Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will set out the Conservative Party's strategy for rebuilding the UK economy in an exclusive Thomson Reuters Newsmaker at 11 a.m. on Monday, October 26.
We will bring you full coverage of Osborne's speech, including a live video feed and blog, after which we will conduct a short social media interview with him.
We want you to send us your questions to put to him.
This is your chance to grill the man who, according to the latest opinion polls, looks set to inhabit Number 11 Downing Street after the upcoming general election.
Be it on bankers' bonuses, tax havens or the Conservative Party's plans for leading us out of a recession, send us your questions now using the form below or via Twitter using the hashtag #askosborne.
A decade ago, Malaysia's former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was on trial for sodomy and corruption in a trial that exposed the seamy side of Malaysian justice and the anxieties of a young country grappling with a crushing financial crisis and civil unrest.
Anwar is Malaysia's best known political figure, courted in the U.S. and Europe and probably the only man who can topple the government that has led this Southeast Asian country for the past 51 years.
Photo: Anwar Ibrahim, with a bruised eye, at court on Sept 30, 1998 during his his first trial. REUTERS/David Loh
Now the leader of the opposition, will go on trial next week again charged with sodomising a 23-year old male aide. The trial once again looks likely to provide gory evidence and bringing some unwanted attention from the world's media on this Southeast Asian country of 27 million people. It could also embarrass the government and draw international criticism.
The 14 months I spent covering the 1998 trials saw Anwar accused of sodomy with three men and having sex with a woman over a period of years. This case is simpler, there is just one accuser. All homosexual acts are illegal in this mainly Muslim country and sex outside marriage is illegal for Muslims.
The first trial was gruelling. Lines began as early as four in the morning as people tried to get into the court that could seat less than 200. Most of the spectators were ordinary people, but there was a sprinkling of dignitaries and businessmen who had known Anwar when he was in office.
There was a separate media queue and again a fight to get in line as dozens of reporters from local and international outlets jockeyed for space. Ringing the court were hundreds of riot police, backed by watercannon, waiting for trouble in a country where there were daily protests at the time, often involving tens of thousands of people.
Once inside the courtroom, things were equally unpredictable. Judge Augustine Paul, plucked from obscurity to oversee Malaysia's most important criminal trial, won national fame for his oft-repeated response of "not relevant" to evidence introduced by the defence team.
The evidence itself was often contradictory and often bizarre. Ummi Hafilda Ali, a star witness for the prosecution called Anwar a "dog" and prayed that he would contract AIDS. At one stage the prosecution paraded a mattress in and out of the courtroom, saying that semen stains showed Anwar had had sex with a man on it.
One day outside the court, a witch doctor cast a spell, for no apparent reason.
Anwar showed up sporting a black eye that he said had been inflicted on him in prison by the country's police chief. This time round he says that he was forced to strip and his sexual organs measured in a hospital.
The evidence to be presented by the prosecution this time looks likely to be just as sensational. The malaysianmirror web portal, backed by one of the government parties, said there will be 30 witnesses, a carpet and a video recording, as well as a DNA evidence brought into court.
Anwar's team, citing two medical reports, says there is no evidence that Saiful Bukhari Azlan was sodomised. Saiful meanwhile has sworn on the Koran that he was and wasn't best pleased when the charge against Anwar was changed to consensual sex.
One key actor in the whole drama is missing this time round. Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who critics say used the 1998 trial to drive Anwar from office and to humiliate him, is no longer in power. That removes some of the sting.
Even so, incumbent premier Najib Razak attracts plenty of ire from the opposition. He has been forced to deny allegations from the opposition and opposition-supporting websites that he was involved in the lurid murder of a Mongolian model.
The country remains tense in the wake of the 2008 general election in which the government lost its customary two-thirds majority.
Can Anwar survive another trial? Without him, can the opposition prosper and have a real chance of winning at the ballot box in elections due to be held by 2013. Can Najib survive as prime minister if Anwar remains free and can he implement economic reforms?
Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of PIMCO (not pictured below), painted a bleak picture of the global economy at a press briefing of Allianz Global Investors earlier today.
“This is not the crisis within the global system. This is the crisis of the global system,” El-Erian says.
“Internal circuit breakers are meant to deal with crises within the system. The crisis of the system challenges all the circuit breakers. There is no reset button.”
For the patient — the world economy — who is in intensive care after a cardiac arrest following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, governments will play a bigger role in getting the patient back on a recovery path.
“You can no longer predict asset value without thinking about the role of governments. Governments are no longer referees, they are players,” El-Erian says.
Japanese stocks are sinking towards levels unseen since 1982, sending alarmed government officials scurrying to come up with some way of propping them up.
Officials are looking at steps to support stocks after the plunge, which has taken the benchmark Nikkei to within sight of a 26-year low hit last October.
That slices into the value of huge share portfolios held by Japanese banks and erodes their capital just when the economy needs them to boost lending.
Among proposals being considered is setting up a stock-buying agency as Japan did in the mid-1960s, which follows another plan for the government to buy up to 20 trillion yen in shares from banks -- a plan currently stalled in parliament.
The latest suggestion, in a newspaper on Thursday, is for the Bank of Japan to be pushed into buying stock exchange-traded funds.
