Danyal Sattar – Interview


Have you ever experienced such economic disruption before? Nothing quite like this. I was a child refu- gee and lived through several wars, floods, famines and military coups as a young person. I have lived in countries where infectious diseases are rife, but this is off the scale of anything I have experienced before.


It is useful to think about the number of recessions that we have been through in our working lives. The mass unemploy- ment in the 1980s, the recession in the 1990s, the recession in the early 2000s and the global financial crisis.


There is something where people who have been through economic downturns before can recognise familiar patterns, but even older and wiser members on investment committees would say that in 40 years of investment experience they have never been through anything like this. This is off the scale.


Despite this being “off the scale”, did Big Issue Invest have a plan for managing a sharp downturn? I have to hold my hands up and say that a global pandemic was not on my risk regis- ter. There are organisations that did.


Wimbledon, for instance, had insurance for a global pandemic as did charities and some of the social enterprises that we have backed. So there are people who thought seriously about this known global risk and put it into their plans. In some ways, without taking any political stance on Brexit, all the additional plan- ning we had to do around it has helped us. We were already thinking about mass civil disobedience and the inability to access certain premises for days, so we were fairly-well prepared having reviewed all our disaster programmes as a result of Brexit. All that planning helped us.


Issue 94 | July 2020 | portfolio institutional | 17


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