What Pakistan’s Biggest Billionaire Thinks About Peace
(Why Mian Mohammed Mansha believes India and Pakistan can do business.)
When I told a friend in Pakistan that I was going to Lahore to meet the richest man in the country, a man called Mian Mohammed Mansha, I was told that the 64-year-old was, in terms of influence, the Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata of Pakistan. ‘Combined, haan, combined,’ said the friend.
A man with planes, and a finger in every pie. A man whose offices have posters that show white water rafters with the words: ‘A journey’s greatest danger isn’t rough terrain. It’s weak planning.’
This is the Unknown Pakistan. A Pakistan open for business. Mian Mansha owns the Nishat group of companies. It owns a bank, the Muslim Commercial Bank (MCB). It is Pakistan’s No. 1 bank in profitability and market capitalization. It owns a general insurance company, Adamjee Insurance, Pakistan’s largest general insurance company. It owns a textile house, which again is Pakistan’s largest. It has four power plants that produce 11 per cent of the total electricity output of Pakistan. It is the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner and largest private-sector employer. The Karachi-based Nishat group ranges from textiles to financial services to cement. Its annual revenues exceed $2 billion, and its assets are worth more than $7.6 billion.
At his teak-lined office in downtown Lahore, minutes away from his bungalow with the customary red Jaguar, there is a vast black marbletopped desk, on which (on the day I meet him) there lies a DVD. Wall Street, it says, Money Never Sleeps. Beside it is a copy of The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World by design and architecture expert Deyan Sudjic.
Mian Mansha looks down an aquiline nose. His patrician face, all angles and high cheekbones, catches the sun in shiny spots and shadows.
When photographed, he aptly appears cloaked in darkness and light. You can imagine him in a toga in the Roman senate, arguing with Caesar. You can imagine him as Caesar. It is one of those impassive faces that has made its fortune, but prevents other men from knowing what plays on its mind. It is the face of a man who never has to speak above a hush. The face of a man not used to smiling very much.
Mian Mansha smiles. Usually, he explains, ‘people’—by which he presumably means billionaires like him—have two kinds of books, some on how to make money, some on how to remain calm.
Mansha’s bookshelves are full of books on politics: My Year in Iraq by L. Paul Bremmer III, The Gettysburg Gospel by Gabor Boritt, The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom and Christopher Catherwood’s Churchill’s Folly, scattered among books on the English civil war, Russia and Napoleon. ‘Economics and politics,’ says the man who had to once go on exile to escape political enemies at home, ‘they are always interrelated, throughout history, indispensable to one another.’
Mansha knows this intertwined path. The story of his journey is the story of Pakistan’s liberalization. In 1968, Pakistani economist Mahboob ul-Haq and a Pakistan planning commission list identified twenty-two business families (Mansha’s family was in textiles) they called the robber barons of Pakistan. These families, Haq said, controlled 66 per cent of the country’s manufacturing and 87 per cent of the banking and insurance industries.
Before I met Mansha, I went to meet an old friend of his: Tariq Sayeed Saigol of the Saigol family, which was also part of the robber baron list.
‘We, the supposed robber barons, formed large chunks of Bhutto’s speeches,’ Saigol said of the early 1970s, when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was gearing to fight the elections. Bhutto became prime minister in 1973 and promptly nationalized major businesses.
‘Most of us lost everything,’ says Saigol.
But in the early 1990s, there was a new prime minister: Nawaz Sharif, who began the process of liberalization and privatization of Pakistani business and economy almost at the same time as Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. But there was a difference. Sharif had a personal interest in privatization. His own Ittefaq Group had lost a lot of wealth during nationalization.
This was Mansha’s turning point.
Mian Mansha and eleven partners bid successfully for the Muslim Commercial Bank, which was and still is the country’s third-largest bank,in 1991. The next year, Mian Mansha and Tariq Saigol, chairman of the Kohinoor Maple Leaf Group, together bought two cement companies, D.G. Khan and Maple Leaf. After four years, through a mutual buyout, Mansha got D.G. Khan and Saigol, Maple Leaf.
