Back to the Guildhall

On November 3-4 I will attend the Thinkers50 London Summit & Award Gala event along with many @100 Coaches colleagues plus a large delegation from Finland organized by the Nordic Business Forum. Thinkers50, often called the “Oscars of management thinking.” is held every two years and will take place at the Guildhall, a beautiful building that dates from the 15th century.

For me, this will be the first time I will be back to the Guildhall after forty years. In 1984 I was Corporate Bank Head at Citibank Helsinki. We were asked by our Finnish client, United Paper Mills (UPM) to put together a bank syndicate to finance the building of a newsprint mill in Shotton, Wales, which would supply rapidly growing demand from London’s Fleet Street newspapers.

It was an imaginative and complicated project. The mill was to be built on a disused British Steel plant which offered excellent access to a seaport, rail lines, power sources, and a local labor force. Pulp came from trees supplied from Scotland. Subsidized loans for the project were provided by the European Investment Bank and the European Coal and Steel Community. Rather than lending the Shotton Paper Company funds to purchase fixed assets, the bank syndicate we formed guaranteed three leasing companies for Shotton’s long-term use of machines and equipment.

The signing ceremony for the £120 million guarantee facility was hosted in the Guildhall by the Head of Citicorp’s International Bank Limited, with whom we worked closely putting the deal together. He asked me to prepare his opening remarks. To mark the roller coaster that the banks and lawyers had been on for over a year, I suggested he start with a question often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. “What is the difference between a pessimist and an optimist?” The reply, “A pessimist sees a problem in every opportunity, while an optimist sees the opportunity in every problem.” He concluded by saying, “it appears we have many optimists in this esteemed hall.”

After the ceremony the bankers and lawyers went to one of the Scandinavian bank’s London headquarters for sauna and then to Chinatown for dinner. Having forged such strong friendships during the arduous journey to complete the deal, we met annually at that same restaurant for the next ten years.

The Shotton Newsprint Mill opened in December 1985, officially launched by the Prince of Wales and was so successful, a second newsprint machine was added in 1989. Eventually, as demand for newsprint declined with digitisation and falling newspaper circulation, UPM sold the mill in 2021to Eren Holding, a Turkish industrial group and newsprint production ceased.

Today, the presses of Fleet Street may reach fewer readers than they did in past years, but new ideas continue to emerge — now through podcasts, online discourse, and international forums such as Thinkers50.