OF all the many strange tales in Hong Kong's financial history, few equal the rise and fall of George Tan's Carrian Group property empire.
Ten year's after the crash of Carrian, the full story has still not been told. But what has been revealed makes a bizarre epic of South China Morning Post reporting.
The framework of the story was that a bankrupt Singaporean borrowed huge amounts of money from a Malaysian bank set up to look after the interests of bumiputras (''sons of the soil''), and invested massively in Hong Kong property.
Throw in a couple of corpses, whispers of political involvement at the highest level, a failed trial that cost the public at least $100 million, a fugitive banker fighting extradition from a British jail, and a volume of unanswered questions, and you have the bare ingredients of the Carrian affair.
For the three years after he arrived in Hong Kong until shortly before he was arrested in October 1983, Tan was the man who could do no wrong.
''Courted by bankers and property brokers, he was the darling of the stock market,'' was the Post' s description following his arrest.
