Like A Kipper

A fine kipper at breakfast is a rare delicacy. They are notoriously intricate and tricky to eat, fraught with the danger of choking on a bone but if you can get a good one, there is nothing like it. The only problem is that they repeat on you the whole day to remind you of the meal - that's fine unless you have a bad one.

A Kipper - An Analogy For Business?

Work with me on this one, darlings, work with me. Being invited onto an £80m yacht, moored in the Mediterranean and offered a nice stay with a businessman is a rare treat indeed. The delicacy can be awfully sweet but it is risky as it can be easily be misconstrued if people find out. The memory no doubt lingers on well after the treat but if it turns bad, it can be a haunting. In many ways it's like a kipper meal.

How such an innocent meeting will be interpreted may yet be proportional to the after taste for Lord Peter Mandelson and his liaisons with Oleg Deripaska.

The Holidays

Of course, the whole business came to light when George Osbourne considered being on the same yacht with Mandelson, then an EC Commissioner, more than a coincidence. Osbourne is pretty much a low-life himself and he made this meeting public when Mandelson was called for by Gordon Brown to be fast-tracked back into Government. The only way to get him back was to have to give him a Peerage where he shares good company with Truscott et al, then a newly created post of Business Secretary, which indeed is the powerful iron fist of the Government.

But the matter did not end there. As soon afterwards we were to learn that the coincidental meeting on the yacht was not the first time Mandelson had met Oleg Deripaska and despite telling his colleagues in Brussels otherwise, he had indeed met him prior to a crucial vote on Russian Aluminium import duties - the very element that Oleg Deripaska made his considerable fortune with. As this revelation broke, Mandelson sought to cover his tracks over the fact that the crucial days of those meetings were missing from his diary which caused the 'misunderstanding' by Brussels auditors that he had not met Deripaska before the vote which ended up in Deripaska's favour, led by Mandelson.

Fantasy World

Peter Mandelson was the Chief Architect of the New Labour Project which saw the Party move as far away from its socialist roots as to be all but conservative. The phrase 'Champagne Socialists' aptly described the likes of Blair and Mandelson who seemed to think that commerce and business revolves solely around the influence and hob-nobbing with fabulously wealthy people, yet the roots of the Party lay in its appeal to the guys on the production line. It was clear where priorities lay in the Government at places like Lindsey Oil Refinery - it had lost all touch with the very people who had constructed the Party and gave it a reason to live.

In this fantasy world, Mandelson, seems to think it is perfectly fine to be seen with Russian Oligarchs prior to crucial votes which do not just favour them but make them fabulously wealthier again. That's the kind of kipper I am talking about - the one that will come back to haunt you, a bad one.

The LDV Story

As the Government talk the talk over rescuing industry we had Mandelson preaching to us that 'The Government was not a bank', 'The lender of last resort' and that he would take this opportunity to support new green business initiatives over traditional ones. This was at loggerheads with the Car Industry and so special interest cases were talked of. As talk is cheap, there has been plenty of it and precious little action. So when Tony Woodley, joint-leader of the union Unite, spoke at the weekend of a potential car plant grinding to a halt and this being the thin wedge of up to 80,000 jobs being at risk, Mandelson did what he does best - he got on the warpath.

Mandelson got on TV and accused Woodley of rumour-mongering and scare tactics while he knew of no such car plant in such mortal danger. But there was - it was LDV Vans.

Leyland DAF Vans was the original company after DAF trucks merged with British Leyland Rover Group. In 1993, the company went into administration and it was bought by Russian car maker GAZ, who in turn are owned by Russian Private Equity House, Basic Elements Group. In turn the Private Equity house is the main investment vehicle of none other than Russian Aluminium tycoon, Oleg Deripaska. The circle is completed as it was Mandelson's department which rebuffed LDV's pleading for bridging loans as it saw sales almost halve in the last quarter and 850 jobs were immediately at risk.

We all know that Private Equity Houses have been the particular love of the Blair-Brown regime. Not only are they great vehicles to buy defunct companies but they can be used to wash profits against debts and so mitigate tax completely - and that goes for the people who run them too. They are special status companies in the UK and have been the centre of many controversies over mega-profit deals that attract no tax like MG, Mini and Rover.

The Kipper Repeats

For Lord Mandelson, it is an embarrassing reminder of that sumptuous kipper he consumed when he met Oleg Deripaska before that crucial EC vote. It is said that GAZ have ploughed millions into LDV but since December 12 it has stopped its production lines, laid off 100 staff and it employs in total 850 workers in the factory, a further 1,200 in its dealer network and around 5,000 jobs are dependent on supplying it.

They say in business 'It's not what you know, but who you know'. I have always felt this was not true, because if you do not know about the person beforehand, they may not be worth knowing like Deripaska, Sir Allen Stanford and Bernard Madoff. Lord Mandelson has become a caricature of himself, ranting at Starbucks' CEO recently in New York, larging it over trade in this country as if he knows what he is doing and then getting caught with his pants down (metaphorically speaking) yet again.

He simply cannot resist a good kipper when he sees one. This one will haunt him for a good while to come. It's time for 'Champagne Socialism' to end and remind themselves that it is those at the production lines who will suffer far more than the oligarchs and investment bankers they so blatantly favour.