Farooq Tirmizi hired me about a decade ago when I started out in business reporting. He taught me a great deal and I’ll always be thankful to him.
Having prefaced my comment with this acknowledgement of facts, I want to draw your attention to his recent article titled, “Citibank Pakistan scaled back, and became bigger than ever.”
I ask him a basic question: what exactly does an article like that achieve? Who does it appeal to? Who does it inform? Who stands wiser after reading it?
My comment isn’t meant to cause embarrassment to or start an online fight with my former boss and mentor. I’m genuinely interested in knowing his reasoning.
He’d tell us in Tribune days that we wrote for not only general readers but also investors — current and prospective. So which kind of readers does it cater to?
Citi is not listed in Pakistan and its local operations, however excellent, have no tangible effect on consolidated accounts of the global parent company.
As for general readers, they sure wouldn’t mind learning that Citi is raking it in even after rolling back its consumer business in Pakistan. That’s business news. But how is proselytising helpful in this case? It is one thing to report on a bank’s good performance but quite another to wax lyrical about it on end. People notice the use of adjectives.
Like others in Pakistan, Citi is engaged in a most mundane kind of business. Its exit from consumer banking should be questioned — not celebrated — because it left retail customers worse off.
Trading debt securities or midwifing bond sales is neither novel nor revolutionary. What’s the point in uncritical cheerleading? If anything, it should’ve been a requiem for the Citi of 1990s when its existence actually made people’s lives better.
He has used quite a few quotes from the recording of Citi’s December 2019 press briefing. I was there. I asked them if Citi had done any CPEC-related financing or helped a participating company raise funds. The long-winded response was abysmally short on substance. (I think that included the quote he used about Ant Financial.) Imagine a global corporate and investment bank with local presence standing by idly while the country undergoes the single largest bout of infrastructure expansion in 70 years.
An Oxford-educated c-suite executive recently switched jobs from Citi to a coal-burning energy company. I asked him if he missed the clean, respectable work at Citi. He said he couldn’t be happier because he now worked for a company that actually contributed to GDP growth.
Isn’t it part of our job as journalists to always mistrust big business? Isn’t it expected of us to be sceptic about their lofty claims, to be suspicious of their posturing?
I hope his answer will make me better understand his point of view.
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