Problems jostle with promise in bullish Nigeria
It was said of John Craven when he sold Morgan Grenfell to Deutsche Bank that it was the crowning deal of his career. He had managed to get such a good price for Morgan Grenfell, in which he owned a large stake, that people doubted whether anybody else could have pulled it off. In Lagos, over the past year, Atedo Peterside, chief executive of IBTC Chartered Bank, has been trying to pull off a similar deal that will put the seal on a distinguished career. But this time he is close to selling his own bank, which he set up in 1989.
Peterside, the son of a medical doctor, decided during his university days at the London School of Economics that he wanted to set up his own investment bank. The reason? "I didn’t think the other banks in Nigeria were any good at it, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur," he says. At the end of his studies, he toyed with the idea of getting a job in the City of London or on Wall Street but dismissed it because he feared that once he was outside Nigeria he would never be able to return.