‘Liberalization changed our life,’ says Saigol, ‘at the time of purchase, D.G. Khan produced 600,000 tonnes [of cement] a year, and Maple Leaf, 450,000 tonnes. Today, production is at 5 million tonnes for D.G. Khan and 3.6 million tonnes for us.’
Now people like he and Mansha were doing well, but the mood, the climate was not right, said Saigol. The problem, according to Saigol, was politics. ‘Barely 1 per cent of the people pay tax. And that 1 per cent is all business people like us or salaried people. If only we could push to India’s level, we would be fine. But no, the feudal chaps don’t want that.’
Fewer than two million people paid taxes in 2010. In India, at the same time, more than thirty million people paid taxes.
‘These guys keep telling us tax is administered by the states and we tell them, well, the states are run by your brothers or cousins or uncles—tell them to get people to pay taxes!’ scowled Saigol. ‘But they won’t. All the landed rich in Pakistan will not pay any taxes because it’s the same people in government, in the state assemblies, at feudal mansion[s] with hundreds of acres of land.’
Mansha and he, entrepreneurs like them, were different, Saigol seems to suggest. At least they paid taxes. And yet, only four or five years after Mian Mansha’s big move in snapping up companies, he had to flee the country. Benazir Bhutto had come to power. She was the daughter of the man who came to power ranting against robber barons, but that was not the only reason Benazir was against Mansha. He was seen as a special friend of Nawaz Sharif, who was not, to say the least, a friend of Benazir.
Raids began on his factories and properties, and Mansha fled.
I ask Mansha about the time he had to leave.
‘It was,’ he says, ‘voluntary exile,’ making it sound like a golf handicap peculiar to billionaires in Pakistan and elsewhere. His second son (he has three) Umer was studying business at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the family went and lived in Boston.
‘It was a good family break. We were going to go for Umer’s graduation anyway. This was a bonus. Also, we (he substitutes ‘we’ for ‘I’ like many powerful men) had very good people running the business in Pakistan. Very loyal and effective, we were constantly in touch with them on the telephone.’
I have been told that at the time he was even scared for his life. He worried that he would be imprisoned, after which there would be no guarantee.
‘No,’ says Mansha softly. A pause, slight but emphatic. ‘No,’ he says again, and leaves it at that.
Just after Benazir Bhutto’s government fell in 1996, Mansha found himself sitting next to his nemesis in an aircraft. ‘She said, “You are a good friend of Nawaz Sharif, you have business interests together,”’ says Mansha. Mansha denied it vehemently. He told the former prime minister that that was absolutely incorrect. It was malicious gossip spread by his detractors. No one knows whether she believed him or not. Most of that decade saw power see-saw-ing between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
Then, in 1999, in an army coup, General Pervez Musharraf kicked Nawaz Sharif out and took charge. Nawaz Sharif promptly went into exile. The raids on Mansha began again.
Mansha says his exile and the raids after Musharraf came to power were the worst times in a forty-year business life. ‘There was,’ Mansha hunts for an accurately subdued phrase, ‘an impression that people who have made money have made it the wrong way. Our papers and facilities were checked and rechecked.’
But Mansha, Saigol, and many like them are admirers of Musharraf.
Under the general, Pakistan grew at 7–8 per cent each year and its stock markets strengthened. Four Nishat Group companies—MCB, Nishat Mills, Adamjee Insurance and D.G. Khan Cement—are on the KSE 30, an index of the most liquid companies.
But then 9/11 happened, and the country went on a downward spiral.
People like Mansha remained unscathed, though. One of Nishat Mills’ top clients remains America’s Gap, buying two to three million metres of Nishat cloth a year, and around 50,000 denim and work trousers that retail under well-known Gap group labels like Old Navy and Banana Republic. A regional officer of Gap called Nishat ‘one of the best places to do business with. Yes, around the world. Period.’
