Politics
UK: The Bomb-Chucking Blogger
A DISCUSSION with Paul Staines develops not so much as conventional-journalist-interviews-gadfly-blogger-of-British-politics, as form dictates it should. Rather it mutates into an hour of grilling each other, as perhaps was destined to occur upon meeting the bomb-thrower better known as Guido Fawkes, named after the anarchist who plotted to blow up … read more >>
Room for Everyone at The Hague
MEET Kuniko Ozaki – 55, Japanese and, since 2009, international resident of The Hague. Ozaki-san is one of the current 19 judges of the International Criminal Court, which sits in The Hague with claims as the world’s most distinguished forum to transact criminal justice. With her untaxed, near €300,000-a-year … read more >>
Europe’s Leaders-In-Waiting Face The Mess Ahead
HINDSIGHT. It’s a wise and beautiful thing. And there’s a lot of it about Europe at the minute. In Britain, the Murdoch kids believe, with hindsight, that Rupert shouldn’t have handed Rebekah Brooks the reins at News International. Much of the rest of the country reckons, in hindsight, that Rupert … read more >>
Amsterdam: I’ve Been To Bali, Too
AMSTERDAM. Been here a year. Was concerned I’d find it boring after years absorbed by manic Asia, the last years in Indonesia, which used to be Dutch. But, neo-colonially, we’re now ensconced in the Netherlands, in an agreeably restored 18th century canal-house that once traded silks, pelts and spices shipped … read more >>
LONDON: Starbucks, Star Pupils and Protest
THE Starbucks on St Paul’s Church Yard is one of the chain’s biggest and busiest outlets in London. And no wonder, servicing disciples of two deities, The City and The Church, and myriad tourists too, at £3.50 per winter-warming, triple-shot venti latte. Worshippers of Mammon swing by here in their … read more >>
Egypt: Banking on a revolution
CAIRO – In January and February this year, as revolution coursed through Cairo and beyond, Egypt’s central bank governor, Farouk Abd El Baky El Okdah, called the heads of the country’s main banks to a series of urgent meetings at the Cairo Marriott on Zamalek Island in the middle of … read more >>
Thailand: Korn puts Shinawatra government on watch
BANGKOK: What a difference a year makes in Thailand. This time last year, Bangkok’s downtown Ratchaprasong crossroads at the Thai capital’s commercial core was a mess. The iconic Central Department Store was in ruins, trashed after the scorched-earth tactics of the crippling protests earlier in the year. Much of Bangkok’s … read more >>
Australia: Hockey needs more than Google for his economic research
Joe Hockey presents as a pleasant enough chap, in a matey, Billy Bunter type of way. But he needs help. The man who seems poised to hold Australia’s economic future in his hands needs to try harder. At the least, he needs to read more extensively, more deeply and of … read more >>
How Euromoney’s finance minister award became an Aussie political football
ALTHOUGH it applauds sound stewardship of an important global economy, in jeering Australian hands Euromoney’s finance minister of the year award has become a political football punted around Canberra since Paul Keating was honoured in 1984, his first year in office, for floating the Australian dollar and rejuvenating a moribund … read more >>
Australia: Wayne Swan Confounds His Domestic Critics
BLESSED WITH, and industriously exploiting, a natural resources bounty pointed at China that would embarrass Croesus, some Australians will find it strange that Euromoney has chosen their treasurer, Wayne Swan, as finance minister of the year. The less charitable might even recall the words of Donald Horne, in his 1964 … read more >>
Libya: Untainted talent leading from front
TUNIS: It’s somewhat alarming, when awaiting a flight to Benghazi, to receive word from Libya that the arranged interview with the economist one is flying to war-torn Libya to see is suddenly cancelled because he ”got the bullet”. Nuance is not always the strong suit of revolutionaries. And neither is … read more >>
Why David Cameron is sounding a lot like Hosni Mubarak
