P W Heap Esq CMG
Senior Trade Commissioner
HONG KONG
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
19 March 1990
Dear Peter,
ACER GROUP
Eric Bridgen, Chief Executive and Managing Director of the Acer Group, came to see me last week.
I have known Bridgen for some time. He was previously Chief Executive of International Military Services (IMS) which as you may know was a wholly owned government company funded originally to deal with defence sales to Iran in the Shah's time but subsequently with a wider remit for arms sales and services worldwide.
Bridgen told me that he had only recently taken over at Acer. I gathered from him that the company is a large engineering consultant group brought into existence by the merger of John Taylor and Freeman Fox both of which were fairly substantial consultant operations in their own right. Since the merger Acer have bought up a number of other consultant companies and, if Bridgen is to be believed, are now fairly substantial beer internationally.
Bridgen, on the basis of our previous connections through IMS, came to have a chat with me about Acer's operations in Asia, and particularly in Hong Kong. You may indeed already know them. Since my meeting with him, Bridgen has written to confirm that his people in Hong Kong have made arrangements for him to call on you when he is there on either 28 or 29 March. I attach a copy of Bridgen's letter to me of 15 March confirming this. I promised Bridgen that I would drop you a line by way of introduction.
I confess that I cannot vouch for the group or its activities, although I do recall having dealt with Freeman Fox in a previous commercial incarnation. Bridgen, who is a somewhat suave character with the old school tie prominently displayed, never impressed me greatly in his time in IMS. But I may misjudge him. He had a particularly difficult row to hoe in
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