board concluded that many of our agribusiness investments, with which CDC has been proudly associated throughout its history, are unlikely to meet our minimum financial requirements," he recorded.

The result, noted Oxfam, was that "investments are in things like shopping malls... which cater to the wealthy elite or expatriate community. These have a neutral or even negative impact for the poor". CDC shut offices in Uganda and the Ivory Coast and opened new ones in Egypt, China and Mexico, staffed, in the words of the Economist magazine, "by people who know more about making deals than growing pineapples".

By the time Gillespie quit in 2002, however, the stock markets had moved against him and the sell-off was scrapped. But far from retreating, the transformation of CDC was accelerated by Gillespie's replacement, another banker, Paul Fletcher from Citibank.

In 2004 the new International Development Secretary Hilary Benn agreed to sell off the job of running CDC's funds in a private equity deal that remains shrouded in controversy. The new fund management firm, Actis,

is a partnership of former CDC directors whose pay has quadrupled and who take a substantial slice of the profits on selling CDC's investments.

On its own terms the strategy, giving the fund managers a huge incentive to boost CDC's returns, has worked: CDC reported record £672 million profits for 2007.

At the same time, however, CDC's investment in agriculture has now fallen from 40 per cent to just six per cent of its portfolio. In its place has come banking, power, property and mobile phones. CDC insists that high returns encourage private sector investors into the developing world. Critics argue that they invest in these businesses anyway and that CDC has lost sight of its purpose to "invest where others are generally unwilling to do so".

The World Bank's 2008 World Development Report blames the West's failure to invest in Third World agriculture for much of the current extreme poverty - a scourge that, through the Millennium Development Goals, the British government is signed up to halving by 2015. Returning its 60-year-old development fund to its founding values would be a significant contribution.