By Antoni Slodkowski and Megan Davies
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters and Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman met Chinese Premier Li Qiang on the first day of the World Economic Forum meeting on Tuesday.
Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Pan Gongsheng and members of the Chinese government who are part of its delegation in Switzerland were also present at a private lunch with business leaders hosted by the WEF in Davos.
“I’m glad that people are all talking,” Dimon told Reuters as he was leaving the lunch in the main WEF conference centre, where leading bankers and business figures mingle with high-ranking government officials from countries around the globe.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said he had met Dimon and other senior JPMorgan executives, BlackRock’s top management, and executives from Bridgewater Associates, Carlyle Group, Blackstone, Dell and ArcelorMittal in Davos.
“It is important for us to attract private capital to the reconstruction of Ukraine. We hope that JPMorgan will help attract a large number of global investors and corporations,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app.
The U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery Penny Pritzker, who also attended the meeting, said Zelenskiy’s economic message was his commitment to reform.
“There’s a lot of question about what’s possible today versus what’s definitely possible in the future when you’re postwar,” Pritzker told Reuters.
“They (Ukraine) indicated that they have early interest from some forward-leaning investors who are willing to maybe take more risk than, let’s say, an established pension fund, if you will. And then there’s certainly individual investors who are quite interested,” Pritzker added.
A source familiar with the situation said that JPMorgan had hosted a small meeting that included Dimon, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, Blackstone’s Schwarzman as well as BlackRock Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand.
In the meeting, the Ukrainian delegation emphasised that Ukraine was a country with GDP growth and a viable place to invest when the war with Russia ended, the source said, although there was no suggestion that anything could be done before then.
There was a sense that the investor community should be ready for that time, however, and the group discussed sectors including information technology and real estate, the source told Reuters.
There was also a discussion about the U.S.-China relationship, with an acknowledgement that tension there was not helpful to Ukraine, as it meant the country was looked on as a U.S. rather than a global interest, they added.
(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski, Megan Davies and Jeffrey Dastin; Writing by Alexander Smith; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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