Hong Kong is where putin's personal company is listed, and young snowdon called as first port of freedom call, now joined by Eric prince ex-blackwater
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/01/14/prince-of-logistics-ex-blackwater-chief-looks-to-help-china-in-africa/#axzz2qSYqxfbd
Prince of logistics: ex-Blackwater chief looks to China-Africa
China is not known for its moral scruples or sensitivity when it comes to investing in dangerous countries. It may help to build schools, hospitals and railways as a quid pro quo for getting access, but what it mostly seems to want is to get in and out with its raw materials and without interfering in local politics.
Erik Prince and China could be made for each other. The former Navy Seal who founded the hugely controversial private security group Blackwater is pitching to run logistics for Chinese mining and energy companies in Africa.
He is now chairman of Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group, which is backed by Citic Group, the Chinese state-owned investment company, and Hong Kong entreprenuer, Johnson Ko Chun Shun. Prince remains the largest individual shareholder having sold an east African aviation start-up company he owned to what was essentially a shell company.
China is expected to invest up to $1tn over the next decade in Africa, on top of the billions it has put in to finance mines, power plants and other infrastructure, which have helped it generate trade of $185bn with the continent.
Prince says the PR battle he faced on returning to the US from the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan was far more difficult than dealing with death on the ground, day to day.
Blackwater, which he founded in 1997 and sold to a group of investors for about $200m in 2010, became hugely controversial for its role providing private security in Iraq, particularly because of the deaths of multiple Iraqi civilians in several incidents.
Prince was called before US Senate committees in 2007 (pictured above) and later to account for the actions of his company and was vilified by large parts of the media. Last year he published his own memoir of the history of Blackwater – Civilian Warriors.
Defending Blackwater’s record, Prince said its tactics were sanctioned by the US government and that ultimately it was made a political scapegoat for wider errors in an unpopular war.
With Frontier Services being a listed company, Prince will be exposed to a greater level of public scrutiny than at Blackwater, which he said might have worked out better if it was listed.
“Back then maybe if we’d have been a public company, maybe we’d have been better off, seen as more transparent or something, I don’t know,” he said. “The kind of risks we took, the kind of work we did for the US government then was significant… Building a business and having it blow-torched by politics is unnerving and I’d rather not go through that experience again.”
With Frontier Services, he got the idea for the business while travelling with a big investor to look at a mining project.
“Nearly being killed in a plane incident about a year and a half ago as we were up looking at a mine site in Burkina Faso, I thought if this is the best that is available here and [people] are going to spend a lot of money building a mine, there’s got to be a better way than this,” he told beyondbrics.
The incident in question was an accident rather than an attack of some kind and Prince plays down the security aspect of the new company. “We’re not in this business to be gate guards and security providers,” he said. “When you look at the spend of a $3bn mine, think of the costs of logistics in that – our ability to compress some of those costs for our customers and still make very good money in the process, that’s what we’re about.”
His aim is to build a multi-billion dollar “austere logisitics” company, beginning with aviation to transport people, goods and equipment under either scheduled or emergency conditions and to conduct surveillance. He hopes later to expand into trucking and maritime work and that the Hong Kong listing will give it access to fresh capital to fund that growth.
Related reading:
US security focus shifts to private sector experts, FT
Lawyers trade accusations over Blackwater role in Iraq, FT (2009)
Africa: can India follow China’s lead?, beyondbrics
China’s junior miners break new ground, FT
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