WHY WOULD BILLIONAIRES GIVE AWAY HALF OF THEIR FORTUNE?
▶ Doing something good for people is good business, the founder of VPS Healthcare tells Shireena Al Nowais
What would inspire one of the world’s wealthiest men to, on his 41st birthday, donate half of his $1.5 billion fortune to charity? Speaking to The National, founder and managing director of VPS Healthcare, Dr Shamsheer Vayalil said he had a burning desire to “do more”.
“I’ve been wanting to do something and I have always believed that doing something good is good business as well.
“And being in the UAE, you get to meet with leaders who believe in giving so you always feel that you need to do something more,” he said.
This “something more” was to join the list of 13 of the world’s wealthiest people who have pledged half their wealth to charitable causes.
Dr Vayalil joined The Giving Pledge, an initiative created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, his wife Melinda and business magnate Warren Buffett in 2010 to support good causes around the world.
Dr Vayalil and NMC Health founder B R Shetty are the latest to commit their great wealth to help the needy
Mr Shetty, who turned NMC into a FTSE-100 listed company and founded Neopharma, one of the UAE’s leading pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, said: “It is a crime when you are able to help others and choose not to.”
Dr Vayalil chose an auspicious time to take the pledge.
“This being the Year of Zayed and on my 41st birthday, I said to myself, let me do the pledge,” he said.
“I had met Bill a couple of times and I was sure that I can learn a lot and be part of an organised philanthropic group.
“I also always enjoyed innovation and felt that this group can do a lot to impact the lives of people, and so it happened.”
Dr Vayalil began his medical career as a radiologist at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City in Abu Dhabi. In less than a decade, he established an integrated healthcare group with 20 hospitals, more than 100 medical centres, pharmaceutical manufacturing and other healthcare support services across the Middle East, Europe and India. He has also established a charity organisation but has yet to release the details of its work.
“It is still in its initial stages. We want to do things in a more organised way and make sure that we work with like-minded people. We have focus areas and want to maintain that and join with others.”
Yet it is clear that Dr Vayalil will use the focus and drive that he has used to establish an international healthcare network to run his philanthropic initiatives.
“The first challenge is how to do things in an organised way because we feel that we are not doing it as efficiently as it can be done.”
Focus and organisation are very important to the entrepreneur who sees that many initiatives are being duplicated.
“There is even some competition along the line. Which is absurd,” he said.
“The majority of people who do charity have good intent but the means to this charity isn’t transparent or accessible to many people, which is why it is important to work with credible organisations,” Dr Vayalil said.
He has worked with the Red Crescent Authority to treat hundreds of patients in conflict zones. Many were transported to VPS Healthcare hospitals for treatment.
“For us it is all about doing philanthropy in a joint format. We like to learn from others and we have our target areas where we believe we can help affect lives. Our main thing is to remain focused. We are very new in the field of philanthropy and we are learning,” he said.
“We are excited about it. We do philanthropy with the same energy that we do our business. That makes it more sustainable and we believe that will bring about good results. Whenever we have done it in the past it had always been successful and we continue to try to affect as many lives as we can,” he said.
It should be like a movie, he said during a panel that looked at how the new generation of entrepreneur-philanthropists is changing the face of giving.
“We want [philanthropy] to be like a Bollywood movie. We want the hero not to be killed, there’s some romance … it should be fun.”
The panel, in May at the Milken Institute Global Conference, was titled Breakthroughs in Philanthropy: Game-Changers in Social Impact. The discussion featured Princess Ameerah Altaweel, founder and chairwoman, Time Entertainment; Peggy Marie Alford, chief financial officer, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; Dr Vayalil and others.