CAIRO: David Cameron doesn’t look like Hosni Mubarak — hated scourge of Egyptians. That would be Robert De Niro. Nor does dapper Dave look like Tunisia’s ousted strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, or Syria’s aptly-onomatopoeaic Bashar al-Assad, or any other tyrant from Pyongyang to Minsk. But in making a … read more >>
TV hit blasts Kabul bumblers
KABUL: If, near a decade after 9/11, you’ve been wondering about the billions taxpayers have spent to build a shiny new Afghanistan, spend a few minutes YouTubing the trailer for The Ministry, a TV comic hit that’s sweeping Kabul. Among the first few results, it’s an excoriating little piece of … read more >>
Behind Wendi Deng’s billion-dollar spike
TIGER WIFE or Trophy wife? Slam-down Sister or caring partner doing a Tammy Wynette? New York socialite or about-to-be global media mogul? When Wendi Deng soared on Tuesday, 42 and pretty-in-pink, left across our TV screens to clobber the idiot cream-pieing her struggling octogenarian billionaire husband, my first thought was … read more >>
Murdoch: No profile
LAST WEEK, as the corruption eating at Rupert Murdoch’s British operation threatened gangrene over the rest of his global empire, I sent an email to Judith Whelan, editor of Good Weekend magazine. This was ‘the media’s Arab Spring,’ I wrote. ‘Nobody is scared any more… no more meetings in the … read more >>
Getting away with murder in Colombo
COLOMBO: When governments kill the people they are mandated to protect and help prosper, what is the world’s tipping point for outrage? How horrific must despotism be to compel the ”international community” to pursue and prosecute national leaders whose regimes commit war crimes? In the Bosnian war of the 1990s, … read more >>
Syria: I would like you to meet my cousin
THEY lurk in the shadows of every autocracy, monopolising business deals and jealously guarding their access to the political power that provided them. In economies across Asia and the Middle East, they’ve become a virtual proxy for the dictators crucial to the massive commercial fortunes they’ve built, often impervious to … read more >>
The Philippines: ‘Sick man of Asia’ looking a bit better
PERMANENT sick man of Asia? Or tiger in waiting? Once Asia’s richest country save Japan but now with reasonable claims to be one of its poorest, the Philippines confounds. Progress in the Philippines can be measured in unexpected ways. The first time I arrived in Manila, the Marcos kleptocracy was … read more >>
India: Hunt for next top Tata man seems an inside job
IN AN aspirational and caste-ridden society, corporate India intrigues at the best of times. Perhaps it’s the lopsided wealth of its business titans who present as both hope and fantasy for the 50 per cent of India’s billion-plus population who somehow struggle by on 50¢ a day. The lavish lifestyles … read more >>
Avoiding the grip of Singapore Inc
The island state’s government-owned corporations need us more than we need them, writes Eric Ellis. Yet we all know national interest goes both ways. ”A MISSED opportunity for both sides,” or so claimed the Singapore government’s quasi-official mouthpiece, The Straits Times, yesterday after the shock of Treasurer Wayne Swan’s knockback of Singapore … read more >>
With Tamil Tigers slain, booming Sri Lanka makes up for lost time
What to call the emerging Sri Lanka? The country seems like a construction zone, with ports, highways and airports sprouting and former rebel strongholds blossoming, writes Eric Ellis in Colombo. SO TINY Sri Lanka has made it to today’s Cricket World Cup final, to face mighty India in Mumbai in … read more >>
Egypt’s reluctant finance minister gets to work
Samir Radwan was a surprise choice as Egypt’s new finance minister, even to himself. Appointed at the height of the chaos, the retired economist is working hard to sustain Egypt’s finances and economy through a period of extraordinary upheaval. Eric Ellis joins him in Cairo IN EGYPT’S chaotic last days … read more >>
Bahrain: The West practises selective dudgeon
DUBAI: It was the 19th-century British statesman Lord Palmerston who coined the maxim that nations have no permanent friends, simply permanent interests. And rarely in recent times has that adage been so nakedly displayed as near here in the tiny Gulf petro-kingdom of Bahrain, the first place in the Middle … read more >>
