Jim Rogers has been carrying the flag for post war investment in Sri Lanka in the international media. He visited the island in August last year scouting investment opportunities, met stock brokers, Central Bankers and bureaucrats. However nothing came of it.
"There was a major guy there who said "We would like for you to get involved', so I said "If I'm going to get involved here in a public way then I cannot invest here because it may be a potential conflict" so I held off and nothing came of the other" he says of the outcome of his first visit to the island and the meeting with a top bureaucrat who he didn't want to name.
"I was prepared and wanted to invest in Sri Lanka but as a result I don't have investments."
One by one other disappointments mounted. An international bank assisting in the investment "turned out to be hopelessly inefficient and couldn't get things done right not for days but weeks".
"I also had an unbelievable disappointment. About three months after I went there, there was a letter in a major newspaper, from a guy who I have no idea is, saying that 'Jim Rogers came here but he hasn't invested'.
Now the fact that anybody knew that (I had not invested) means there is no respect for privacy of capital and as you may know most investors around the world don't want their affairs spoken about."
"Secondly this newspaper decided to publish this letter saying this. They don't know, they didn't check with me. I'm worried about the lack of discretion in Sri Lanka.
Yes I went to Sri Lanka and people knew about it and I wasn't bothered. But all of a sudden when it's written in the press about what I had done or hadn't done I was shocked", he adds. "Pick an investor. Mark Mobius went to Sri Lanka, which he did. What if a newspaper starts publishing what he did or didn't do without his knowledge, that's a lack of discretion, maybe because Sri Lanka is new to the world of investing" says Rogers who was born in the US state of Maryland and raised in Alabama. He earned bachelor's degrees from both Yale and Oxford before enlisting in the US Army in the 1960s.
(An excerpt from an interview conducted with Jim Rogers by LBR)
source - www.dailymirror.lk
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