Asia/Pacific
Mulyani rides to Indonesia’s rescue (again)
Indonesians well remember the moment when their popular finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati unexpectedly resigned her post in 2010, defeated by the country’s venal money politics, her reform work unfinished. It was a dark time, as Indonesians fretted that their most trusted public official had been crushed and, with her … read more >>
Zeti ups the ante in fight with 1MDB
Malaysia’s formidable central bank governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz endured quite a month in October. It began with her contemplating the fresh lows that her beloved ringgit had plumbed on September 30, having lost 40% of its value in a year to become Asia’s worst-performing currency, and taking much of her … read more >>
Zeti tries to rise above Malaysia’s creeping crisis
For Zeti Akhtar Aziz, the venerable governor of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the country’s central bank, these should be the best of times. Deep into her last year of what will be, by her retirement next April, 16 years at the helm of BNM, it should be a period of … read more >>
Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s new president: Death and Taxes (from 2004)
Shortlisted for the 2005 British Business Journalist of the Year Award (Economics) Death and Taxes in Kabul Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani is battling warlords, cabinet colleagues, indifferent global donors and stomach cancer as he struggles to salvage Afghanistan’s ravaged economy. If he fails, the world could pay an enormous price. … read more >>
Indonesia: Flight of the Navigator
Muhammad Chatib Basri is not a big fan of bureaucracies. “One of the reasons so many Indonesians have become religious,” jokes Indonesia’s 48-year-old finance minister, Jakarta’s ninth in 16 years, “is because they have to deal with the government.” Citing a common gripe of his 250 million compatriots – and … read more >>
In Singapore’s Shadows
From the late 1960s until last Sunday night, the closest Singapore has ever come to a race riot was in June this year when McDonald’s offered locals a Hello Kitty soft toy in blackface, with an order of burger and fries. Bad idea. The inner Singaporean was uncorked. Chaos reigned … read more >>
The Brothers’ Grip
Meet Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena. He’s every saver’s dream come true – a bank director who can predict the future. Abeygunawardena is the ‘working director’ of one of Sri Lanka’s biggest banks, the state-owned National Savings Bank (NSB) – that is, when he’s not being a celebrity soothsayer. Abeygunawardena’s main claim to … read more >>
Myanmar’s Little Helper
Revolutions have a way of revealing inconvenient truths; the dictator is toppled, his cronies flee in haste while they can, and in the ransacked files of the regime’s abandoned palaces, the dark secrets of tyrants – and the hypocrisy of their embarrassed enablers, too – are revealed. But sometimes revolutions … read more >>
Sri Lanka – Rajapaksa Calls “Bull Shit” On Global Mail Coverage
Last weekend, as a courtesy, The Global Mail emailed Sri Lanka’s unelected Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa a link to our story on the nepotism among Sri Lanka’s powerful elite. Gota, as Sri Lankans know him, is the country’s enforcer-in-chief. The former soldier is credited with having masterminded his presidential brother … read more >>
Sri Lanka Part Three – The Smugglers’ Prey
WHAT does a Sri Lankan would-be asylum seeker look like? Many look like this man. His name is Gnanaseelan. He’s 32. He’s a Tamil, though never a Tiger. A father. A widower.He lives in this desperate shanty outside the seaside hamlet of Mullaitivu, on Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged north-east coast, with … read more >>
Sri Lanka Part Two – The Monks’ Army
Sri Lanka’s raffish capital, where we begin our series, is in economic catch-up mode. Colombo is replacing the colonial-era roads and railways built when Churchill was a boy and ‘Ceylon’ was a languid tropical afterthought for the British who ruled the plantation island.Though it took its time – 10 years … read more >>
Sri Lanka Part One – How Not To Win A War
FOUR years after its brutal victory over Tamil Tiger rebels that ended a 26-year-long civil war, Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-led government is at pains to persuade the world that it has at last brought peace and unity to this troubled island. And the captain of the flag-carrying SriLankan Airlines flight 423 … read more >>
Singapore
Greetings Singaporeans You’ve likely arrived here because of the recent fuss after the airing of some inconvenient facts about the corporate history and possible conflicts of Foreign/Law Minister Shanmugam, that seemed to have stirred him (and his followers) http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/out-of-the-haze-a-singapore-spring/646/ Whenever one writes about Singapore, I get many emails from Singaporeans … read more >>
Out Of The Haze, A Singapore Spring?