Egypt still waiting for someone to lead
BE IT by accident or design, the massive new billboard framed by Cairo’s October 6 bridge across the Nile speaks to a telling transition in these revolutionary times. The bridge marks an Egypt whose time has passed, the 1973 war when Cairo’s military regime led an Arab coalition across the … read more >>
Indonesia is no role model for Egypt
JAKARTA: Let’s hope life after Mubarak does not resemble the post-Suharto era From Barack Obama to prolix purveyors of punditry in Australia and abroad, it has become fashionable in these heady revolutionary times to cast Indonesia as the democratic vision for a post-Mubarak Egypt — largely, it seems, because the … read more >>
Making turmoil pay- Egypt’s richest man is not for fleeing
CAIRO: Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris knows a thing or two about operating among strongmen in their dictatorships When tyrannies teeter to people power, as we are witnessing in Egypt and beyond, the cronies and rentiers who got rich from their cosiness to authority usually cut their losses and run for … read more >>
Orascom: A very modern tale of corporate finance
North Korea. Zimbabwe. Tunisia. Algeria. Iraq. Pakistan. Egypt. It’s a list of the world’s flashpoints. And they’re all part of Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris’s unique telecoms empire. So when his Orascom group needed financing, and then sought a buyer, it presented Sawiris’s advisers with a unique set of challenges. Eric … read more >>
Orascom: How do you solve a problem like Korea?
Naguib Sawiris has built large parts of his empire by being prepared to do business where other companies would fear to tread. He explains how he became a telecoms operator, banker and even an hotelier in the biggest rogue state of all, North Korea. “We looked at a map of … read more >>
Hot money threatens to scorch Asia again
JUST 13 years after the Asian Contagion, Eric Ellis questions whether the region’s reforms would prevent another crisis A few weeks before the Rabbit replaces the Tiger on Asian lunar calendars, the region’s investors must wish the zodiacal bunny’s more rational attributes – sagacity, shrewdness and tranquillity – will mark … read more >>
Asian sirens cast a spell but leave some things to be desired
THEY’RE robust and the road to the future, but our nearest and dearest could resolve to do better, writes Eric Ellis THE new year is upon us, a fine time for cleansing resolutions. Corporate Asia could use a few, too, if only to make it more user-friendly for corporate Australia … read more >>
Singapore slung
SINGAPORE: THE city-state’s success as a financial haven for Asia’s wealthy is turning sour as GFC fallout enters the courts THE scene: the bar of an exclusive Singapore sports club in a pre-Christmas jolly. The clientele: a well-heeled coterie of expatriate and local private bankers, Asia’s masters of the universe … read more >>
Australia: Our Julian
FOR ONCE, Australia really is punching above its weight in the world My mother, Sage of Winchelsea, Skyped me from her rural Victorian hearth to ask what I was doing in Cairo. ‘Profiling Egypt’s richest man, and writing about Australia’s relevance in the world,’ I told her as the Nile … read more >>
Media mogul makes his mark in a troubled land
Melbourne-raised Saad Mohseni is forging an empire in his homeland of Afghanistan SAAD Mohseni is the Australian media mogul you’ve probably never heard of. His writ runs wide and influentially in a country at the crossroads. At 44, his authority is sought by some of the world’s most powerful people: … read more >>
Afghanistan: Media mogul makes his mark in a troubled land
Melbourne-raised Saad Mohseni is forging an empire in his homeland of Afghanistan SAAD Mohseni is the Australian media mogul you’ve probably never heard of. His writ runs wide and influentially in a country at the crossroads. At 44, his authority is sought by some of the world’s most powerful people: … read more >>
A model democrat in Burma
AUNG San Suu Kyi is the dissident tailor-made for Western luvvies Had she been so inclined, when Aung San Suu Kyi got her release papers from Burma’s junta last weekend, she could have left the dilapidated family home in which the generals incarcerated her for 15 of the past 21 … read more >>
