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Malaysia’s Forest City is billed as a luxury housing and leisure development, yet when police raided a tower in the leafy complex recently they found not well-heeled residents, but an alleged scam enterprise staffed by hundreds of Chinese nationals.
‘It was a much bigger operation than we were expecting,’ said a person involved in the July 15 operation. ‘It took us two days to do the paperwork.’
The raid, which echoed recent busts on scam compounds in rundown buildings across poorer parts of south-east Asia, was just one of a long line of blows to the reputation of Forest City, a Chinese-backed development co-owned by the king of Malaysia and promoted by Kuala Lumpur and the Johor state government, the FT’s Owen Walker explains.
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