Thaindian News

By Dipankar De Sarkar
London, Dec 4 (IANS) A powerful Indian-origin troubleshooter who helped restore economic order in Britain amid the impending collapse of high street banks says the year-old crisis still gives her nightmares.

“That was the single most traumatic period of my life, as I think it was for many people across the world, in governments and banks and for people at risk of losing their jobs,” said Shriti Vadera, a former business minister who is now an adviser to the G20 chair.

Vadera, who was one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest aides, said she had to harness all her experience of 14 years as an international banker and 10 years in the government, in order to grapple with the banking crisis that broke out last year.

“Somehow everything seemed to come together because I had the experience of the financial side as well as the economic side and the fiscal side, of being able to crack a team and to put together a team across the whole (spectrum),” Vadera said.

“Now I will have to work through the nightmares,” she told guests at a dinner hosted by the Asian Voice and Gujarat Samachar newspapers Thursday night to honour Asian achievers in Britain.

Vadera, who was described by the host, publisher C.B. Patel, as the most powerful Asian woman in Britain, quit her government job in September to begin her new international assignment advising the chair of the Group of 20 economic powerhouses, currently held by South Korea.

Vadera is thought to have been instrumental in devising and enforcing the British government’s strategy to bail out failing banking giants Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland in exchange for greater government control.