LONDON NEWS

Today is National Cheese On Toast Day, TUPNews can exclusively report.

In Leicester Square, trade representatives of the UK's major bread and cheese manufacturers have set up stalls. On one, roughly 200 slices of bread have been laid out on a table in a big grid and covered with grated cheese. A woman then melts the cheese with a blowtorch. Fantastic.

Unfortunately, TUPNews had already eaten.

BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews has reported on this in the past, but as today’s FT headline shows, unbelievably biased coverage* of the Russian gas giant remains popular in the mainstream press, and may well seep on a dinner party table near you. As one of only two Gazprom-defending journalists in the UK (my girl Mary D at the Independent is the other), I’m pleased to offer you some insider chat on what promises to be a long-runner.

So there you are, admiring the frozen grape and dark chocolate dessert, wishing the host would crack open more wine. From the end of the table you hear the words “energy bully”. Without pausing to establish the context, or even the identity of the speaker, bellow the following:

“Ukraine is a nation of thieves who don’t know who their real friends are. Russia has effectively subbed their economy for a decade with dirt-cheap gas, and all it asked in return was for Ukraine to be its mate. In return, Ukraine steals from the pipes at every opportunity and racks up massive debts. Then Ukraine decides it would rather be mates with the EU. Fine – but it can’t expect to keep getting mates’ rates on gas - if your girlfriend leaves you, you can respect her decision but still stop sending her flowers. It doesn’t make you a “flower bully”.

As for the “shady intermediary” RosUkrEnergo handling Gazprom’s Ukrainian sales – what exactly is shady about using a subsidiary or joint venture? RUE is half-owned by the ‘prom, half-owned by an Austrian bank. It’s all there in black and white. In fact, the only shadiness going on is the question of who the Austrians are representing here – the word on the street is, fucking Ukranian politicians/gangsters!

Also why the fuck do you think Russia is so keen to move its commercial relationships with its neighbours to “market conditions”, i.e. a higher, market-driven price, not the amalgam of mates’ rates and pipeline access barter that it has been up to now? More dough, certainly, but also bare pressure from your precious friends the WTO, which Russia is desperate to join. They’re just trying to play by the rules of your sacred free market!! And how do you respond? Getting all protectionist over the Centrica bid, and generally accusing them of starting a new Cold War.

Finally - what has Ukraine got out of this great new pro-Western stance? Fuck all. Fuck all investment, fuck all modernisation, fuck all trade, just a vague promise to maybe join the EU in about twenty years.”

At this point someone may interject: “Yeah but Putin, like, was in the KGB, and he’s, er, oil…”

Feel free to physically attack them.


*What happened: Gazprom complains about the fact that the UK is furiously trying to change the law to prevent it from taking over Centrica, and points out that if it is prevented from growing in Europe, it will have to grow into other markets instead.

What was reported: “Gazprom in threat to supplies” screams the headline. Gazprom “threatens” to redivert supplies, as a “warning” to the EU and a “riposte” to the UK.

UPDATE!

RosUkrEnergo has revealed who owns the other half (i.e. the half not owned by Gazprom). It’s two Ukrainian businessmen, one of which had been rumoured to be involved in deals with crime lords, but denies it and nothing has been proven.

Meanwhile Putin had this to say:

“When European companies come to us it’s called investment and globalisation, but when we go there it’s called expansion by Russian companies.”

Finally, a Gazprom spokesman admitted that Moscow had committed a PR blunder by remaining silent during the Ukraine cut-off: “I think the mistake on our side was that we didn’t explain it properly,” said a spokesman.

SPORTS NEWS

Football

Southern Premier League
Twerton Park

Bath City 0 – 2 Chippenham Town

I was hoping to write an in-depth report about this Easter Monday fixture, but the result has left me too depressed to go into it in any detail.

It was, in fairness, a lovely day to go down the football, and the fine weather and import of the match had swelled the crowd to over two thousand, well above the average gate of six hundred. But we was robbed: an early red card for a City striker put everything off balance in an already sloppy match, and the atmosphere was dead by the sixty-minute mark. Usually I can watch City lose and still enjoy the day out (God knows I’ve had enough practice), but God I fucking hate Chippenham Town, and faced with a home loss like this, all my Zen deserts me.

