravioli of its giblets; de Castries chooses the mushrooms, then scallops with more mushrooms and borage. Our chaperone – Axa’s head of corporate communication – has the all-vegetable starter and the fish in seaweed butter. There is a murmured exchange between the sommelier and de Castries but it is not clear that a bottle has actually been ordered. Anxious not to have one of those teetotal Lunch with the
FT
s that prompt mocking letters from readers, I receive reassurance that wine is on its way.

Past encounters with de Castries have established English as the language in which we communicate (he speaks it extremely well). I begin the interview by asking about his remarkable family tree, which groans under the weight of achievement. One notable de Castries served as naval minister under Louis XVI, for instance, sending Lapérouse – France’s answer to Captain Cook – on an epic but ill-fated expedition to the Pacific. ‘There is a painting, and I don’t know if it is in Versailles or the naval museum, showing the king, Lapérouse and himself, looking over the map in preparation.’

There are also illustrious names on his mother’s side. His maternal grandfather, Pierre de Chevigné, was a hero of the Free French who also acted as de Gaulle’s wartime ambassador to the US. When Henri was a boy, de Chevigné recounted to him how he was with Roosevelt when he learnt of the invasion of Sicily by Allied troops. With that kind of upbringing, ambition was natural. ‘The tradition was to do things,’ he says.

With the backing of his family, de Castries broke with custom by not choosing a military career, although he did perform his national service in a parachute regiment, where he developed a passion for freefall. He has jumped more than 100 times. Now that his children are relatively grown up he says he may take it up again.

After military service, de Castries went to the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (Ena), the civil-service school that was created to help rebuild post-war France and whose alumni are notoriously powerful and clannish. His was a particularly stellar intake. Classmates included Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate in the last presidential election, and Dominique de Villepin, the former prime minister.

Yet Ena is not an experience he would recommend today. Just as he was advised not to attend Saint-Cyr military college, de Castries says he is telling his children not to become
énarques
, steering them instead towards business school and other experiences that offer better preparation for what he sees as the big challenge of the age: getting France to accept globalization.

As we mop our runny egg yolks, de Castries tells me that one of the reasons for the prominence of his Ena class was that they graduated in 1980, shortly before François Mitterrand was elected president, evicting the centre-right’s Valéry Giscard d’Estaing from the Elysée. This gave early career momentum to those members of his class ‘who had decided that they would be Socialists, some by conviction, others by …’

He giggles and fails to complete the sentence. I’m intrigued. So which of your contemporaries were Socialists of convenience, I demand, suspecting that he means Royal. He won’t say, however.

The young de Castries was a fan of Giscard d’Estaing. He still is, citing his ‘outstanding’ mind. The octogenarian former president had recently called de Castries to ask for a briefing on the crisis in the debt markets. The Axa man was dazzled by the way he devoured the background material.

‘I think Mitterrand was a guy with a vision but totally amoral,’ continues de Castries. He is even more scathing about Jacques Chirac, the president who came next. ‘Chirac was a combination of the two worst things: amorality plus absence of vision.’

As for Sarkozy, de Castries praises him for unblocking European policy-making and for his university reforms but says a question mark still hangs over the government’s willingness to rein in public spending. So what about this old finance-ministry rumour, I ask: did the president offer you the job? ‘Ask him,’ he says, laughing. There is a long pause, but instead of moving on I let the question sit on the table among the crumbs from our sourdough toast. He is too courteous to leave it there.

‘It is a complicated question. I mean, I like what I do at Axa. I have spent 18 years of my life there. We have a goal. I don’t want to leave …
I think I am serving my country by doing what I do at Axa as well as I would in a political position.’

Enough politics: de Castries notices the arrival of Hervé Aaron, a noted art and antique furniture dealer. He happens to be in discussions with de Castries – a collector of 17th-, 18th- and early-19th-century French art – over a particular painting. (The sighting is not a good portent for the negotiations, de Castries later jokes, since it means that Aaron ‘is not starving’.)

Some antiques chitchat follows, punctuated by mouthfuls of pigeon and sips of smooth Bordeaux (although the
FT
is paying, I have no idea how much the wine costs – it tastes expensive, but not alarmingly so). I return to a topic we had touched on earlier in the meal, namely that of risk, and people’s perception of it. It is hard not to conclude that the French currently have an unhealthily low tolerance for risk, manifested in demands for excessively secure jobs and retirements. Does de Castries – whose job involves rational assessments of the probability of bad things happening – agree that this excessive caution is more pronounced in France than other countries?

He does. ‘I think it is particularly accentuated in France but it is a problem that is common to all the old societies that feel threatened by globalization,’ he says, blaming a shortage of authority figures willing to calm people down. ‘I think the world was much more threatening to previous generations than it is to the current one.’

But are insurance companies blameless? I’m thinking of how some people fear retirement more than death now we are living longer. Isn’t that partly because insurers advertise the downside of greater longevity – possible sickness and dependency – to win more fees from pensions and other investment products? I ask.

