KL outwits the bankers. (Citicorp and Kuala Lumpur beat the Japanese banks to lending money to Malaysia)

Malaysia is proving to be a shrewd player in the international financial markets. By all the rules of the game, the political and financial scandals of the past year, as well as the bleak outlook of the economy, should have left the country paying over the odds for its new borrowings.

Yet Kuala Lumpur has just managed to outwit and outrage the region’s bankers by engineering what seem to be highly generous terms on a black-door loan from Japanese leasing companies.