Turks might not wait
TURKEY, with its strong economy and links to Asia, may not need to be part of the European Union ISTANBUL: Is it European? Asian? Both? Neither? It’s a millennia-old question; culturally, religiously, geographically and economically. And one that could be posed more and more of Australia and its embrace, if … read more >>
Why Farnood was flushed out of Kabulbank
In the battle to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan, Kabulbank inserted itself as a key player, building the country’s largest deposit base and becoming the payment agent for many government enterprises. But a run on the bank in August led to the ousting of colourful poker-playing bank owner Sherkhan Farnood. What does … read more >>
“Double-A Team” inspires new hope for Indonesia
Government officials hope that international investors will look afresh at Indonesia. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government made history with its re-election. It is using a strong popular mandate to tackle corruption and bureaucratic shortcomings head-on. Eric Ellis reports from Jakarta AFTER 30 YEARS of kleptocratic dictatorship and a decade or so … read more >>
Afghanistan: Why Farnood was flushed out of Kabulbank
In the battle to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan, Kabulbank inserted itself as a key player, building the country’s largest deposit base and becoming the payment agent for many government enterprises. But a run on the bank in August led to the ousting of colourful poker-playing bank owner Sherkhan Farnood. What does … read more >>
Court of the Lion Kings; the moneymaking machine of Singapore Inc
IN THE fomenting debate over Singapore Inc’s bid to buy a most vital pillar of Australia’s economic architecture, there’s something deliciously apt that the decisive call on the Australian Stock Exchange will probably be made by Canberra’s independent members of parliament. Singapore doesn’t do independents, Mr Oakeshott. Indeed, it would … read more >>
India: A most uncivil service
ASIA’S monumental sporting events change nations; indeed, that seems to be the point of the billions lavished on them. Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics heralded Japan’s revival from World War II, and its future as a tech-savvy economic power. Likewise the Seoul Olympics in 1988 signalled a new trading giant also rising … read more >>
Indonesia: New dawn slowed by speed limits
JAKARTA: In December 1967, the prominent US magazine The Atlantic made a foray into the Pacific, to look at Indonesia. Written by John Hughes, who won a Pulitzer Prize that year for his Indonesia reportage, the piece examined the aftermath of the Year of Living Dangerously, when the independence hero … read more >>
Malaysia stumbling
ONE of Australia’s key partners in Asia is struggling. Given the way its leaders have taunted Australia over the years, schadenfreude at its plight would be understandable. But this should be resisted, for if Malaysia stumbles, the effects may ripple across the region. Erstwhile sponsor of the Carlton Football Club, … read more >>
Don’t bet on Kabul Bank
On the verge of collapse, Kabul Bank operates in a financial system we would barely recognise. SHANE Warne’s post-cricket pursuits and the murky nightmare that is Afghanistan would not appear to be obviously connected. But had you swung by London’s Empire Casino in 2008 during the World Series of Poker, … read more >>
Say a little prayer
New evangelical, deal-making networks are tiptoeing to the edges of power in south-east Asia. HOW to penetrate and plunder the supposed mysteries of corporate Asia? Many words, seminars and hectares of print space have been devoted in Australia to this apparently vexed question over the years. Leader after leader – … read more >>
Evangelical business network takes Asia
Listen to the full story >>
Thailand’s perfect solution
BIG problems require big ideas to fix them and, in Asia, few problems are bigger than the red-yellow divide that bedevils Thailand. Now four years old and no closer to resolution, the discord has been a huge problem in Bangkok: six governments in four years, hundreds dead as the military … read more >>
Gibraltar – Cracks in the Rock?
