Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

89 страница из 137

In recalling the hoops that the bankers had to jump through on the Autostrade issue, former SG Warburg executive Ian Fraser wrote:

For instance there was a British stamp duty of 4% on the capital value of all bearer bonds in Britain: so we decided to issue them on Schiphol Airport in Holland, in which country there was no such impost. The British Inland revenue would insist on deducting 42½% income tax from all coupons cashed whether by UK residents or foreigners; so we arranged for the coupons to be cashed in Luxembourg and several other places abroad. Most of the banks in the syndicate that [SG Warburg director Gert ] Whitman was putting together would not underwrite unless we put in place a listing on a major stock exchange such as London. After a lot of hard work we persuaded Throgmorton Street to admit our bonds to the official list even though they could not be ‘delivered’ (in settlement of a transaction) in Britain but only in Brussels or Luxembourg. Then we had major difficulties with the central banks of France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and of course Britain, about the exchange control consequences of allowing the bonds to be underwritten, purchased, sold and coupons cashed and ultimately the bonds redeemed all in a foreign currency – US dollars. Finally we could not find any printing firm to do the security printing of the bonds to a standard required by the rules (written in the 1920s) of the London Stock Exchange, until at the last moment De La Rue, the playing card printers, came forward and said they had two aged Czech engravers whom they could bring out of retirement who could do it for us.ssss1