Hanoi Host To Motley Crew and Aussie Who's Who

Eric Ellis, Hanoi

05/20/1993

THE unmistakable voice of Ray Charles drifts across the velvet Hanoi night - "your cheatin' heart will tell on you ... will ... tell ... onnnnnn ... yoouuuu."

Through the smoky haze of the Lan Anh bar, Kevin Edwards sucks the life out of a Vinataba cigarette and adds another 333 beer can to the half dozen piled around him.

"That's my theme song now. They know I was set up, so they always play it for me round here." Perhaps we have caught "Hanoi Kev" on a difficult night. It's just 8.30pm for the tired and emotional former head of Brian Burke's Western Australian Premier's Department, who came to Hanoi in the wake of the WA Inc royal commission and earned respect as an effective and influential consultant.

The Lan Anh is also known as the Algerian bar, so named for the Maghribi diplomat who married locally and stayed on. It's largely from here that Mr Edwards now plies his trade as the "cheapest lawyer in town".

"I picked up a hundred bucks here this morning for givin' a fella a couple of names. I'm not that fussy."

Does Kevin Edwards - his card says B. Juris. LLB but he's better described in Perth as 'bagman' - have a licence to operate as a lawyer in Hanoi? "You don't need a licence to work this town, not yet anyway. All you need is a telephone," he says.

(The other thing you need is $US2, enough to buy a bootleg copy of a United Nations list of the Vietnamese bureaucracy, complete with telephone numbers, from one of the entrepreneurial street vendors trading outside Hanoi's main Western hotels).

Dr Nguyen Mai, vice-chairman of the State Committee for Co-operation and Investment - the new body which authorises all foreign investment - said Vietnam was "very concerned" at the spread of "freelance" consultants and said the State would be cracking down on such operators.

"They must have a licence and they must get the licence from the proper authorities," he told the Financial Review.

Some of his colleagues had heard that large sums of "open-door money" were being offered, he said, but he joked that the money seemed to be going no further than the people who opened the door.

"I think there's a role for the entrepreneur here, but it depends on what kind of entrepreneur", says Richard Martin of the ANZ Bank's newly minted Hanoi branch. "There's certainly a colourful mix of characters here," he says, somewhat diplomatically.

Mr Edwards is not the only Labor Party luminary to surface in Hanoi since the once hard-line Communist Government began embracing market reform.

Operating at all levels of the commercial spectrum, no fewer than two former prime ministers, a handful of senators, various ministers, a deputy premier and any number of former public servants have passed through town.

The former WA Deputy Premier and old friend of Hanoi Kev, David Parker, had been fiddling around with some Hanoi development sites on behalf of the property developer, Warren Anderson.

And then there's the group from Western Australia and South Australia, led by old WA Labor man Jim Stitt and wife and South Australian politician Barbara, who have also been working the Hanoi bureaucracy.

At different levels of the business world, Gough Whitlam, well thought of here for his opposition to the war, visited late last year as patron for a group known as Friends of Hanoi, a "charitable foundation to preserve the old city", run out of a renovated terrace house by former Bank of New Zealand executive Leigh Scott-Kemmis.

Mr Whitlam was nominated to the position by another visitor, former Treasurer John Kerin.

Bob Hawke, less regarded because he knocked off, politically, that old friend of Vietnam, Bill Hayden, has been here twice in recent months looking for "opportunities in the tourism industry".

Staying at the $US200-a-night Pullman Metropole Hotel and fully availing itself of embassy assistance and goodwill, the Hawke party described itself as a trade mission and is said to have included representatives from the Packer, Lustig & Moar, Ansett and Pacific Dunlop organisations.

Mrs Dorothy Button, wife of the former Minister for Industry, runs the well-respected Vietnam Ventures Travel Group from the heart of Melbourne's Vietnamese community in Richmond.

Mrs Button's company sends tourists by the planeload to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where they can choose from four hotels owned by Mr Nguyen Xuan Tien.

Mr Nguyen has several cousins, one of whom runs the hotel in Hanoi where law firm Phillips Fox has its Hanoi office.

Another cousin, a South Vietnamese Army veteran, works for Phillips Fox in Australia where he helped translate the now-famous "Green Book" which describes Vietnam's foreign investment laws that have brought so many Aussies to Hanoi.