COMMENT | Adani’s fall, Turkiye quake hold lessons for Malaysia

COMMENT | Are there lessons to be drawn from two disparate events that have hogged the headlines in recent days: the devastating earthquake in Turkiye and the spectacular fall from financial grace of Indian industrialist Gautam Adani?

At first glance, it appears difficult to draw common inferences from a massive natural disaster - an ‘act of God’, as it were - and the defenestration of what was a short time ago the world’s third richest man.

But if you take what the French novelist Honore de Balzac said that behind every great fortune, there lies a crime, we might get somewhere.

In early 19th century France, Balzac was a matchless discerner of societal particularities, such that his take on the causal factors behind the accumulation of great wealth possesses relevance for our times.

In the construction boom that fuelled Turkiye’s rapid growth in the Recep Tayyip Erdogan era, safety corners were cut by building tycoons considered allies of the Turkish leader...