Napoleon may have dreamed of it … Margaret Thatcher may have proposed it … but it took an ex-IFC man to get it done.
In other words, Sir Alastair Morton, “the man who got the Channel Tunnel built.”
Morton oversaw perhaps the greatest private infrastructure project of all time. And where did he hone his project finance skills? In IFC, as an investment officer in the 1960s.
If you’ve ever taken today’s two-and-a-half-hour train ride from London to Paris, you have one man to thank above all others: the late Alastair Morton, master of project finance, negotiator par excellance, and proud IFC alum.
Morton was a true visionary of public private partnerships in infrastructure — and a controversial one at that. Born in Johannesburg in 1938, he grew up there, then moved to the U.K. to study law at Oxford and took on British citizenship. Starting his career back home in mining with De Beers, he soon became a fierce opponent of apartheid and felt no choice but to leave his native country. The next stop: Washington.
Morton joined IFC at the age of 26, staying with us from 1964 to 1969. Fluent in French, he worked on deals in several francophone African countries.
These were formative years in his career. But he was an unheralded investment officer in a small institution — one whose mission the world had not yet fully embraced. Infrastructure at the time was still seen the exclusive domain of governments in the developing world. Roads, ports, railways: IFC never touched them.
But he must have learned something here. For this is the man who brought to completion the world’s largest, most complex privately financed infrastructure project, one that changed the way a continent travels.
On his death in 2004, London’s Guardian newspaper gave him all the credit, saying he was “the man who got the Channel Tunnel built.” The Independent went even farther, saying “God created Alastair to supervise the Eurotunnel project.”
Like the Panama Canal and so many other mega-projects first proposed by politicians, the “chunnel” encountered deep trouble early and needed a strong-willed leader to turn it into reality. In this case, it was one who learned the fine points of project finance at IFC.
After he left in 1969, the UK government came to think highly of Morton, being especially impressed with the way he had turned around a near-bankrupt London investment house called Guinness Peat in the mid-1980s. It named him co-chairman of the troubled Anglo-French project company Eurotunnel in 1987.
As if getting the English and French to work together were not enough of a task, Morton also had to obtain £10 billion in financing from 225 different banks. He did. Cost-overruns, confrontations with contractors, political squabbling, and other nightmares soon arose. But they did not stop him. The project opened in 1994 and has run ever since. In his final years, Morton stepped down from Eurotunnel and shared his knowledge more widely as an adviser to the U.K. Treasury on privately financed infrastructure.
Anyone who has ridden the train between Europe’s two grandest capitals has Alastair Morton to thank. And, indirectly perhaps, IFC as well.
If you have an idea for a “postcard from the past,” please email Celeste Diaz Ferraro at cdiazferraro@ifc.org.
