...And Soros The Spider

MALAYSIA'S prime minister Mah-athir Mohammad does not lose an opportunity to bash US investment banker George Soros, who is dubbed a one-man central bank but prefers to be known as a "financial, philanthropic, and philosophical speculator". Mahathir blames Soros for the recent attacks on the Malaysian ringgit that shaved 16 per cent of its value against the dollar. But Soros, whose personal worth is calculated at £625 million, denies attacking the ringgit and has blamed Mahathir for being a "menace to his own country".

A few days after Myanmar's admission into ASEAN in July, Mahathir blamed Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, for being behind the attacks on regional currencies in order to punish ASEAN governments for welcoming Myanmar's military regime into the grouping. A Soros official denied the charge. But Soros, a self-appointed global humanitarian, abhors juntas, and his Open Society Institute has lobbied for democracy in Myanmar through its Myanmar project for the last three years. Incidentally, it is no secret that, a la Robin Hood, Soros plunders the markets and funnels his earnings into democracy projects.

In their war of words, there are the ominous makings of a clash of civilisations. Mahathir is Muslim and leads a predominantly Muslim Malaysia. Soros is Jewish and pumped $360 million into global human rights and democracy projects last year, in some countries giving even more aid than the US government. "Being Jewish makes Soros even more of a public enemy in Malaysia," says an analyst.

Born to a Hungarian-Jewish lawyer in 1930, Soros survived the Nazi holocaust only because his father had purchased false identity papers for the family. He emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics and came under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound effect on shaping Soros as a philanthropist.

Soros shifted to the US in 1956 and amassed a large fortune through the Soros Fund Management, a private investment management fund that he founded. But for all his money, his personal life was a shambles. He broke off with his wife and lived a reclusive life cloistered in a Manhattan flat.

It was in philanthropy that he found release. He promoted free speech in Eastern European states in the '80s through his Open Society Fund, Eastern European Foundation and the Soros Foundation (Soviet Union). His human rights and free speech agenda—through a network in 31 countries, employing 1,300 people—cost him $1.1 billion, but he did not bat an eyelid, as he had earned $1 billion in just one week in 1992 when he bet against the British pound. Interestingly, the most affected institution in that operation was the Malaysian central bank and analysts trace Mahathir's anti-Soros stance to this.

But it was in 1997 that he actually came up against Mahathir. A worried ASEAN accused foreign forces of conspiring to destabilise their cur rencies for self-serving purposes. But Soros denied any hand in dumping the Malaysian ringgit. And when he came to Hong Kong in September to attend the annual IMF/World Bank meeting, he decried Mahathir publicly as a 'menace' and warned him that "interfering with the convertibility of capital at a moment like this is a recipe for disaster".

Interestingly, there has been talk that Mahathir and Soros were planning to meet some time in the future, but the Malaysian leader left Hong Kong before Soros made his speech. Analysts say Soros is no less an ideologue than Mahathir, who is known for his passionate anti-Western diatribes. For his part, Soros has written several books: Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995), Opening the Soviet System (1990) and The Alchemy of Finance (1987).

For now, one of the most visited websites after Buckingham Palace, is Soros' http://www.soros.org. Clearly, his agenda is not just to make money, but to ram his human rights medicine down the most reluctant of throats.