A Bazaar Life: The Autobiography of David Alliance by David Alliance & Ivan Fallon & Peter Mandelson

Author:David Alliance & Ivan Fallon & Peter Mandelson [Alliance, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548786
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-02-04T22:00:00+00:00

We were still doing business in 1974 when Clive Bossom went out to Tehran to see whether there might be some interesting opportunities for us there. Clive’s father, who was an architect, had been very close to Reza Shah and Clive had kept up the contact with the royal family. When we heard rumours that the Shah was going to commission a new underground sewer system for Tehran, we both thought there might be an opportunity for the bank to become involved in the project on behalf of the British government.

The Shah agreed to give him an audience, and Clive began by telling him that he was giving up his seat in the forthcoming parliamentary election in order to work for one of the Shah’s own countrymen.

‘Who is that?’ the Shah asked.

‘Davoud Alliance,’ Clive answered.

‘Oh yes, how is he doing? Has he survived the recession you’re having over there?’

‘Yes, he has,’ Clive told him, ‘because he remembered a story he had been taught at school in Kashan about the Shah of Persia and he knew that he should never extend himself beyond his limits – which he never did.’ Clive explained that, during the height of the London property boom, I had told him a little story I remembered from my schooldays of how in olden times the Shah called his ministers in to see him, and one of them sat down with his legs outstretched rather than folded under him as politeness demanded. So the Shah ordered his guards to cut off the minister’s legs as a reminder never to over-extend yourself. The Shah apparently roared with laughter.

Clive wrote to me on the plane on his onward journey from Tehran to Hong Kong, complaining that three-quarters of his meeting with the Shah had been taken up with talking about me. I think he was rather put out by it.

My Anglo-Eastern bank weathered the storm and we came through the fringe bank crisis intact and without making anybody bankrupt. Some of our customers failed to pay us back in full, and ten years later we still held some of the properties we had made loans against, but the markets by then were healthy again. My pockets were just deep enough for us to get by, and Anglo-Eastern survives today as a private investment company, with its nameplate on my Manchester office.

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