BMB Group is one of the world’s most exclusive financial institutions. Its growing numbers of investors are often drawn from eastern ruling families with vast riches gleaned from the long-term growth in demand for commodities. It makes some institutions based in London’s Mayfair look dreary and mundane by comparison. The group calls to mind an era when the courts of Asian empires were the global centres of money, technology, culture, and power. But this is not an artefact in a museum.

It is at a nexus of the contemporary redirection of wealth to the industrializing nations of the east, from the west, via petrodollars.