So all TUPNews has to share with you is a realisation I had on the terraces: that the emptiest, most lonely sound in the world is the sound of the away support celebrating a goal from the other side of the ground. Their roars don’t just sound like a quieter echo of the home supporters’ cheers - they actually sound like the inverse of the home supporters’ cheers, like the air is being sucked out of the stadium.

LONDON NEWS

TUPNews was just stopped on London’s Carnaby Street by a young woman with a plate of meat, camera crew in tow. She asked me to sample her wares – little grey meatball things – while the cameras filmed me. I ate one; it was tasty. What is it, I asked. Lamb testicles, she replied. The camera crew leant in, awaiting my gor-blimey-gov’nor-well-I-never reaction.

Who do they think they’re kidding? I’m a LONDONER, for fuck’s sake. You really think this is the first time I’ve eaten a lamb’s nuts? Fuck, I could probably give you a Time Out-style top five places to eat lamb balls right off the top of my head.

I signed the consent form triumphantly: look out for me on Food Uncut.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

Part 1

We rounded off our trip with a few beers in the exclusive bar on the top floor of our hotel. Now that the ordeal was over, the mood had lightened. In fact, I started to feel a little sentimental.

Like I said before, I am primarily a desk-bound feature journalist. I don’t get out much. I have no rivals, and know few of my peers. Even at events, I rarely find myself socialising with other hacks, preferring the company of bankers and lawyers – I don’t know why this is. As proud as I am of my press card, I’ve never had a sense of being part of the international brotherhood of journalists.

But in the emptiness of the Qatari desert, adversity and futility had bonded this disparate group of hacks together. For a couple of days, I was more than a member of the press. For the first time in my career, I was part of a press corps.

Part 2

The final thing I want to write about is what it’s like generally being in an Arab country.

The first thing that’s weird is visas. On my arrival I was escorted to a small, plush waiting room while headscarved women checked my papers and brought me tumblers of chilled water. This put me in mind of a 1970s international espionage thriller, or an episode from the original Mission:Impossible.

The second thing that’s weird is seeing burkas everywhere. I live in London so it’s not like I’m not used to seeing them. But the cumulative effect of seeing them on around half of women, and hijabs on most of the rest, made the place feel other-worldly. Specifically, it reminded me of the Star Wars prequels.

I did get a chance to wander down the seafront and around the old town for about two hours. Along the seafront were dozens of joggers and power walkers, many wearing burkas, which I found charming. The traditional souq in the old town looked nice, but was empty. Traders sat around stoically, completely failing to surround and hassle me to buy their spices/rugs/plastic footballs. Joe Qatari, it seems, has moved on to the designer shopping mall next door.

As the sun began to set, I found myself in a throng of builders trooping off to the nearby mosque. Somehow I had failed to hear the call to prayer – I did not hear it the whole time I was there.

Part 3

There was a young, impeccably dressed, impossibly thin, severely good-looking girl among the Arab press. All us British boys were fascinated, but were too intimidated by her beauty and culture to approach her. Luckily I managed to find myself in a lift with her and introduced myself. She works for Radio Monte Carlo.

Do I even have to say it? I fell immediately in love.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

Our time in Doha was drawing to close: there remained only the gala, alcohol-free launch dinner.

The trench humour of the Ras Laffan trip had given way to a listless depression, as we sat right at the back of a massive dining hall and watched the ridiculous video presentation unfold, unfeelingly. We picked at our starters, barely able to summon the energy to comment wittily on the proceedings.

David Frost was the master of ceremonies: the poor boy seems to be suffering from Parkinson’s, or some similar disease. Frost is about to take up a senior position within the al-Jazeera TV news organisation, which is based in Qatar. He dutifully rolled through the script.

In a final cancellation, the Emir himself had wisely decided not to turn up to his own event, sending his prime minister along instead. The prime minister had the honour, therefore, of placing his hand on a tacky glowing sphere and formally launching the new city.


David Frost before his speech

To their credit, the British press officers were still frantically trying to secure an audience with the Qatari oil minister, who had blown us off several times already. Just before the main course arrived, word came – the minister would take questions! We grabbed our pads and Dictaphones and went to wait in the wings.

This was very exciting for all of us, but me in particular. I have always been a desk-bound feature journalist – I’ve never door-stopped anyone, or been part of a media scrum.

