AN INTERVIEW with Asian Development Bank president Tadao Chino, published in this newspaper on Friday, cannot pass without comment. While the article did a good job of setting out what the ADB would like to do and be, there is another perspective to this institution and it needs to be offered in balance.
Let us start with the simple observation that when ADB staffers set out to do good in their campaign to win the war against poverty they do very well indeed.
It is a high life for them in Manila, enormous modern offices with sweeping galleries, homes over which we in Hong Kong would drool and great bundles of perks with every job. How grand to be a warrior against poverty.
Of course, there are a few trade-offs, among the most notable of which is something that, this being a family newspaper, we shall call apple-polishing.
I once attended one of those big ADB talking shops in Manila and for two days the team from our bank grovelled in front of stuffed shirts from finance ministries and central banks around Asia, laying on the praise good and thick for their efforts on behalf of humanity.
The only reason I did not choke from the embarrassment of it all was that everyone in this Alice in Wonderland world was doing it. The ADB is a political institution in every facet, a very political one indeed. Bear it in mind.
It had particular reason on this occasion for being so because of an embarrassment of its own. In its war against poverty it had decided that what Indonesian irrigation projects and the like needed was loans at low rates of interest.