Though market players say stock buying by government agencies might help a little, most remain wary with the Japanese market slide part of a global criiss.
"These stock plans may buy a bit of time, but without enacting a decisive economic stimulus package simultaneously they won't be really effective," Takahiko Murai, general manager of equities at Nozomi Securities, told me.
Others are harsher, noting the dire economic state and paralysis in a divided parliament under unpopular Prime Minister Taro Aso, with an increasingly strong opposition determined to delay policy as it eyes an election soon.
"We don't need more money," said one fund manager. "We need a change of leadership."
The Nikkei gave all the proposals a cold shoulder and edged down on Thursday, bringing its losses -- after the worst post-War decline ever last year -- for calendar 2009 to more than 15 percent, on top of a record 42 percent slide last year.
I once paid a cop 30 ringgit (about $10 then) for making an apparently illegal left-hand turn in Kuala Lumpur. Scores of drivers in front of me were also handing over their "instant fines", discreetly enclosed within the policeman's ticketing folder. It was days ahead of a major holiday and the cops were collecting their holiday bonus from the public.
Malaysia opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim holds a disc he says contains evidence of judge-fixing in Malaysia
I felt bad about this, of course. What I was doing was illegal, immoral and perpetuating an insidious culture that goes by many names in the East -- "baksheesh" in India, "Ali Baba" (and his 40 thieves) in Malaysia, "swap" in Indonesia (means "to feed"). But the policeman pointed out I would have to take off the good part of a day to go to court and pay 10 times as much to the judge. So I rationalised: "When in Rome..."
Alas it was not the first time, nor would it be the last that I have (ahem) paid an "informal levy" to officialdom. I've given baksheesh to the phone company in India to get a telephone installed, and to get a driver's license without a test (no wonder there are so many accidents in India.) I've paid the immigration officer at Jakarta airport to let me in with a nearly expired passport.
Many of my friends in Asia have similar tales to tell about bribing customs agents, power companies, hospitals, schools -- anybody with the power to give a license or provide a service. A couple of bucks here, a couple there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money. Daniel Kaufmann, who spearheaded the World Bank's efforts to improve the study of governance and the rule of law estimates that $1 trillion of bribes are paid every year. A Reuters series on corruption in Asia found that perceptions of corruption in the emerging markets of Asia have not improved much over the years and have even declined in some cases. This is despite a growing revulsion among people in those countries for business as usual on the "demand" or government side, and a growing realisation from companies on the "supply side" of the bribery equation that payola is simply bad for business.
Protester holds a wanted poster for ousted Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra at a mass anti-government rally in Bangkok.
Part of the problem is mindset and a major attitude adjustment might be needed. People may be fed up with "money politics" and crony capitalism in their countries, but they still pay off people in their neighbourhoods. A U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research study on unpaid parking fines issued to diplomats in New York, home to the U.N., showed Southeast Asian nations again among the league leaders and a remarkable correlation with more conventional measures of corruption. You can take the man out of his corrupt country, but you can't take the culture of corruption out of the man.
Anti-graft fighters model uniforms that those convicted of corruption offenses inIndonesia willbe required to wear in court and jail.
For years, Indonesia ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world. It permeates almost every level of society, reducing the country's appeal to foreign investors, and curbing Indonesia's potential for growth. Today, Indonesia's anti-corruption agency, known by its acronym KPK, has won plenty of media attention with its Jame Bond-like undercover exploits against corrupt officials. The government is also trying to get at the root of the problem by sending officials and judges to "anti-corruption school.
Passers-by in Jakarta walk past a poster that reads "fight corruption."
Some OECD countries will even let you take a tax deduction for providing "facilitation payments" to get routine services such as a phone installed. Facilitation payment? Hello, it's called a bribe, payola, grease, ice, a backhander. It's corruption, the dictionary definitions of which include moral perversion, depravity, debasement, not to mention rottenness. Okay, that's a little harsh. We're not talking about the moral equivalent of, say, paedophilia. But it's surely a slippery slope from giving the cop some lunch money, to bribing the customs guy to look the other way on a smuggled shipment, to paying off politicians.
Ramon Navaratnam, 73, the Transparency International Malaysia President told me the battle for him started when he was a young man in the finance ministry and he came home one night from work to find a case of whisky on his doorstep from a company bidding on a government contract. "It took a lot of doing, but the company finally took the whisky away. "If I had taken that box of whisky, I can never say no later on."
Thirty-first U.S. President Herbert Clark Hoover once said: “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”
Governments around the world are borrowing heavily to finance their fiscal expansion – unprecedented in size and scale – to prevent severe economic downturn.
However, outspoken independent economist Roger Nightingale thinks fiscal stimulus will not work.
He predicts a severe, Japanese-style recession to hit major and developing markets.
“There is no way out of this problem. Fiscal policy won’t help it at all,” he told a conference in London.
“It’s taking from one type of people and giving it to another… It’s net zero. It’s taking from non-banks and giving to banks. It’s taking from the innocent and giving to the guilty. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.”
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will set out the Conservative Party's strategy for rebuilding the UK economy in an exclusive Thomson Reuters Newsmaker at 11 a.m. on Monday, October 26.
