Bullish about Romania and opportunities there

WILD GEESE:John Aston, CEO AstonEco Management, Romania

“I WOULD like to have the feeling of being bored in Ireland again – I haven’t had that for 20 years,” says John Aston (38), sitting in a sunny pavement cafe in Bucharest, Romania.

The founder of AstonEco Management is feeling a little homesick after spending two decades in countries as varied as Britain and Yemen, France and Zimbabwe.

He dreams of swapping his Romanian base for Ireland – if only to draw breath before embarking on more adventures abroad.

Aston’s work as an engineer on major infrastructure projects around the world has given him ample evidence of how big business, local people and ecological concerns rarely fit together easily.

With AstonEco, he says, he is trying to help firms achieve their economic aims in co-operation with local communities in an environmentally sustainable way.

Aston’s travels started early. When he was just one year old, his English father decided to swap London for life as a fisherman in Donegal.

Aston grew up in Glencolmcille “in the last house in the glen, and we walked about a mile over the bogs to catch the bus to school, where all the classes were in Irish”.

He studied civil and environmental engineering at the National University of Ireland in Galway and spent an academic year in Lyon, honing the French that he speaks fluently along with good Romanian and what remains of his schoolroom Irish.

After starting work with Galway Corporation, Aston helped a French firm build a gas pipeline linking Larne with Stanraer in Scotland, before “itchy feet” took him to Knight Piesold, a London engineering consultancy.

He was quickly dispatched to Zimbabwe, where he worked on a pipeline taking water from the Pungwe river to the city of Mutare and on plans to take water from Lake Kariba to the proposed Gokwe North power station.

“Zimbabwe was incredible, probably the most beautiful place I’ve been, and we were flying planes around to find [supply] routes, testing water quality and so on,” Aston recalls.

In 1998, he returned to London to start a master’s degree in environmental management.

After another series of assignments around Europe, Aston was sent to the Romanian village of Rosia Montana in the spectacular mountains of Transylvania, where the Romans mined gold almost two millenniums ago.

After a brief visit in 2000, he returned a year later to work for the firm that planned to pulverise two local hills and use cyanide to extract the gold hidden within them.

“My first impression was that all the issues were manageable provided we engage properly with local people and work with them,” Aston says.

“When I went back, the opposition was in place, the company had employed lots of lobbyists and lots of ‘interests’ had arrived. But it was an amazing job to work on, a microcosm of all the issues involved in a big project, and a great place to learn.”

Aston rose to vice-president for development, reporting directly to the chief executive of the parent company in Canada.

The project became a cause célèbre for Romania’s emergent environmental movement and tiny Rosia Montana became a battleground between advocates and enemies of the mine. It is still unclear whether the mine will ever be built.

Aston left the project in 2006 to focus on AstonEco, which aims to help firms avoid the mistakes he believes were made at Rosia Montana.

“We’re trying to create win-win agreements between companies, communities and local authorities,” he says.

“For a long time there was no culture of dialogue in Romania and whatever the company said went, but that is changing. We help companies understand NGOs and help them realise that what’s important is personal contact and being fair and transparent.

“As soon as you are fair in a country like Romania, people trust you.”

Aston believes his Irishness has helped him to understand and be successful in formerly communist eastern Europe.

“Inherently in Ireland we know how to sit down and talk to people and, as in Ireland, people in Romania don’t like being told what to do.”

Aston now hopes to spend more time back in Ireland with family and friends, but is also looking to take on projects in Bulgaria and Macedonia and is bullish about Romania and the region.

“Romania has fallen very heavily after experiencing its own ‘tiger’ economy, and now people are looking less for a quick deal than for long-term stability,” he says.

“It is time for professionals to come and set up systems and processes to help Romania make the transition from ad hoc business to standardised business. There will be major opportunities here.

“Corporate and organisational and governmental expertise are needed here now,” Aston continues.

“Eastern Europe can give an amazing injection of energy to the West and those countries can give expertise to this part of Europe. That dynamic could energise the continent.”