Entering a Nishat Mills factory busts many clichés. I travel to one of them, located 22 kilometres from Lahore on the Lahore-Ferozepur road.
This, in the tradition of places named after companies generating jobs, is called Nishatabad. Inside, there is clear lighting and endless rows of air-cooled workers. As one shift ends, another seamlessly takes its place.
The section where linen is displayed is decorated as mock living rooms and bedrooms. Beside the showpiece bed, draped in Nishat linen, lie Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boons novels. The Nishat customer, it seems to say, is English-speaking, modern and a global citizen, with a taste in romance shared with Benazir Bhutto, that great Pakistani fan of Mills & Boons.
‘When I come in here,’ says one worker, ‘everything seems all right.’ In a country where so much is not, this is Mansha’s pitch.
This could be anywhere, and that is the point. If anything, Mian Mansha is the salesman of Pakistan Normal, Pakistan-Business-As-Usual. This is his primary pitch. His business stands on this.
Mansha and his sons often talk about India with admiration. Look at the Indian stock markets, they say. Look at how they rise. Look at their power. Nishat has not done badly in the markets. In May 2008, in a deal that astonished Pakistan Inc., Mansha sold 20 per cent of MCB to Malaysia’s Malayan Bank Bhd for 907 million dollars.
Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in December 2007. Turbulent polls followed. Pervez Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q), was defeated. The two major opposition parties—Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)—came together to form the government. Musharraf remained president, but his time was coming to an end. By the end of 2008, in November, Pakistani terrorists had attacked the Taj hotel in Mumbai and there was talk of war in the air, and in December, Pakistan suffered one of its worst terrorist attacks ever when its own landmark Islamabad Marriot was bombed.
Mansha got about 490 Pk rupees per share from the sale to Malayan Bank Bhd. In three months, the stock of MCB was down to under 200 Pk rupees. All this money came in handy during the global downturn. He continued to buy. He started a leasing company in Azerbaijan and two power plants with a total capacity of 765 MW in Multan and, while he was at it, picked up the historic St. James Hotel in London. All for $165 million.
His new targets: Indonesia (a bank, perhaps?), electricity in West Asia and China, and yes, India.
‘Why should we try and sell things to America and Europe when right beside us is a billion-strong market?’ says Mansha. ‘How much total business do we do? Two billion? That’s nothing. We can do five times—just open the borders.’
What will he sell? Cement, he says, textiles. And what will he buy? Information technology. Engineering equipment. The idea of the open market and how to make it even more open.
‘The Indians are good at selling themselves.’
A few days later, I am at the Mansha farmhouse in Raiwind, in the farmhouse stretch outside Lahore. I am counting his carriers: an E-class Jaguar convertible, three Mercedes steeds, a Porsche turbo, a BMW 750, a Range Rover, a Volkswagen, a turboprop plane and an 8-seater jet.
There are swimming pools, elevators, fields and a nine-foot-deep lake to farm roe. Mansha is wearing a Gulfstream golf cap that he says he got free with the jet. On the weekends, he wears Ralph Lauren casuals.
His eldest son Raza is running after his two little brats who tumble about. He takes me to his pool. ‘This is too large, you know, for just a hobby. Maybe we could sell fish.’ He looks at his wife, who smiles like she has heard business ideas all her life.
There is too much corruption everywhere, says Mansha. He argues on behalf of Pakistan Inc., saying that entrepreneurs are willing to pay ore tax if a regime change happened, and everyone, including the feudal lords, are brought into the tax net.
Only trade can bring peace, says Mansha, warming to his theme. Violence is the by-product of unemployment.
And no, he says, he is not, and will never be, interested in politics. He is happiest here, at this farm, far away from the shenanigans of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.
If only it had not been for his neighbours. Two brothers called Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif.
-(A version of this essay first appeared in the Indian edition of the Fortune magazine.)-