When you are Singapore’s Lee family, and your clan has exercised absolute and uninterrupted control over its swanky specklet of Asia for 54 years, fellows like Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam are handy to have within your power court. K. Shanmugam, as he’s less tongue-twistingly known, may have escaped the attention of those … read more >>
Wendi…back by popular demand…
“Cheers to Wendi! Gan bei! Drink the cup dry!” It’s 8 pm on a freezing night in Xuzhou, and we’re having a jolly time in the Overflowing Fragrance dining room of the Sea Sky Holiday Hotel, an oddly named establishment given that this grim industrial city of 10 million people … read more >>
Fact-Checking The Geert Wilders Road Show
In the bewildering battle of ideas, ideology and spin, facts are important. But the ugly confrontations that have marked the Australian tour of the extravagantly coiffed Dutch politician Geert Wilders — the Islamophobe whom Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik cited as an inspiration — have seen truth fall by the wayside. Wilders’ … read more >>
Conrad: The New New Black
Convicted fraudster Conrad Black, who once lorded over Australia’s Fairfax newspapers in another less-disgraced life, has been peddling around London, hyping his new book with the velocity of a Lance Armstrong EPO-ed to the eyeballs. And, like Lance, flogging The Big Lie that he’s innocent. Armstrong would have us believe … read more >>
Pyongyang Pastorale
Pedalling Propaganda by the paddy October 14, 1994 It seemed an image of rural harmony in developing Asia – a woman riding a pushbike beside a paddy field where peasants were harvesting rice. But in communist North Korea, nothing is as it seems. This cyclist had fitted to her bicycle … read more >>
Dear Leader and The Golf War
Pyongyang, October 13, 1994 THE first hole at the Pyongyang Golf Club is a 340-metre dogleg par four, a severe test of skill even for Normans and Nicklauses. But it was a mere cakewalk for North Korea’s “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, when he gave “on-the-spot guidance” at the country’s … read more >>
Ground Zero Kuta – The Bali Bombings Revisited, 10 years on – Part 1
October 17, 2002 As dawn broke on the chaos that was Kuta Beach, Eric Ellis searched for survivors of Australia’s worst terrorist outrage…. HE WAS tanned, a bit paunchy, late 40s; a handsome man with short hair. He was a solid bloke and very clearly an Australian. The bare feet … read more >>
Bali’s Demons – The Bali Bombing Revisited, 10 years on – Part 2
October 23, 2002 As well as the lives of many, the nightclub bombs destroyed any lingering illusions that Bali was a tranquil haven somehow isolated from Indonesia’s current malaise. Eric Ellis reports from Kuta Beach…… IT didn’t take long for the bile in South-East Asia to rise. And it came … read more >>
Allah’s Assassins – The Bali Bombings Revisited, 10 years on – Part 3
Winner of the 2003 Walkley Award, Asia-Pacific reporting…. THE Bali bombers were rootless young men recruited from the dusty poverty of a village in West Java – their overseer a worldly West Javanese, burning with Islamic zeal and with the contacts to organise and bankroll their jihad. Eric Ellis retraces … read more >>
Wikileaks: Jennifer Robinson
JENNIFER ROBINSON is baffled. And that’s not the natural state of this peppy jurist, defender of whistleblowers, daughter of tiny Berry on New South Wales’s south coast now ascending the rarified legal heights of Cavendish Square, London W1 and jurisdictions beyond. I’ve asked her to clarify what seems an elliptical … read more >>
Murdoch: All The Truth That Fits
AFTER swearing on the Bible to begin a two-day interrogation in Court 73 of London’s Royal Courts of Justice last Wednesday, an octogenarian once feared as the world’s most powerful media mogul began taking questions, the first few being perhaps the only ones he answered with clear and indisputable truth. … read more >>
Irish Eyes Are on Australia
IN Kilkee, a sleepy retreat from the stormy Atlantic on Ireland’s remote far west coast, they still talk about the day the West Clare Gaels Ladies Football Club won the 2010 All-Ireland Ladies Intermediate Final. It was, by all accounts, an incredible victory, a bright moment of glory that briefly … read more >>
An Environmental Problem For Brisbane Roar
THEY DO things differently at the Football Federation of Australia, the peak administrator of soccer in Australia.
