Financial analysts admit trepidation over Balcerowicz departure threat
Did the dust-up over taxes and the fate of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz really matter to foreign investors?
You bet. Some expats worried that he'd threatened to resign once too often especially with lots of folks in his own coalition who are waiting to poke a stick in his eye. "It's the problem of crying 'wolf' too often," said David Hartford, the chief of Pioneer's venture capital fund here.
At the AmCham meeting the day after Balcerowicz had agreed to stay, despite President Aleksander Kwasniewski defeating his tax-cut plan with just a little slice of the overall pie, a panel of financial analysts agreed they'd been worried.
"If you look at the markets, a lot of the concerns come from the fact that nobody has any idea who conceivably might replace Balcerowicz," said Pierre Bergeron, the chief economic analyst for Citibank (Poland). Bergeron asked them: "No one had any idea. Someone mentioned (ex-Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) government Finance Minister Marek Belka. That doesn't work. So this creates uncertainty."
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) banker Kazimierz Przelomski said that while they invest long term, the prospect of a Balcerowicz departure "definitely was a concern for us."
Wood&Co. chief strategist Krzysztof Bledowski put a different spin on it. He said he expected that the late-night meetings with government leaders resulted in at least some commitments by the warring factions within the Solidarity Election Action (AWS)-Freedom Union (UW) coalition to do certain things such as an early debate on the 2001 budget.
"He came to a wall and if he were to scale that wall, I think it was to get something for something vs. something for nothing," Bledowski said. He called Balcerowicz "a man of principle" who had become a better politician as time went on not in popularity with the people where he gets high negatives and not within AWS circles "where he is almost vilified."
But it was notable that AWS critics were silent during the week-long firestorm and that supporters, within the government and from foreign investors here and overseas bigwigs, spoke up vociferously in favor of Balcerowicz who has become a code word for forward motion on next-generation reforms. Bledowski said Balcerowicz's success was in leveraging that, within the coalition, to make it possible for him to stay.
It's that season: Christmas parties and corporate thank you's, large and small.
At the Institute of Polish for Foreigners (IKO) party, a bash at Champions Sports Bar for the second year running, it appeared that at least half of the school's more than 650 students showed up. IKO began in 1994 with founders and owners Dorota Drewnowska and Malgosia Kujawska doing much of the teaching themselves. Now they're drawing many of the incoming managers from multinational corporations such as Francois Colombie who is in a language-immersion program before taking on a major management role at Auchan.
Another was a Scotsman, Argus I.W. Lyon, director of a new telecom-related company, Yoosh.com. "And how did you find IKO?" Gina Podhorecka asked.
"Through the web site," he said. That was music to her ears she designed it and has worked with IKO's bosses to not only inform strangers of everything they might want to know about IKO, but also to introduce an interactive word-a-week feature.
The La Boheme party celebrating the fifth anniversary of Heidrick & Struggles' headhunter operations here was a who's who in banking and finance. When Vera Hartford introduced her staff, it was a shock for some: the former country manager for Euronet, Krzysztof Krol, was now part of the headhunting team. "I'll focus on IT and financial services," he said. He didn't even have his business cards printed yet. After five years of weathering lots of international storms around U.S.-owned Euronet, including hard times in nearby transition countries such as Hungary, Krol left knowing that in Poland, Euronet's ATMs were the dominant system. And, he said, it was time for a new challenge.
Hard to keep up with the graffiti and anti-graffiti scuffles. Obviously it would be hard to put up an anti-Russia banner near the Russian Embassy. Aha! Think again. There's the Hyatt Hotel construction site just a half block away with aluminum and steel barriers separating the sidewalk from a deep hole in the ground. Last week, there were two or three "Wolna Czeczenia" (Free Chechnya) slogans scrawled across the construction site's walls. Within a day they were covered with advertising posters.
