It
was 3am on a bleak February morning in central Moscow, and blood from
the gaping wound in Charlie’s liver was drenching his white sofa.
Stabbed and robbed in the courtyard below, the young Rothschild banker
had dragged himself to his apartment before collapsing. But Charlie’s
problems had only just begun.
It was 2013, and his housemate, Jack Coleman, had been in Russia long
enough to know that calling an ambulance was futile. Even if it
arrived, it would require difficult bribes to get the wounded man
treated, says Mr Coleman, who says the law firm employing him had the
number of a travel security company. A frantic phone call found him
speaking to medics in Australia just as Charlie, 26, went into shock.
The company scrambled a special ambulance to take the young banker to
a private hospital, but as he was wheeled into theatre the surgeons
demanded a fee of €8,000 before they would operate. Charlie, who asked
for his full name not to be used, faced a total bill of €30,000 for the
saving of his life - money that Mr Coleman managed to borrow that night
over the phone.
Charlie’s story illustrates the nightmare for employers who send
staff to far-off locations — the problem of managing the real if small
risk of serious physical harm to employees with attendant financial or
reputational damage to the company.
Most expat business people are not in extremely dangerous places such
as Iraq or Libya, but instead face relatively low-level threats of
theft, extortion, muggings and requests for payments to hasten
bureaucracy in airports or customs. All this creates a web of pitfalls
for travellers who suddenly find themselves under pressure to make deals
and meet deadlines in alien environments where they do not understand
the language.
The
type of business you are engaged in is also a factor, such as
litigation or a merger. When talks over litigation in one west African
country collapsed at the eleventh hour, a covert protection service had
to fly western executives out immediately to avoid a potentially
threatening situation with angry locals, Mr Doyle says.
Threats change on almost a daily basis in some locations, and risk
managers recommend the use of specialist travel advisory services that
monitor risks and can integrate their services with a company’s travel
management plans. The emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, for example, and increased activity of armed militias in north
Africa and the Middle East are forcing companies to reassess risks more
frequently.
For the next level of risk, particularly for
extractive industries such as mining, there is hostile environment
training, where executives are exposed to simulations of the sorts of
worst case scenarios that can occur. One such real life example for the
oil and gas sector was the January 2013 terror attack which killed 39
foreign workers at the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria, which involved BP and Statoil.
Companies naturally keep their security policies close to their
chests. Banks and oil companies approached for this article declined to
comment. But after his brush with death in Moscow, Charlie says there
were several steps he could have taken to minimise the risk, such as
keeping a cheap emergency mobile phone at hand containing essential
numbers, using a more responsive and accessible medical insurer, and
avoiding wandering around alone in the middle of the night.
