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The ultimate result of the Asia crisis in Thailand and many other countries was that the wrong- doers were still able to entrench their position, using a host of miscellaneous connections and friends to do it. In the end, apart from Indonesia (where we may have simply replaced a corrupt civil elite to give the military elite even more power) and Korea, the political elite remain (perhaps predictably to anybody who knows the politics of power in Asia) firmly entrenched.

A stream of international business people re-entering Thailand have found debtors invisible behind screens of paper and previously visible companies hidden behind layers of blind soi-soi's. Those who spent promiscuously and hid behind incompetence are now sitting in the far corners of the high profile Bangkok business clubs sipping their Remy Martin's, protected by polite but formal doormen of the privileged. The bad news is that most creditors cannot pay, and those who can, will not.

And who are paying...? ...the younger smart professionals who tried to succeed by competence rather than favour and patronage. It was always a bad strategy for this region, and now as much as ever. The glamorous favoured child is protected, while the ugly duckling children who can really build a new Thailand are still barred from those very same cozy clubs.

Let's see what Suthichai Yoon, Group Editor in Cheif of the Bangkok based "Nation" has to say about this...

In the doom and gloom of the crisis, we saw the signs of the "best and brightest" being wiped out. The corporate elite, comprising a handful of privileged few from wealthy and well-connected families with foreign education, were using the easy money for short term financial and stock manipulation while spinning the property market out of all reasonable proportions. They set the stage for the subsequent collapse...

Nobody should be allowed to "fall on a soft mattress", -an apt Thai expression, coined in the wake of the economic turmoil, to indicate how a shrewd and well-connected wrongdoer could conveniently escape punishment through shenanigan....

But the lost decade could be replaced by a "decade of renewal" if the new generation of technocrats, corporate managers and academics are ready to take up the challenge. They are the new movers and entrepreneurs who need no special favours to achieve their special goals. They don't need to drop names and brag about their family backgrounds. The emerging generation of leaders realises that a new degree of corporate integrity and business ethics will be pivotal to the country's real and lasting recovery.

But.. one of the new breed of the countries real corporate leaders told me, "New entrepreneurs can't survive if banks still don't lend and credit analysts at financial institutions are still demanding collateral for loans rather than considering the feasibility of their projects. A real paradigm shift has still to take place."

And it is not only Thailand. Though the Malaysian elite are at pains to admit it, a great deal of funds moved out of Malaysia in 1997 was from local investors, not the foreign devils. The same elite that contributed to the Malaysian crisis are still in charge.

Years of business culture favouring "golden children" though family, connections, and tradition will take more than an Asian crisis of a couple of years to remove.