Take the horrific tale of woe that one chap I was chatting to the other day told me. It sounded like the perfect storm of logistical upheaval, colossal expense, time-wasting and unnecessary competition that is the lifeblood of Chinese capital markets transactions. Throw in a dash of anti-graft and you've gone straight to bureaucrat heaven.
And so to my chum's tale. It started in the spring of this year, when he received an invitation to pitch — alongside about 16 of his closest competitors — for an IPO mandate in China. All the teams were told to assemble somewhere in the outskirts of Beijing for a couple of days, so my friend was already steeling himself for a endurance test surrounded by another 120 bankers.
What he hadn't expected, however, was one curious response to the corruption paranoia sweeping the country at the moment. In order that there could be no suggestion of any underhand behaviour in the pitching process, the bank teams had to draw straws to decide the order of the presentations to management. And it was all done in front of lawyers.
The result of all these shenanigans, you ask? Apparently four banks were chosen, the cheapest. And the deal never happened.