(My editor, by contrast, was once a bona fide oil reporter on a major newswire, who has seen firsthand the media scrums that accompany OPEC ministers wherever they go, and has participated in a few herself. She once scooped her rivals by turning up at an OPEC minister’s favourite London hotel at 5am in her jogging clothes, just in time to join him for his morning run. Old school.)

Thick with adrenalin, I rehearsed my questions and fiddled with the voice recorder function on my phone. The minister came over to inspect the model city along with the rest of the royal family. We were yards away. A harried press officer I hadn’t seen before approached him and pointed over to the assembled ranks of the international media, hungry for anything they could bring back to their editors. He looked over, smiled at us, and fucked off.

We shuffled back to our tables, to find that we had missed the main course.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

By the second day, the press corps was in open revolt. Promises of one-to-one meetings with ministers had been quietly swept aside, and even the British public relations boys were admitting to us in private that the trip was a bust.

(At the previous night’s reception, I had casually asked a British PR how the day had gone from his perspective. He leaned in, stared fixedly into my eyes like a hunted animal, and confessed that it had been the worst day of his career.)

Disillusioned, we impassively accepted our fate: a morning at a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Ras Laffan, some forty minutes’ drive from Doha.

LNG is where you compress gas into a liquid, whack it on a ship and send it off to Asia, or increasingly, the US. It's good if you don't want to build pipelines. It's the future, some say.

The cracks started to show during the introductory video presentation, which told the story of Qatar’s natural gas industry and the Ras Laffan plant, closing with the phrase “It’s Ras Laffantastic!” This had a few of us desperately biting our knuckles. Herded back on the buses for the grand tour, the stout and somewhat camp tour guide made some opening remarks in English, causing the Arab press to again go apeshit. A few chuckles were suppressed from the Westerners at the back of the bus. The driver then fired the engine, which shook gamely before shuddering to a complete halt. This was too much; the international media dissolved into fits of laughter.

Wiping tears from our eyes, we watched on as the poor guide attempted to give his speech in both English and Arabic, only for the Arab press to shout him down every time he dared speak infidel, which was every thirty seconds. He pleaded that he was “just trying to please everybody,” but this didn’t cut it – eventually, the buses stopped and the Westerners were evacuated to the bus behind. Linguistic segregation assured, the tour continued.

I’m being a little disingenuous in running down the experience of touring the LNG facility. I write about the more rarefied financial aspects of the energy industry, so it’s refreshing for me to see the nuts and bolts every once and a while (although this was clearly not true for most of my colleagues.) Big gas flares, racks of computers keeping tabs on flows and pressure - it's all good.

Best of all was the anti-dehydration signs in the men's room, which explained what the optimum shade of urine is, using a colour-coded system (the lighter the better.) I wanted to take a picture, but as my phone is not "explosion-proof", I had to turn it off during my visit.

Also there were loads of cool LNG tankers from all over the world. My principal regret in life is that I am not a mariner - I tried to join the Merchant Navy two years ago, but I was too old and they wouldn’t have me - so I was perfectly happy to hang out by the docks for a while.



Tom looks at a tanker, utterly disillusioned.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

The first day ended with a drinks reception in the Royal Suite of the Four Seasons, a little closer to Doha city centre. I was twenty minutes later than the others in arriving, but that twenty minutes had clearly been enough to totally destroy whatever morale might have been left among the press corps.

We had been promised a 4x4 desert safari; I don’t mind admitting it was the principal reason I accepted the assignment. Instead, we were stuck drinking non-alcoholic smoothies in a gold-leaf apartment with smiling, vacuous officials. The balcony afforded a fine view of Doha; my boys looked ready to jump.

Like many middle-class Britons, I’m happy to indulge the line that we’d all be better off if we sipped slowly like the French rather than etc etc. But a drinks reception without drink is just wrong, I’m sorry. And for British journalists – it’s just insulting, quite frankly.

I tried to cheer everyone up with amazing stories of my visit to Lusail. At the presentation they had attended, Lusail looked like this:




In fact, Lusail currently looks like this:




They all found this hilarious, as you can imagine. I was also able to laugh, having survived the car journey back from Lusail. The Qatari state is pretty obsessed with road safety, for a country where there is presumably no drink driving, and most of the roads are of the straight, desert variety. To deter people from dying in traffic accidents, there are loads of posters literally encouraging people not to die in traffic accidents, as well as car wrecks perched on roadside plinths. These were a curiosity on the way out, but more ominous on the way back - at least while the hi-tech dashboard of our driver’s Mercedes repeatedly asked him to pull over and check the tire damage he had suffered busting a sharp U-turn across the road. Not a strong English speaker, he was oblivious; not a religious type, I nevertheless prayed for my immortal soul.