‘Well tried – but I don’t buy that,’ he counters, seeming to enjoy a bit of needling. In order to mitigate the risks of old age, the facts must be laid out well in advance, he says, stressing that dependency is going to be a massive social issue.

I change tack. A few days beforehand, I had scanned through the terms of pet insurance Axa sells in the UK. It offered up to £2m of cover against damage caused by a domestic animal. Surely that constitutes scaremongering: how often do pets wreak such costly havoc? ‘If a young child is severely injured by a dog biting him, how much is this going to cost?’ he replies.

It is time to order dessert. Normally, de Castries sticks at two courses but he sometimes makes an exception for Laurent’s vanilla ice cream, and will do so today. I choose the (excellent) pear roasted with ginger. The chaperone has ice cream.

Earlier in the lunch, the former paratrooper had outlined his rather gung-ho willingness to seek out and then master risks in his career and hobbies (‘I don’t like bonds, I prefer equity,’ as he puts it). I ask whether there aren’t a few areas in which he – like everyone else – harbours irrational fears. Apparently not. ‘Life is a gift, so you should say thank you every morning and why would you be fearful? You know that one day it is going to end. If you have strong beliefs’ – de Castries is a practising Catholic – ‘it is not a problem.’

This recognition of mortality has seeped into his leadership of Axa. Succession planning is already under way; it would, after all, be unforgivable for the boss of an insurer to fall under a bus without having sketched out a plan B. He won’t say how many dauphins are jostling for the right to follow him. But with demographic trends being what they are – and if the example of Giscard d’Estaing is anything to go by – there is a decent chance that de Castries will remain influential in France for decades.

By the time we leave Laurent, it has been a leisurely two hours. We emerge into bright sunshine. Before we part, he observes that it would have been a wonderful day for hunting. Confronted by such an urge, a de Castries from an earlier age would no doubt have ridden off straight away with hounds in tow. But this is 21st-century France and some of us at least have to get back to work.

16 JULY 2010

The Russian metals magnate has entertained Peter Mandelson and George Osborne, yet has been humiliated in public by Vladimir Putin. The
FT
meets the teetotal billionaire in a London restaurant

By Gideon Rachman

It is a sunny summer afternoon in London, and the courtyard of St John restaurant is bright and airy. Inside the dining room, however, things are much darker. There is little natural light, the walls are white, the lamps are black and the waiters pad silently around in the gloom.

St John has a reputation as a restaurant for people with a serious interest in food – which makes me wonder why Oleg Deripaska has arranged to meet there. Deripaska, a 42-year-old tycoon who made his fortune by dominating Russia’s aluminium industry, is known for many things: his enormous wealth, his prowess as an industrialist, his political connections and the rumours about his past that have seen him denied visas to visit the US.

But he has never been noted for an interest in food. I had been briefed that he is a man of few words, who eats and sleeps very little and seems to survive on a diet of green tea.

As I wait for this phenomenon to make an appearance, I study the menu. St John is favoured by the most enthusiastic of carnivores and the choice is Dickensian and sounds slightly stomach-turning: devilled kidneys, beef mince on dripping toast, smoked eels. In a dark corner, a Japanese tourist is eagerly scooping out the marrow from an ox-bone.

I look up to see Deripaska striding into the room. There are no bodyguards in evidence, although I assume that they must be stationed outside. It is a hot day and the photos I have seen of Deripaska suggest that he favours the ‘smart casual’ look, so I am not wearing a tie. But Deripaska is dressed formally: blue suit, blue shirt, blue tie, blue eyes – all slightly different shades. He is around 6ft tall, well built, lean and with closely cropped brown hair.

Most entrepreneurs like to talk about the old days and how they got started. It is usually a safe, relaxing way to begin an interview. With Deripaska, however, the origins of his business empire are the most sensitive topic of all. At the beginning of the 1990s, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing and the old state-run industrial behemoths were being sold off, he was a student. By the mid-1990s, aged 25, he had acquired a stake in a smelting factory. By the end of a turbulent and bloody decade in Russian business and politics, he had emerged as a tycoon controlling a huge swathe of the Russian aluminium industry.

In 2008,
Forbes
magazine listed Deripaska as the ninth-richest man in the world, worth about $28bn. He was hit badly by the global financial crisis and by the collapse in the demand for commodities. But even now, after a near-bankruptcy and a restructuring of his debts,
Forbes
estimates his fortune at about $10bn.

As we settle back in our chairs, I ask him what qualities he had needed to prevail in the industrial struggles of the 1990s. He points out that he was a star student at school in southern Russia – ‘I was very good in maths and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.’ Deripaska went on to study nuclear physics at Moscow State University. He says that in the height of the Soviet era, he would probably have ended up doing military research. But the old system was breaking down as he was graduating. Like a lot of his contemporaries, he went into business.

Deripaska says that from an early age he was fascinated by factories: ‘My mum brought me to my first job when I was 12. I started electrical work at her plant. She was an engineer, a technical expert, at one of the plants in the south, and in the summer she brought me in and I learnt how industrial things work: casting, electricity, maintenance, everything.’