City Life | 30 August 2008

The credit crunch reaches the home of the rotten apple and the ‘Rolexo’ watch

James Gregory Pool III is an elderly, stooping Canadian with a most un-usual job. Every month he boards a plane from Canada with 200 sedated heifers and flies with them to Almaty to beef up and variegate Kazakhstan’s breeding livestock. He’s the archetypal eccentric foreign entrepreneur one finds in this eccentric Central Asian city. A recent trip threw up several such oddities: a German wine trader trying — and largely failing — to interest the Kazakhs in £100-a-bottle claret; a Norwegian flogging confessedly second-rate salmon to hotels and restaurants; a 19-year-old British geologist so driven to succeed in the mining industry that she carried a glass construct of the element molybdenum in her pocket. All are attracted as much by the beauty of a city in the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains as by its mineral wealth.