So the news arrives, as it always does in these final decadent days of Western finance: Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, announces India’s biggest ever share sale. A 20 billion rupee behemoth that makes London’s sleepy equity offerings look like a village fête. The London Stock Exchange, poor thing, braces for ripple effects. But let us be honest: this is not a ripple. This is a tidal wave, and the Thames is about to get very wet.
Ambani’s Reliance Industries is not merely a company. It is an empire, a vertical monopoly that touches everything from petrochemicals to 5G spectrum, from retail to green energy. It is the kind of conglomerate that Victorian imperialists would have admired: ruthless, efficient, and utterly indifferent to the niceties of shareholder democracy. The share sale, if successful, will cement Reliance as the East India Company of our age, only without the white linen suits.
And what of London? The LSE has been fading like a Victorian dowager, clinging to its past glories. It lists shell companies and mining stocks from defunct corners of the world. Ambani’s offering, moreover, is not a British story. It is an Indian story. The money will flow to Mumbai, not Mayfair. The ripple effect London fears is not capital flight but irrelevance. The City used to finance the world. Now it watches from the sidelines as the world finances itself.
There is a pattern here. We have seen it with the Romans and the Byzantines. A centre of trade grows soft, bureaucratic, and self-congratulatory. Then the periphery rises. Huns, Visigoths, or in this case, Gujarati billionaires. The LSE’s best defence is regulation, but regulation is a moat filled with paper. Ambani will simply build a bridge.
Some will call this hyperbole. They will say London remains a hub for cross-border listings, for IPOs from emerging markets. But that is precisely the point. The emerging markets are no longer emerging. They have emerged. Ambani’s sale is proof. He does not need London’s capital. He needs London’s stamp of approval, and even that grows less necessary by the day.
What should the LSE do? It should abandon its pretensions and become a truly international exchange, listing the world’s best companies regardless of domicile. But that would require a revolution in British financial culture. It would require accepting that the era of British financial supremacy is over. And that is a truth the establishment cannot bear.
So we watch. We watch Ambani’s offering set records. We watch the LSE flutter its hands. And we remember that the decline of empires is not marked by a single battle. It is marked by a thousand share sales, each one more foreign than the last. The East India Company is dead. Long live Reliance.
