Starting out in banking in the mid 1980s, you had to get used to being thrown in at the deep end pretty quickly; as John St John found when he joined Barings in 1985.
He remembers his first Christmas in the job. As one of the juniors, one of his tasks was to be the last to check the telex machine each night before going home. On Christmas Eve he duly did so, only for the machine to whirr into life as he was preparing to walk out of the office.
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| John St John |
It was the French Trésor with an invitation to pitch: some things never change.
“The submission date was something like January 5, so I worked all Christmas on a pitch that I knew was probably going to go straight into the bin because I had never written a privatization pitch before,” he says.
