London: the conference that talked to investors, not only donors

Lugano set the principles. London, a year later, asked the harder question: where does the money actually come from?

Public financing cannot rebuild a country of this size. The arithmetic does not work, and everyone in the room knew it. So the conference in June 2023 addressed private capital directly — and private capital has exactly one question. Not whether the opportunity is attractive. Whether someone will carry the risk if a facility is destroyed.

The instruments that were discussed

War risk insurance, sovereign and multilateral guarantees, political risk cover from development finance institutions, first-loss tranches that let a commercial lender sit behind a public one. Not glamorous, and precisely the plumbing that determines whether a factory gets financed.

I was interested in this as a practical matter. I have signed contracts here that a European bank would not finance because it could not price the risk. The whole reconstruction question, for a private company, reduces to whether that pricing problem is solved. London was the moment the conversation admitted it.