Profile: Dominic Scriven of Dragon Capital

Most people associate the name Dominic Scriven with Vietnam because of Dragon Capital, the investment group he co-founded there in 1994. A growing contingent of followers, though, knows Scriven as the man who built one of the world's largest collections of Vietnamese propaganda art.

The collected works, known as The Dogma Collection, consist of hand-painted pictures spanning the era from 1960 to 1980. They've since been exhibited in as faraway locations as the National Gallery of Prague, but the inspiration for Scriven's archive efforts came while he was studying slightly closer to their origin, in Hanoi, during the final years of the US trade embargo on Vietnam.

"One of the things that I was very aware of when I was in Hanoi was that there wasn't a lot of color in the streets, and much of the color that did exist was political art, in the form of propaganda," he recalls. "I did some work to understand it and it became clear that nobody was really motivated to preserve it. It's art, though, and politics, and history, so I think it would be a real shame if that were lost, for both Vietnamese and international posterity."

Artistic license

Having grown up along the Welsh border as the son of a management consultant and a mother who worked in tourism, Scriven's interest in the arts first came alive during his time at Exeter University, where he studied law and sociology. There he participated in the drama society, which produced plays that included an interpretation of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal in a London park. "There was zero audience," he recalls, "which is why I didn't follow it as a career. I was worried of having no audience."

The world of fund management did strike him as a sustainable career move, however, so after graduating, he moved to London to take on the role of assistant portfolio manager for Asia ex-Japan for M&G, the company responsible for bringing the concept of unit trusts to the UK. After two years spent "shoveling sugar into people's coffee" and filing the company notes, he sought greater stimulation and decided that a move across the world to Hong Kong was the way to do it. There a 24-year-old Scriven sold and researched Asia ex-Hong Kong and Japan equities, companies and funds for brokerage Vickers da Costa by day, but by night he embraced amateur dramatics again as a member of the Hong Kong Garrison Players, one of the city's longest-running theatre groups.

Two years on, Scriven and his colleague were recruited by Hong Kong finance corporation Sun Hung Kai, where he held the role of investment director and was responsible for raising capital for several Asia-focused mutual funds. In 1991, when his contract ended, he rejected the prospect of following his contemporaries down the MBA route, and instead embraced a burgeoning interest in Vietnam's cultural heritage by signing up to study Vietnamese in Hanoi.

Surrounded by Japanese businessmen, Asian missionaries and scholars from other Communist-sympathizing states such as Cuba and Russia, Scriven studied under a professor of Laos linguistics during a two-year stint, which was to become to the precursor to a 20-year stay in the country.

Taming the dragon

His mastering of the Vietnamese language became useful when, in 1994, he became part of the founding team of Dragon Capital. The following year Dragon launched its first vehicle, with $16 million in committed capital. Although the US embargo had by then been removed, the local investment environment remained fraught.

"There were very strong similarities with the way that Myanmar is now, because you had this largely isolated political and business culture and a set of very restrictive obligations imposed from abroad and then these are suddenly removed and there's a great wave of interest that washes in," he explains. "If you're not careful, though, the expectations on both sides become misaligned and people end up losing money."

For the most part that hasn't been the fate of Dragon Capital, however; on the contrary, Scriven's contribution to financial services in Vietnam was recognized by the British government in 2006, when he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The principle impetus for this award, he believes, were his efforts to promote the need for fully-developed scalable domestic institutions, rather than wholly relying on foreign investment.

Scriven may have been in Vietnam for 20 years already, but the decision to remain for the rest of his life appears to be one that's already been taken. As well as managing his art collection, he is founder and trustee of local conservation charity Wildlife At Risk and sits on the board of companies including Vietnam Dairy Products, Ho Chi Minh City Infrastructure Investment and Saigon Commercial Bank.

"This part of the world is growing," he says. "To people in Hong Kong, I think it still looks quite small, but we've become investors in Laos now, we're investors in Cambodia, and the Mekong sub-region is likely to remain the big key to what we do."

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