Other Recent Articles


Most Popular Content

Featured Work, Malaysia, Politics - Feb 2, 2010 22:50 - 0 Comments

Malaysia’s Democracy on Trial

anwar-ibrahim1

Australian Financial Review, February 2 2010

When Anwar Ibrahim walks into the Kuala Lumpur High Court today, he will at least know what to expect.

Anwar, Malaysia’s one-time deputy prime minister and now the de facto leader of the first credible opposition in Malaysia’s independent history, is facing the third incarceration of his life. The first was a 22-month detention when a student leader in the 1970s; the second a six-year stint in 1998 for sodomy (overturned in 2004) and corruption, during the administration of his one-time mentor, Mahathir Mohamed. Now, he faces another sodomy charge, and the potential of 20 years in jail. Locally the press are calling it Sodomy II, like a sequel. “They use the same script,” he tells the AFR in an interview in his Kuala Lumpur offices. “I’ll leave it to the lawyers. I don’t have any trust in the system.”

Continue…

Popularity: 100% [?]

More In Featured Work


Australia, Banking, Big Interviews, Featured Work - Sep 16, 2009 23:53 - 0 Comments

Nicholas Moore: Potholes not pitfalls on Macquarie’s road

Euromoney, September 2009iStock_000002397033Small

IF MACQUARIE GROUP is at a crossroads, it probably already owns it. The financial services group, best known outside Australia for its infrastructure investments from Sydney Airport to the M6 motorway in the UK, has had a difficult year and has seen one part of its model – the satellite fund – run into trouble. It has faced belligerent hedge funds intent on bringing down the stock, and indeed the bank; it has taken billions of dollars of impairment charges on its listed funds; and it has faced a certain local Schadenfreude in a country that shows little warmth for tall poppies. But as imitators have gone bankrupt it has stayed profitable throughout and is already tweaking, evolving and reinventing, just as it has ever since it started out in 1969.

“In the time I’ve been covering the stock it’s gone from market-making equity options to gold bullion trading, to R&D tax financing to cross-border structured financing to listed infrastructure,” says Brian Johnson, one of Australia’s most highly rated banking analysts, who recently moved from JPMorgan to CLSA. “The model just continues to evolve.” Continue…

Popularity: 34% [?]

More In Big Interviews


Big Interviews, Economics, Featured Work, Foreign Exchange, From the Vault, Malaysia, Politics - Oct 1, 2007 9:52 - 0 Comments

Mahathir Mohamed, Emerging Markets, October 2007

With MahathirEmerging Markets, October 2007

Putrajaya is a curious place. Though few outside of Malaysia have heard of it, it is the country’s federal administrative centre, founded in 1995 to take the government departments out of nearby Kuala Lumpur. It’s a place of resplendent architectural daring: mosques, palaces, convention centres, and five extraordinary bridges over a 650-hectare man-made lake. But the most striking thing about it is this: there’s no-one there.

Continue…

Popularity: 33% [?]

More In From the Vault