TINY Gibraltar is an ocean away from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it doesn’t take much traversing of the Rock’s lanes to get a distinctly Groundhog Day feeling that Bill Murray might recognize read on…
Thailand’s finance minister Korn faces the ultimate stress test
Thailand’s finance minister Korn faces the ultimate stress test Finance minister Korn Chatikavanij has steered the Thai economy successfully through huge political and social upheaval. But his long-term aim is to connect with Thailand’s people, and not just its financial and business elite, to bring prosperity to the majority. Eric … read more >>
Indonesia: Here’s mud in your eye, says president-in-waiting
Comparisons between how US and Indonesia have dealt with their respective environmental crises are striking CLEARLY, after the BP oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s beyond preposterous that its gaffe-prone chief executive should be considered for higher public office, or for much longer at BP for that … read more >>
China: Pearls for the Orient
WHAT is ”The String of Pearls?” If you are a mainland Chinese ”bizoid”, it is your toil for the motherland in joining strategic points of the globe, including Australia, to secure China’s imminent dominance of the world economy. And in doing so, you’ll be ably assisted by compliant locals wherever … read more >>
Sri Lankan brotherhood
The model in war-weary Sri Lanka is Singapore but the feel is more Suharto’s Indonesia, writes Eric Ellis in Colombo. NATIONS can be run as democracies or dictatorships, monarchies or even as products, for instance the widely admired production-to-port ”Singapore Inc” model. But is there a country run by a … read more >>
Karachi under siege
KARACHI: IT IS a measure of the limited appeal of Karachi, Pakistan’s bumptious commercial capital, that eager taxi drivers try to lure their few tourist passengers to a laundry. Admittedly, Karachi’s ”dhobi ghats” are perversely impressive in a modern world of Whirlpools; kilometres of downtown riverbank are strewn with shalwar … read more >>
Pakistan’s central bank governor Syed Salim Raza resigns before our very eyes
Euromoney’s correspondent has spent more than two decades navigating Asia’s often fathomless vagaries. But this was an exceptional experience. Having been lured to the most dangerous city – Karachi – of one of the world’s most dangerous countries – Pakistan – to interview the governor of the central bank we … read more >>
The slow-motion revolution
Thailand has been spared its Tiananmen moment, says Eric Ellis in Bangkok, but Thais now know what civil war looks like Murderous though May and the months before it were in Bangkok, this was not 1989 as it spontaneously rose in Beijing. Casualties were measured in Thai tens not Chinese … read more >>
Qataris score own goal in banking stoush
WHAT is more important, money or liberty? David Proctor is in no doubt – it is liberty every day of the week. In 2007, the British banker and his Australian wife Trinh were lured by big salaries and prime ministerial patronage to the tiny, gas-rich Gulf emirate of Qatar, which … read more >>
Who Knows What Happens in the Shadows?
One hopes Stern Hu will keep a diary, a little red book if you will, of the dark years he’ll endure in his Chinese gulag, ruminating on the less-than edifying events that put him there. Of the forests felled publishing myriad clueless ‘expert’ commentary and management-speak twaddle about doing business … read more >>
Islamic finance: Hub or hubris?
Shariah banking is becoming big business in Southeast Asia, with Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta battling for the title of regional Islamic finance centre. But even the most optimistic bankers fear further expansion could be stymied by arcane regulation and lack of cross-border consensus. Eric Ellis reports. HERE ARE SOME concepts … read more >>
Thailand’s royal ill-health threatens to infect ASEAN
BARELY affected by the Atlantic financial crisis, ASEAN’s regional economies are vaulting ahead and presenting sexy business opportunities. Though still plagued by corruption, Indonesia, the biggest economy in the Association for South-East Asian Nations, is politically stable, buoyant and knocking hopefully at the door of the BRIC club – Brazil, … read more >>
Qatar? Be warned
DOHA – WHAT do you know about Qatar? In Australia, Qatar probably begins and ends with those nice ads on the radio and telly. There’s a soothing soundtrack, attractive air hostesses serving sumptuous tucker to weary travellers doing the Kangaroo Run between Australia and London – spruiking the new ”five … read more >>
Sri Lanka: A one family state?
