Throttle to the stop

Today's lunch at Kari Kepala Ikan Stadium Merdeka was a reunion of some sort. Apparently the German bankers for the ERL project flew in for a loans' review and see how ERL is doing. Although I left ERL 5 years ago, they still invited me for the gathering. Why Kari Kepala Ikan? That you have to ask Scheinder.

Back in 1998/1999 (during the economic downturn), none of the local banks wanted to finance the project. Our advisors, a local merchant bank also flew the coop, leaving us stranded. We had a new advisor and assistance from MP Capital, a new local advisory group (all ex Bank Bumi, my ex-colleagues).

We at ERL, basically me and NMN (we were also both ex-Bank Bumi) and MPC then teamed up with Siemens Financial Services to get the required loan from a group German banks. Scheinder helped to arrange and in the end 4 banks were involved, Kreditanstalt fur Weideraufbau, Bank Gesellschaft Berlin, HypoVereinsbank and Dresdner Bank (now Dresdner-Kleinwort-Benson). Bayerische Landesbank Girozentrale and Deutsche Bank pulled out halfway during the negotiations. We were banking on BLG to come in as they are a AAA rated bank but then what to do. Negotiations took place for a long time and in the end we managed to get a DM665.0 million export credit facilities from them.

We had to use Clifford Chance, an international law firm based in Singapore together with a local firm for the loan documentation process. Up to 2 days before the signing we were still amending the agreements and during that time I did not get any sleep at all. As usual, balachi me was running around getting all the necessary approvals from the directors, preparing for the signing ceremony etc etc.

We had an innovative plan for this DM loan to cap our expenses. At the final drawdown, ERL will transfer the whole amount of DM665.0 million to the Government at an exchange rate of RM1.76 for every DM. The Government will pay the German bankers DM665.0 million at the prevailing exchange rate (within 10 years) while ERL pays the Government in Ringgit a fixed amount of RM1,170.0 million. Clever huh?

We finally signed it on a Friday afternoon and as reward for managing to get the required financing, we were shipped off to Pangkor Laut for a weekend of R&R (myself, NMN and the gaggle of German bankers) courtesy of a generous shareholder, who also owns the resort.

The same people (well, almost the same) who represented the banks were at the lunch and we had a fine time reminiscing the stressful time trying to put together the said financing. Some have gone up the ladder like Volker (KfW) and Michael (Hypo), both now VPs (back then just Asst Managers) while Scheinder will be going back to Germany soon.

I left ERL in 2000 after the 2nd drawdown of the facilities and having put up the system in place for use by my replacement. I still keep in touch with the people in ERL and being a typical Malaysian freeloader (heh heh) still managed to get free tickets from time to time for my own consumption.