Of course, the reception did at least afford an opportunity to hobnob with the bigwigs. A chance to pick up the scoop, the inside, the real deal.

A common paradox in financial journalism is that the more important someone is, the less they have to say. The top dog is invariably so elevated from the real action as to be reduced to vagaries and verbless sentences. For crunch, you actually need to speak to the ambitious head of a minor desk, the maverick analyst, or the central European lawyer who’s spotted a problem with such and such directive.

Tom, for instance, had covered the G8 summit in Gleneagles, and declared it to be the dullest week of his life. The only relief from the tedious mission statements and position papers was being able to watch the riot police wade in on the kids, all from the safety of the hotel. That, and watching the professional fury of the major outlets’ big-dick reporters, stuck in a remote Scottish village while the YTS boys back at head office got to cover the biggest terrorist attack in London’s history.

True to form, none of the top brass had anything to say – in fact, most of them had only been brought on board a few weeks previous, and none of them seemed to understand what the company was or what it was doing.

After a mediocre buffet dinner and some stilted chat with our brothers in the Arab press, we made a unionised decision to fuck off back to the Ritz-Carlton for some $10 cans of John Smiths and an early night.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

We reconvened at noon, to learn that the promised 18 holes at a luxury golf club had also been cancelled. TUPNews was secretly relieved, as despite some proficiency with the putting iron, I am overall a poor golfer. Instead, we were carted off to the Qatari Financial Centre for the launch of a new energy exchange.

Imex will be the centrepiece of Energy City Qatar, the financial district that will be the centrepiece of Lusail, a whole new extra city the Qataris are whacking up in a bid to become the new Dubai.

The press release claimed that Imex was the first energy exchange in the Middle East, which is a straightforward lie, given that the Dubai Mercantile Exchange launched last year. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, as they say.

The Imex officials were pretty non-committal about such details as what type of futures contracts might be traded, who might trade them, etc. After an hour of half-Arabic, half-English Q&A with the Qatari economics minister that went nowhere and revealed nothing, proceedings were brought to a close – and then rapidly re-opened after the Arab press went apeshit and demanded to be allowed to ask more pointless questions. I love the Arab press.



A light buffet lunch later and we were treated to our third schedule change of the day: a trip to the Qatari Hotels Association – not, as listed, the Four Seasons, where the British, Bahrain-based TV producer had already sent his crew - to watch a presentation about the development of Lusail, the brand-spanking new city we were all so looking forward to seeing.

I was in the car with the TV producer, and we broke away from the main convoy to swing by the Four Seasons to pick up his crew. It was not his usual crew, he explained: his usual crew had been denied visas for being “insufficiently managerial.” It is remarkably difficult to get around the Middle East, even if you are a local. A Bahraini must be a manager to come to Qatar on business, and despite receiving an on-the-spot promotion in Bahrain International Airport, the poor lad was grounded. Instead, we were joined in the car by his makeshift, Doha-based crew: a silent Indian and a chipper Dutchman.

The producer was pretty stressed at this point, musing dolefully about what an incredible amount of effort it took to produce a vapid 15-second news clip. Little did he know that, thanks to a misunderstanding with our driver, we were about to land a scoop – the first viewing by Western journalists of the actual Lusail development itself.

BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews lunched today at the W-lbrook Club, in London’s The City, as the guest of a French investment bank.

Despite the indignity of having to wear a house tie, I was completely won over by the club and resolved to join immediately, or just as soon as I become a wealthy industrialist. With just three rooms and a bar, the W-lbrook is a cosy affair. It was founded in 2000 as a simple City dining club, so it has none of the dusty, oppressive history of the Mayfair bruisers. The décor is modest yet quirky: the old-school portraits are there, but mixed in with 1920s cartoon sketches and Edwardian architectural drawings. Although I didn’t see it, the club’s Oak Room is apparently decorated with celluloids from the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, alongside Sir Peter Blake’s paintings of wrestlers.

And when I saw the massive model of the ocean liner Saturnia behind the bar, it was, of course, love at first sight.