Top banker breaches FSA rules in £2 million share trade
A Standard Chartered plc director has breached Financial Services Authority regulations over millions of pounds of his personal share dealings in the bank’s stock. A joint investigation by Euromoney and The Global Mail into the share dealings of Stanchart’s Hong Kong-based group executive director and CEO for Asia, Jaspal Singh … read more >>
The Last Grande Dame of Australian Art
DAZZLING in a sarong of a shade best classified as unspeakably orange, Mitty Lee Brown emerges regally from a nap through Sri Lanka’s tropical torpor to receive an unexpected well-wisher. She’s a little startled at the intrusion because these days, at 89, Mitty doesn’t get too many guests … 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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
Indonesia: Helman’s play on Asia
MENTION the name Aburizal Bakrie in the smart bars, clubs and restaurants of Singapore and Jakarta where bankers gather and the name Helman Sitohang is often uttered in the next breath. Sitohang is Credit Suisse’s chief rainmaker in Jakarta and Singapore, a man regarded by many as perhaps the best-connected … 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 >>
Wendi Deng Murdoch: La Bella Ambiciosa Que Llegò de China
LONDRES: Fue en marzo de 2007 en Pekín, adonde yo había ido a ver un hermoso siheyuan —el patio tradicional de las casas chinas— al lado de la Ciudad Prohibida, cuando por primera vez noté que algo extra- ño pasaba con mis comunicaciones. Podía enviar correos electrónicos, pero no llegaban … 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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
Kuala Lumpur a world financial centre through growth in Islamic banking
FORGET the City, Wall Street, Frankfurt and Tokyo, here’s a revelation that will rock you, and probably Gail Kelly at Westpac too. One of the world’s biggest financial centres is Kuala Lumpur. No, you didn’t read incorrectly – tropical KL, capital of the infamously ”recalcitrant” Malaysia, a country better known … 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 >>
Thais in a bind
Thailand has found much-needed stability under the Abhisit Government but maintaining it is a problem IT IS – apparently more than most new years – the season to note anniversaries; 240 years since Cook’s Endeavour arrived on our shores, 200 years of Peugeot, 75 years of Elvis and 20 years … read more >>
City Life, Dili
Sleepy Dili, capital of East Timor, doesn’t have much going for it. Its tallest building is just three storeys. The most obvious economic activity is the purveying of SIM cards and pirate CDs of ‘jiggy-jig’. The harbour is full of ships, but only because some dopey official misordered an import … 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 >>
Sycophancy lavished on Asian hosts
THERE must be something about Asian potentates, benevolent or otherwise, that gets those expatriate corporate hormones racing to lavish love in spades on them. In nearly two decades trawling through corporate Asia, I’ve seen it time and again. Foreign businessmen who’d be the first to trash the business policies of … read more >>
Fire rages over Red Dragon ‘prawn ultimatum’
JAKARTA – IT’S THE EMERGING market investor’s lament – if it’s Tuesday it must be Shanghai, Wednesday Mumbai and Thursday Rio. But it seems that if it’s most any day of the week, it’s Jakarta: there’s yet another financial drama to upset Indonesia’s emergence as a credible investment destination. Indonesia’s … 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 >>
Indonesian reform the path to investment
PESKY corporate regulators sniffing around the business? Stock exchange on your case? Not in Jakarta, where it’s plain sailing for all manner of corporate governance fiddles. Indonesia’s peak regulator, the Capital Market and Financial Institutions Supervisory Agency, known as Bapepam by its Bahasa acronym, has rarely seen a deal it … 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 >>
Formula for Excess
Singapore’s free-wheeling private bankers enjoyed the ride of their lives in the precrisis years, but with government intervention and a clutch of lawsuits looming, it looks as though many are finally running out of road. DESPITE ITS GLITZY new image as the latest hotspot to host a nighttime Formula One … 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 >>
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 >>