A conversation about the extraordinary political influence exerted in Sri Lanka by the newly re-elected president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his family. With the long civil war over, optimists hope Rajapaksa will use his formidable mandate to heal ethnic divisions and rebuild a shattered economy. The president is a hero to … read more >>
Crony v reformer; fight becomes feisty in Jakarta
IT IS Asia’s feud of the year, and one that could define whether Indonesia makes it to international investment grade, or will spend some more time in the economic basket-case category. In one corner is Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati; eloquent, stylish, almost an anti-politician; a cleanskin with a self-professed … read more >>
After the war comes Sri Lanka’s refugee crisis
Menik Farm refugee camp, Northern Sri Lanka. LAST week at her bowls club, in a bucolic town in Victoria’s whitebread Western District, my mother mentioned to ‘the girls’ that I’d soon be in town for a school reunion. Her bowling mates know that I’m a foreign correspondent, reporting from sometimes … read more >>
Indonesia’s elite has too much to lose from addressing its actions in East Timor
A friend, recently visiting Jakarta for the first time, surveyed this ugly, chaotic and most inappropriate of metropolises. As we edged our way through the gridlock clogging the fetid sepia dusk, begging mothers with scrawny babes-in-arms pawed at oligarchs’ BMWs and Ferraris circling the downtown ‘Welcome Monument’ fountain, which was … read more >>
From financial powerhouses to the houses of power
AUSTRALIA has one as prime minister-in-waiting, while across the Tasman, New Zealand is actually led by one. And it is happening in Asia, too. It seems that bankers don’t retire, die or get sent to Guantanamo Bay, as many victims of the global financial crisis might prefer, but get their … read more >>
World turns disapproving eyes on Singapore banquet
WERE every high school as wonderful as Singapore’s United World College. Each morning, a convoy of chauffeur-driven Mercedes, BMWs and SUVs sweep up to the expansive campus, dropping well-shod students dangling all manner of modish teenage bling; mobile phones, computers, designer this and that. The sumptuous grounds are more suggestive … read more >>
Sri Lanka’s Next Battle
AFTER the end of Sri Lanka’s long and often barbaric civil war, there’s no avoiding President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Banners espousing his election manifesto Mahinda Thought line the nation’s roads and railways. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV and his mustachioed visage appears a dozen times, illustrating the … read more >>
Indonesia looks forward to continued reform
WITH Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) re-elected for a second term as Indonesia’s president, the big question Jakarta bankers are asking is whom he will appoint to his cabinet. Bankers have been happy with the incumbent finance minister, the capable and – more important for one of the world’s most corrupt … read more >>
Ten years on, East Timor looks to the future
EAST Timor’s Finance Minister, Emilia Pires, remembers well her first days at Moreland High School in the tough Coburg of the 1970s. Neither European nor Asian but something of both, Pires and her six siblings, exiled from their invaded country, perplexed her fellow students. “We got called so many things,” … read more >>
The World’s Most Powerful Women – Emilia Pires
Exiled to Australia at age 15, she spent 24 years away from East Timor. Good experience for her job as finance minister. East Timor’s finance minister, Emilia Pires, is nothing if not ambitious for her struggling country, one of the world’s newest and poorest. It’s not enough for East Timor … read more >>
Afghanistan needs an economic leader
DEMOCRACY IS a wonderful thing, at least it’s supposed to be. But sometimes democratic elections don’t deliver the type of leader a country needs. That looks likely to happen in Afghanistan, a barely formed nation economically more desperate than most, next week. If the West and its misspent billions in … read more >>
Afghanistan doesn’t have to be Obama’s Vietnam
A seven-point plan to halt the country’s eight-year decline IRAQ seems, at last, yesterday’s war. Now the Forgotten War in Afghanistan, the one that’s been going on longer, has become — again — the Just War. Barack Obama insists Australians do more of the heavy lifting against a resurgent … read more >>
Is Turkey Ready for the EU?
ISTANBUL: It was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well, life-size images of her — flaunting her curvaceous clunes at shoppers in the Agent Provocateur lingerie outlet at Istanbul’s Kanyon Mall. It was … read more >>
Hot spots, pot shots and gold pots for the brazen and the bold
Hot spots, pot shots and gold pots for the brazen and the bold Compile a fake CV, head for a war zone, and a fortune in taxpayers’ dollars can be yours, writes Eric Ellis. RESOLVED to make big quick money in 2007 at the frontier of commerce? Sure, YouTube … read more >>