Peter Pender-Cudlip’s business faces a unique marketing challenge. “I spend most of my time telling clients what we cannot do for them, as opposed to what we can do,” says the 46-year-old managing partner of intelligence firm GPW.
People in his line of work were for many years associated with some pretty dubious methods: covert surveillance, phone hacking, even rummaging through rubbish bins in the grubby hope of some vital piece of information to use on behalf of a client in a multimillion dollar corporate dispute.
But, in the new digital world of information overload, such techniques are increasingly illegal, unacceptable and, in any case, unnecessary.
“We are specialists in information retrieval, but that does not mean what it might have meant years ago,” he says.
That’s a good thing, because he does not have the appearance of a classic gumshoe detective: a sharp business suit instead of the collar-turned-up raincoat; lean, super-fit physique in place of the paunchy, pallid demeanour that comes from too much late-night surveillance.
Mr Pender-Cudlip explains: “The world has moved on and the industry has become professionalised. The staff at GPW are lawyers, bankers, journalists, academics, linguists and diplomats. They might have been working for Goldman Sachs, the diplomatic service or McKinsey, but they’ve decided to make a career in intelligence,” he says.
His own background spans several specialisms: a qualified solicitor, he worked briefly in law before going into merchant banking, then into financial public relations, before finally joining the legendary intelligence firm Kroll Associates in 2002 in London.
He decided to branch out on his own in 2004 when he joined the “G” and “W” of his current firm’s name – the sleuth par excellence Patrick Grayson and the Russia expert Andrew Wordsworth – to launch a business specialising in “pure intelligence”.
That was something of a contrarian move at the time, in an industry that was gorging on the fat contracts available in security and defence services in Afghanistan and Iraq. But GPW personnel had a track record in the intelligence field – Mr Grayson has led a team that hunted down the overseas assets of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s. The Middle East was a natural area of specialism for the new firm.
“Five years later we were doing so much business in the region it made sense to drop anchor here, so we set up in DIFC. It was a decision based on client needs and revenues. We had to have significant bookable business to justify our presence here, and we’ve achieved that,” says Mr Pender-Cudlip.
“Dubai has become both a source of business origination, and a hub for business intelligence gathering. Geographically it’s perfect for the whole region and for Africa, as well as being a stopping-off point for work further east, in Mumbai, Singapore and China. DIFC, of course, is a global centre for dispute resolution,” he explains.
The firm’s commitment to the region was enhanced earlier this year when Mr Pender-Cudlip took the decision to relocate himself and his family – wife, Sophie, and four children – from the tranquillity of village life in Dorset, England, to the UAE.
After some acclimatisation – which in his case involved running 20-mile trails in the Hajjar mountains – Mr Pender-Cudlip is also planning to learn Arabic, in keeping with the firm’s tradition of wide-ranging linguistic capability.
But for now he is focusing on how the business develops from its Dubai base, only its second permanent office in the world after London. Although a New York presence could soon be on the cards via a potential acquisition.
“We work in very specific areas: corporate investigations centred on disputes; global asset tracing; and risk advisory for counterparties in big transactions,” he says.
Disputes can be state versus state, like the asset wrangles that came out of regime change during the Arab Spring; investors versus state disputes, involving international arbitration of broken contracts or agreements; and private sector disputes.
The latter are the most common, usually involving failure to pay or breach of contract.
With multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects involving international contractors, there have been rich pickings in this field, increased by the fallout from the financial crisis and now the falling oil price. Corporations with a turnover of $1 billion-plus will have between three and five such cases per year that could involve a firm like GPW, he estimates.
Sometimes the business comes from investment banks and law firms, but there is also a client list of “household name” corporations that GPW serves regularly, with specialist expertise in energy and natural resources, commodities, financial and insurance, shipping, transport and technology.
“We can do work on both sides of the economic cycle, in the pre-investment stage and in the dispute stage. It’s not recessionproof, no business is, but it’s insulated to some degree,” Mr Pender-Cudlip says.
So with the old gumshoe methods ruled out or impractical, how does GPW get those gems of intelligence for which corporations will pay big bucks?
In the internet age, there is a vast array of material already in the public domain, on the web, in specialist sites, but also through physical archives.
Then the greyer areas come into play. “We do not have the same leeway as government authorities, which can access CCTV records, mobiles and registration plate tracking, for example.
“It is illegal in the UAE to specifically mount surveillance on an individual, so that is something we would never do either.
“We have to be more imaginative. We live in a global village, where information is passed from one individual to another. One skill of our job is in identifying the right person, and then establishing a situation where they are willing and able to provide us with answers, without breaking the law of course,” says Mr Pender-Cudlip.
fkane@thenational.ae
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