Michael Lindsay, the global head of real estate at KPMG’s corporate finance arm, first visited Koh Samui in 1982, in the days when the Thai island barely featured in travel guides.
Thanks to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he recently had a professional reason to return to the tourist hotspot. “It was unrecognisable,” he says.
Outsiders have never before got to peek inside the balance sheet of a global investment bank in this manner and he admits to “fascination” at what he has discovered.
His efforts are focused on a particular Hong Kong entity that has an aggregate real estate exposure of $1.25bn, spread across 44 positions, in loans of various forms to hotel developments and retail and commercial buildings.
