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"My understanding is that ABCN is like a parent company for Asia Times," says David Peters, deputy managing editor, who has been with the Manager Media Group for several years. "The satellite project involves Khun Sondhi's drive to become an information provider on a regional level." The newspaper's network of correspondents and its database will be harnessed to provide Asia-wide business and economic information.
But while offering information services is part of the picture, Sondhi has a grand plan for a partnership of new and existing broadcasters. The idea is for the M. Group to create or link up with a TV broadcaster in each country and to join them in one giant pan-Asian network. Suradet explains: "ABBC, or the Asia Broadcasting Business Company, involves broadcasting for the whole region. ABBC will provide a consortium in Asia, with The M. Group as promoter, but this doesn't mean The M. Group wants to control it."
How will Sondhi get the funding for all these ambitious projects? Two business analysts who asked not to be named say he has made a lot of money playing the stock market, a claim Sondhi contemptuously labels one of many "myths" about him. "There were times when people said I got my money because I was involved in drugs," he scoffs. "That's a very cynical view, but I don't blame them because this is how people around here think." Sondhi told Asiaweek that he is personally financing Asia Times. "This is my own money," he said. "I enjoy spending and backing the things I believe in."
Like some other Thai businesses, though, transparency does not seem to be a hallmark of the M. Group's finances. Analysts say his companies are structured to be leveraged one against the other and it's difficult to tell what's going on where. One analyst said he wasn't recommending Manager Media Group stock even though it is virtually at an all-time low.
Still, Sondhi has attracted investors by entering sectors that are the darlings of the Thai economy. The feeling among financial analysts and other observers is that his projects start off with an explosion, attracting a lot of investment and interest. But after the glow disappears, the day-to-day operations turn out to be weak. Even Sondhi recognizes that he has a short attention span. "You give me a fortress to attack, I'm pretty sure I can attack it," he says. "But once I overtake that fortress I don't know what to do with it. I have to move on."
Despite the high profile of his stable of publications, Sondhi remains something of an enigma in Thailand and is virtually unknown in the rest of Asia. "He doesn't want a high profile; that is something personal," says Suradet. "He's not a public guy, but the people that have to deal with him know him quite well."
Suradet has a point. Sort of. Sondhi has hardly been media-shy during the Asia Times launch. And he has built up a wealth of high-powered political and business contacts across Asia, the U.S. and Europe. When asked about his connections, Sondhi says, "I don't have any serious political contacts." But after a press conference to announce the Laotian satellite deal, Sondhi hosted a dinner for several politicians and businessmen, including Thai Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh and an old friend, Justice Minister Chalerm Yubamroong.
The former journalist has also made a point of surrounding himself with bright, people who tend to be on his wavelength - and often streets ahead of others their own age. Several trace their roots back to the 1960s and 1970s when ideologies clashed and students took to the streets.
Born to Chinese immigrants in Bangkok, Sondhi first tasted student activism at UCLA, where he studied history. "When I went to school in California, I always had a dream that I would be back and I would be running a regional paper," Sondhi says. Keen to get into the action, he became a reporter for the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, from 1966 to 1969, a time of increasingly violent protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
The agitation on U.S. campuses was echoed in the student activism he found on his return to Thailand. Sondhi took up work for the newspaper Prachatipatai (Democracy) as reporter and managing editor from 1973 to 1974, running into some of the people who would later join him in his media ventures. Sondhi had an outstanding political mind, a friend says, and wrote insightful exposes of the political developments that led to the bloodshed on Oct. 14, 1973, an event that brought the government down.
Pansak says the period provided valuable lessons. "Sondhi and I didn't come through a banking background, we came through a journalism background in the 1960s and 1970s in Asia when the ideological divide was great," he says. "We went through this not only as journalists but as publishers in trying times. We, unlike others, have tried to do things before and we have failed."
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