His father had never told him much about his work and didn’t believe in asking for help : he wasn’t good at delegating. Maybe that was why he’d been so successful which was all well and good while his company was smaller. But as it had grown, it had become impossible for him to do everything himself. Rob wondered where his father had found the time to look at claims work – that was why the company employed someone to manage them.
He’d told his father to ease up but it had fallen on deaf ears. It might have been the loss of Rob’s mother, a year earlier which led his father to spend more time at the office. Most of Jim Ashby’s life had been spent building up his company. Without his family around him, it was what he’d fallen back on.
After the Second World War had ended, Jim Ashby had taken a job in the City and worked his way up from clerk to manager. By the late fifties, he’d set up his own company.
In the sixties, some of the social barriers in the world of finance had fallen away : this is what had happened in the London market and at the London Risk Exchange – the LRE. Around it, orbited several large insurer conglommerates, a few international broking houses, lots of smaller brokers and scores of underwriting companies, many of which were branch offices of almost every overseas insurer in the world. All of them were sharing, exchanging, buying or selling contracts to cover almost anything and everything imaginable, on a worldwide scale.
Until the sixties, the Risk Exchange and the large broking houses had been a rich man’s club of wealthy middle class or upper class families. Commercial risk, although highly valued, was considered a tedious occupation. It was nevertheless a profitable business if handled the right way and in some cases, extremely profitable. Some families had been in risk insurance for generations and it was thought of as a relatively safe and secure investment, over the long term.
This select club began to break down in the early sixties when it became fashionable to experiment. The younger members wanted to try new things. They thought they could make a lot more money if they let in ‘the barrow boys’ – men from the working class or lower middle class who had nothing but brains and ability, worked hard and knew how to make money – but often at greater risk.
Ashby’s father had been one of them. The senior members of his syndicate at the Risk Exchange, knew he was clever and when the Vietnam War was going, he’d made them pots of money. Eventually, he had enough capital to set up on his own.
Britain’s empire may have gone but the London market was the traditional place for corporates from all over the world to find the financial security they needed. Many of the talented underwriters left the dreary, tuppeny ha’penny stuff to others. Instead, they were interested in the lucrative and complex contracts which underpinned the business of companies operating globally.
This had attracted Jim Ashby. He’d become a ‘leading underwriter’ and was able to expand his business from almost nothing to one of the largest group reinsurers in London, insuring other insurers across several continents. Depending on the way the wind was blowing – literally – one day he could be making a fortune and overnight he could almost be wiped out. This vicissitude didn’t bother him and in the early years of building up his business, he seemed to thrive on it.
His corporate group, Plantation ended up covering almost anything large you could think of, in over thirty countries – skyscrapers, oil refineries, jumbo jets, supertankers – and what could happen to them – earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, explosions. He ran a large book of American business for all sorts of things from car assembly plants in Detroit to accountants in California, hence his son’s secondment to Texas Fire : they were his most valued overseas partner. For over twenty five years, they’d been doing business together and he visited them every second year.
Naturally, there were huge risks surrounding this type of business and more than once Plantation would have been obliterated, had his father been too greedy.
High premiums went with high risk. Around the market, all of the major broking houses knew that Jim Ashby was a tough sell to get the security their clients needed. They made sure they did their homework before going to see him as there was little chance of slipping something into the contract which other underwriters might overlook.
Plantation had expanded as the London market had grown. During the post-war boom, a lot of American money had flowed into the City. Jim Ashby had exploited this by having most of business outside the LRE while running three small syndicates at the Exchange – one each for marine, non-marine and aviation contracts. His largest company competed with the LRE for general underwriting business. He liked the different parts of his business to compete against itself. He also had a broking company which channelled business to the underwriters, a company in the Cayman Islands and interests in various other underwriting and broking companies in Britain, the United States and Canada.
Thinking of this, Rob Ashby stared out of the plane window into the blackness of the early morning hours. As the headwinds buffeted the plane, he recalled his father’s reputation. He was angry that no-one in London had telephoned him and instead had sent him a telex. And he hadn’t been told why they wanted to see him at Plantation’s office.
He knew that his father had a fair-sized shareholding in the Plantation Group and he wondered whether he himself would still have a job there, now that his father was gone. In the past, the old man had raised the prospect of Rob taking over the reins one day but nothing had been said about the shares or what his father intended doing or what the other directors would say. He remembered saying that everyone in the company would think that it was nepotistic. In some countries, the head of state bequeathed power to his son or wife. But his father saw it differently : he’d set up and run Plantation from day one and to him, it was a family business.
The more Rob Ashby thought about it, the more it struck him that the request to attend the board meeting was odd. He would have his father’s funeral to organise and personal affairs to clear up. It was possible that Plantation might not want to keep his job open or put him on temporary leave – something of the sort. He wasn’t a director and had no responsibility at executive level. It was more likely they wanted to see him about something else, perhaps related to his father’s position in the company or his shareholding. They appeared to want something from him, otherwise why see him in person ?