Why the Red Cross’s Beat Richner finds Rolls-Royces offensive

WHY the Red Cross’s Beat Richner finds Rolls-Royces offensive.

Cambodian road conditions make hitting 100km/h in 4.6 seconds unlikely.

IN 1958 David Ogilvy, the founder of agency Ogilvy & Mather, pinched a quote from the technical editor of The Motor, who probably pinched it from a Pierce Arrow ad in the 1930s. It became the most famous headline in advertising.

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

Ogilvy justified to US readers why they should fork out $13,995 for a car. “With power steering and power brakes you don’t need a chauffeur,” he wrote.

Fifty-six years later, Beat Richner wrote a headline that may become equally famous: “The Shame of Super Rich Cambodians and BMW Rolls-Royce Europe. A Peak of the Iceberg of the Decadence of Brutal Capitalism.”

Richner was offended that Rolls-Royce had set up a showroom in one of the world’s poorest countries. At the opening ceremony were Cambodia’s Minister of Industry and Handicraft, Cham Prasidh, and Rolls-Royce’s Asia-Pacific regional director, Paul Harris.

Rather than being offended, this group, including the two local models (persons not cars), who draped themselves over the front sections of the Rolls-Royce Wraith, saw it as a sign of Cambodia’s emerging status.

Driving around the streets of Phnom Penh last week, it was not immediately clear where you would get to really stomp your foot down and get from 0 to 100km/h in 4.6 seconds.

There are too many tuktuks and people wandering the streets to get close to that speed.

Richner is a Swiss pediatrician, whom the Red Cross sent to the Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospital in Phnom Penh in the mid-1970s, only to be forced back to Switzerland when the Khmer Rouge arrived.

A decade later, he returned and reopened the children’s hospital. He then created a foundation that has funded four more children’s hospitals.

Richner says every day he has to “admit for hospitalisation 400 severely sick children, most living in misery. The parents could not pay. That is why we treat all children and women in the maternity free … 60 deliveries per day.”

Ironically Richner was accused by NGOs and the aid community of doing “luxury medicine”.

“They told us and wrote in the newspapers that we are doing ‘Rolls-Royce medicine’. We do the same medicine for the poor and the rich child, the same as they do in Europe. And to do this, you have to beg for the money, still today after 22 years, this in a country, where now they sell and drive the Rolls-Royce from BMW Germany. It is disgusting.”

Donate to his children’s hospitals at beat-richner.ch.

Apology: I was wrong. In last week’s column I wrote that Daniel Ricciardo’s father Joe was the founder of GR Engineering. Apologies to both Joe Ricciardos but Daniel’s father Joe actually is the founder of Ricciardo Earthmoving, one of Perth’s largest providers of site works to project, residential and commercial builders. I also wrote it cost Joe and other sponsors $420,000 to race in Formula BMW. The cost was around $150,000, not $420,000. When Daniel moved up into Formula Renault, the family supported his living expenses overseas, but Red Bull paid the racing expenses — and that has been the case through British Formula 3 and into F1.

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