‘ICARCUS: The Life and Death of The Abraaj Group’ with focus on Arif Naqvi by Professor Brian Brivati was published by Biteback on 20th July 2021 and by Vanguard Books in Pakistan in Mid-August 2021 Arif Naqvi was a figure of global importance and influence before his sudden and devastating fall from grace and arrest at Heathrow Airport on April 10, 2019. The western media has so far told the story of the spectacular fall as though it was the inevitable collapse of a corrupt company run by corrupt Pakistanis. It is the usual story about the usual suspects. The conventional one-dimensional and inherently prejudiced way in which non-whites success stories have to be taken down. However, a new book has appeared which sets out to challenge this conventional picture with an evidence-driven account, written by a former Professor who now works in international development and consultancy and understands the inner workings of global politics and international capitalism. The media coverage of Arif Naqvi in much of the western press has read like a long press release by the United States Department of Justice. Unfounded allegations are presented as facts. Allegations in an indictment that was designed to win over what they call in the US a grand jury so that budget could be allocated to the case are presented as truths. No petty story is too small to be repeated in this desperate bid for attention and prizes. In most of this coverage, the Pakistani must be a thief because the prosecution say he is a thief and if the US says it so we must all repeat it as true. Arif Naqvi has been accused, tried and condemned in the western media and corners of our own media without once having the chance to present his side of the story or the evidence that will counter the simplistic and misleading story that has been put out. That level of attack is not only an attack on an individual, it is an attack on a country and a faith. There is a line of barely concealed Islamophobia in much that has been written and broadcast on this story in the west, depressing in its content and predictable in its tone. This racism is only one dimension of the story of course, there is also a deeper and more telling force at play: power politics.
If you want illuminating as to how power politics works in an age of globalisation, read Icarus: The Life and Death of the Abraaj Group. In telling the story of how a firm which had fully ‘drank the globalisation Kool-Aid,’ in its words, was brought down through underhand means by nation-state power, and how that process was then spun into simply being more of the same old white-collar crime, Icarus provides useful instruction on how the world works and the direction that international politics will go.
Where the book really shines is in its examination of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, the push-and-pull it creates in Pakistani politics and how Karachi Electric exerted such a gravitational pull upon an internationalist, truly boundary-crossing company such as Abraaj which nevertheless could not escape the tug of its founder’s roots upon its deals. The look into a Chinese investment operation such as that to buy Karachi Electric at such a close in level provides excellent context for an audience who may have only heard of the BRI in the abstract in terms of the large projects in Pakistan. It both lays out the processes, how of the three Chinese companies involved, two dropped out to give Shanghai Electric Power a clear run at it with their $1.77 billion offer, and it lays out the rationale on a strategic level, why the Chinese want certain ports and how their operations in specific countries fit into a wider pattern. It does so clear-headedly, rationally, and without having to slip into fear mongering to make its points. From a Pakistani perspective, Icarus vividly paints a political picture of an establishment torn between a US-friendly military, an insurgent populist party led by an ex-cricketer and a pair of conflicting historical relationships with the Great Powers staring each other off over Karachi. Keeping the facts and figures side of the story to a good minimum allows this colourful drama to play out to full effect.
Into the middle of this, of course come Arif Naqvi and the Abraaj Group. No one who creates and grows a company to the point it can raise a $6 billion investment fund could ever be accused of being naïve, or not knowing how the world works. Icarus itself demonstrates Abraaj’s past canniness in moments of political tension and flux – notably the Arab Spring. As a company that prides itself on its Middle Eastern home knowledge, their success in waiting out the turmoils of 2011-12, of keeping their cool while others around them lost theirs, in the first stands undoubtedly as a moment of vindication, a high point of the first of two iterations the book treats them as having, that allowed them to go onto bigger and better things. The key question of Icarus, therefore, is where they lost that canniness, if indeed they did, or was it simply a case of being overmatched by a superpower. The answer it comes to is a bit of both. As with so many, Arif Naqvi was vocally anti-Trump, quite understandably in the expectation he would never win election. Unforeseeable perhaps, but an error in light of his position as a man dependent on American friendship. Icarus lays out the closeness of Naqvi to Imran Khan’s PTI, he was planning to sell Abraaj to take up a permanent position in Pakistani politics. The book’s conclusion that Naqvi both believed the rhetoric of globalisation, that the day of the nation-state was done, and that America believed its own spiel to the point of forsaking national interest, if not naivety, is an endearing idealism that gives lie to the portrayal of him as a grasping crook.
Ultimately, Icarus’ lesson is that nation-states and their interests stop for no principles. If Naqvi’s mistake was forgetting this, then what Icarus does well to demonstrate is that it was through some genuine idealism, and that the principles of impact investing were trying to make the world a better place. Cast aside by competing superpowers, Icarus shows the human cost to such games. But it also tells us that in the end there are limits to the cosmopolitanism of the west and its liberalism. Limits to the spheres in which Muslims are tolerated and beyond which they are always in danger of being permanently confined.
–The writer is a political
commentator based in London.