After a quick drink in the bar, around thirty press and bankers assembled in the upstairs dining room for lunch and a presentation. The food was excellent, as you would expect from a French bank. A few glasses of fine wine took the edge of TUPNews’ boat race-induced hangover.

Seated on my left was a darling young girl from the Dow Jones newswire, bright-eyed and bird-like, who charmed me off the table. But to my right, more excitingly, was Caroline Hayas, the chief energy reporter for the Financial Times.

To me, FT writers are celebrities. They’re not that much better than other City hacks – my journalism heroes all work at The Sun - but when you read their stuff every day, you can’t help but feel excited when you actually meet one. I have no desire to work for a daily, but for the pink ‘un I might make an exception.

Hayas was just like I expected: a slim, elegant woman in her early thirties, doubtless a graduate of the LSE or Sorbonne or something, putting sharp questions to the brass one minute and telling us cute anecdotes about her two-year-old the next. Brilliant. People always tell me that City journalism is a male-dominated line of work – this might be the case statistically, but it always seems that the quality hacks are girls. Two of my last three editors, for instance.

Before I left I went for a slash. The marble urinals had a frosted glass piss-guard about eighteen inches high, which kept my marvellous shoes safe from errant flecks. Genius.

BUSINESS NEWS

BREAKING NEWS!!!

Just got this press release in my inbox:

Bergen and London, 03 April 2006 - Fish Pool AS, the first international marketplace for the trading of financial salmon contracts, today announced that it has selected [such-and-such software] to power this entirely new market.

The marketplace will officially open on 27 April 2006 and has been created to facilitate the transaction of financial salmon contracts for farmers and purchasers of salmon. The contracts to be offered by Fish Pool are completely new tools for the salmon industry and will aim to bring more stability to the prices of salmon.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

What the Emir wants, the Emir gets. He wanted the international media present at this shindig, and was willing to shell out to make this happen. So here we were, jetlagged and woozy from a champagne-soaked flight.

The international media consisted of myself; Tom, a wry freelancer who claimed to have fathered “dozens of children”; Luke, a young educated hippie six months into the job; Mark, a broad-shouldered, soft-spoken Texan; John, a depressed Atlantan in his late forties; Elizabeth, a very funny middle-aged woman from a Malaysian tabloid, and Wang, an unnervingly young-looking reporter from the New China Daily. There was absolutely no common editorial link between our publications, and by the end of the trip, we would all agree that there was absolutely no point in any of us being there.

We had been promised unforgettable hospitality, unparalleled access to senior figures, and a massive story: the establishment of a fully-fledged trading hub in the Middle East.

The Middle East produces vast quantities of crude oil and natural gas, but this is all sold directly to Western energy firms who take it at a fixed price and then sell it on the major commodity exchanges in New York, London and Singapore.* The Middle Eastern producers don’t get to wear brightly-coloured jackets and shout at each other, like in Trading Places. Understandably they feel left out, and want to set up their own, which is what they’re doing, which is why we were there.

On the morning of the first day, we were visibly excited. A grand ribbon-cutting of a sparkling new futuristic energy city!Pages and pages of easy-to-write copy, with dazzling photographs! Mucking about with the Qatari oil minister! It doesn’t get any better than this.

Unfortunately the morning of the first day was cancelled. We repaired to our hotel rooms, watched one of the eight channels devoted to football, had a look out of the balcony, read the awful local paper, wondered if we had enough time to check out the sauna, decided that we didn’t, and reconvened in the lobby at noon.

*Some more background: the Middle East and Russia produce sour crude, while the West produces sweet crude – West Texas Intermediate (WTI) from Texas, and Brent crude from the North Sea. Sour crude requires more refining before it can be turned into gasoline, so it is cheaper. Fair enough. But prices for crude oil are “discovered” by the balance of supply and demand on Western exchanges, which use Brent and WTI as the benchmark grades. That is, the price of Brent and WTI is determined by the actual supply and demand for Brent and WTI, while everything else – including Middle Eastern sour crude – is priced at discount to those benchmarks. Sour crude producers would rather see it prices for sour crude set by the underlying supply and demand for sour crude, and are eager to establish a sour crude benchmark in the same vein as Brent or WTI, most likely on a Middle Eastern exchange. This way, “price discovery” could occur nearer to home.