Moments after I was first introduced to Charlotte Phillips, I overheard a mutual friend refer to her as the Queen of the Pipeline. Being a man whose shadow has been stalked by petro-dollars, my interest was immediately piqued. Charlotte had been responsible for the financing of the controversial Baku-Ceyhan pipeline which provides XX% of Europe’s oil from the Caspian with one important caveat: it does so without going through Russia. Pipeline kings, princes, and presidents there are many. But queens?

To be clear, she didn’t need one of the most interesting epithets of the late 20th century to cut a striking figure. At 1 meter 85 cm, and equipped with an equally towering intellect, Charlotte is that rare specimen: a successful executive who maintains a critical distance from a business drenched in equal doses of inner cynicism and outer positivism. As much as we may have a soft spot for such things as doubt, humour, or a German sense of schadenfreude, are these really the required skills to finance billion dollar deals. I can only imagine the bulldozed look on the faces of her otherwise macho audiences in such places as Baku, Dallas, Almaty and Istanbul. Sharp wit, confidence, and sharper analytical skills come along once in a pretty while, they must think, but surely not in a woman.

I can stare at passion for a long time. But at some point, I want to see the backstage of passion. Charlotte’s backstage stems first from rifle training with her father who wanted her ready, at any moment, for an invasion by the Ivans (meaning the Russians), particularly ironic given that Charlotte moved to Moscow in 2006. A stint at the Treuhandalstat, a German privatization agency, also seemed to further stimulate her raider-like slavophilia. “Berlin between 1991 and 1993 was an unbelievable experience not only because of the city itself but the responsibility we took as youngsters working with these state-owned companies in East Germany. We learned a lot: for example to differentiate between a knitting pattern and a balance sheet. ” Her next outfit, EBRD, based in London, sent her for the first time to Kazakstan, a country that had appeared on the world map for the first time ever, clocking in at number 9, or roughly the size of Western Europe. This was light years before the country would provide fertile ground for the likes of Boratl; and when Charlotte asked her then-Japanese boss to take one of her Russian-speaking colleagues with her, he answered dryly, “No. Only nuns travel in pairs. ”

Charlotte is a return to form of the businessman intellectual, a lost species in the late 20th and early 21st century. When most of those with financial acumen have relinquished any claim to lead interesting lives and look to creatives as some kind of vicarious salvage, Charlotte turns the tables around, refreshingly, and regales you with stories about Kosovar Central Bankers asking to hold her hand while crossing the street in London or why, oh why, Mikhail Sakaashvili launched the August 2008 war with Russia (dietary). Charlotte became involved in contemporary art during the hey-day of the YBAs and continues to dine with Pigozzi, chat with Dasha Zhukova, and twitter with Larry Gagosian. But her involvement with these very disparate worlds remind us of the very necessary incommensurate nature of this disparity: in times like these, it is easy to imagine and thus dismiss the seamless hobnobbing of bankers, politicians, artists, intellectuals, farmers and queens (both real and fake). By bringing the very specificity of each into relief, Charlotte remains, deliberately, strategically, an outsider in the ultimate insider industries–from art to oil, finance to politics.