Thanks to Barisan Nasional for singlehandedly transforming Ipoh from a rich and bustling Tin City to a Nga Choy Kai (bean sprouts chicken) city.

Ipoh had changed so much through the years since the tin bust that nobody seems to know that Ipoh was synonymous with tin.

Until today, Ipoh never recovered from this fatal stroke of incompetence and greed to corner the world tin market. As a result of this, the once vibrant tin industry was totally wiped out.

It was all started by a shady Egyptian tin trader who goes by the name of David Zaidner. He worked for the commodities firm, Marc Rich & Co in Switzerland.

Actually, he first approached the Indonesian government thinking that they were stupid enough to buy his idea to corner the tin market but the Indonesians smelled a con job and had him kicked out of the country.

Next, he couldn't believe his lucky stars when his idea was accepted with enthusiasm by our then brand-new prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad. In quick succession, a plan was hatched out to corner the world tin market.

In December 1980, the state-owned Malaysian Mining Corp Bhd. named Marc Rich as its trading agent in a move that would shock the world commodities industry.

Secret, large tin purchases were made on the London Metal Exchange and went on unabated throughout 1981, inducing a worldwide price increase. The strategy was cheap and simple. Malaysia had to pay only a 10 percent deposit against three-months forward purchase contracts.

When the price of tin shot up on the world market, the Malaysian government thought it had scored a huge victory. But unexpectedly, the price increase attracted many world producers to increase tin production and even the US began selling from its strategic stockpiles to take advantage of the Malaysian-induced price rises.

Subsequently, Malaysia amassed about 50,000 tonnes of tin and had no other choice but to keep buying just to keep prices up.

Production continued to soar and even unheard of suppliers started to turn up to cash in on the high tin price. The world tin market went berserk and it crashed.

Malaysia lost an estimated US$250 million on its failure to honour forward contracts, and another local bank lost another US$1 billion in separate losses on loans it had made covertly out of its Hong Kong subsidiary.

For five years, Mahathir categorically denied that Malaysia had anything to do with the plan, but as the outside pressure mounted, Mahathir finally revealed the details in 1986.

Marc Rich was finally indicted, arrested and extradited to the US and convicted of massive tax fraud.

Think of how many billions of ringgit were taken out of our economy in Perak when the tin market went bust. Had Mahathir not meddled with the tin price, we wouldn't have lost 30 years of tin export income.

Perak wouldn't have been relegated from one of the richest states to one of the poorest today.

Another good example akin to Perak's demise is Terengganu. If all the oil royalties went to the people of Terengganu, Terengganu would be an advanced state on par with Selangor.

But unfortunately, these royalty payments went into the pockets of BN politicians and cronies in the form of duit ehsan.

(Researched from Steven Schlossstein's book, Asia's New Little Dragons).