Why Mieugard had chosen a strange château twenty kilometres south of Biarritz for the meeting seemed a mystery to Fitzwilliams. The neo-Gothic Château d’Abbadia lay just outside of Hendaye, perched on a hill overlooking the ocean. For all that it was not sinister, though certainly eccentric; from the pages of a Conan Doyle tale.
Jean Mieugard, president of the French gas giant, Aquitania, was proud of his Basque origins, as had been the nineteenth century builder of the château who in addition had been Irish on his mother’s side. The idea of a Basque-Irish marriage had pleased him; for Kennedy the château was symbolic, an omen. The fact that Aquitania was French was irrelevant.
The château had been built by Antoine d’Abbadie, a Dublin born nineteenth century explorer and ethnologist. His father, a nobleman, had fled France to Ireland during the Revolution and there he married an Irish girl. The family had two sons and returned to France in 1818, when Antoine was eight years old.
As a young man Antoine Abbadie studied at the Sorbonne, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and the Collège de France, after which he participated in scientific expeditions organised by the French Academy: first to Brazil, then, with his brother, to explore Abyssinia and the Blue Nile.
He built his château in Hendaye, between 1864 and 1879, where he bought the domain overlooking the ocean, which was bequeathed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1897. It contained an observatory, a chapel and Abbadie’s library that included his maps, manuscripts, Ethiopian and Basque dictionaries, works on astronomy, coins and ancient inscriptions.
The château was a ten minute drive from Villa Leïhorra where Fitzwilliams and Kennedy had been invited to stay. A magnificent Art Déco style villa built in 1926 on a hill in Ciboure overlooking the Bay of Saint-Jean de Luz, far from Paris and the City where a meeting of bankers and oil men could not have gone unnoticed.
Their goal, an ambitious investment programme in the oil group Yakutneft in Russia’s Far East in partnership with the oligarch Sergei Tarasov.
Château d’Abbadia – Hendaye
SPRING WITHERS
The Arab Spring had been an unforeseen event, a Black Swan, but the Arab Summer was even more surprising. John Francis had never imagined the Egypt’s Islamist government would be ousted barely a year after its democratic election. The media announced that Mohammed Morsi, the recently elected Egyptian president, head of the Muslim Brotherhood party, had been ‘isolated’ by the army; along with members of his government and leading figures of his ruling party. Together they were being held incommunicado.
In total, over three hundred top members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been arrested during the course of a tumultuous night in Cairo. In a dramatic televised speech, General Abdulfattah al-Sisi, head of the Egyptian armed forces, accused Morsi of rejecting calls for national dialogue.
Francis feared a civil war that would would send the price of oil rocketing and markets plunging. Earlier that week as tensions rose he had called Fitzwilliams to warn him of the dangers and discuss the possible consequences.
Whatever the fate of the Egypt’s millions, the verdict concerning Mohammed Morsi was without appeal. He had failed to understand the essential task facing leaders, wherever they were, especially in the developing world: building a viable economy, the rest came a poor second. Leaders such as Morsi had only to look at China: an outstanding example of economic reality, but things were never that simple.
All that was not just of academic interest to Tom Barton; he had followed the events assiduously. As the threat of Egyptian chaos blew hot and cold, the price of oil rose and fell, and he played the markets, netting substantial gains. As ever he followed market-changing events, not merely waiting for CNN or Al Jazeera to announce the news, but by using specialist sources, experienced observers and analysts present in countries hit by crises.
He watched old hands on China and the Arab world interpret events, scanned foreign news media and read political analysis, on a constant lookout for the first signs of impending crises and the effects they could have on oil, gold and commodities. He bought and sold not to accumulate any specific asset, but to grow his wealth: in dollars, euros, Swiss francs and pounds.