India’s politics is clean at the top: Murdoch

NEW YORK: India outscores China as a “good place to do business,” said media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who had nothing but out-of-left-field praise for India’s Supreme Court.

Murdoch said advances in Internet technology had ushered some “individual freedom” to places like China which are riddled with censorship and restrictions. But he also talked about the “great difficulties” he has faced in doing business with China.

“The fact is, media is pretty much closed,” News Corp chairman and CEO Murdoch told business leaders at a two-day conference organised by the Milken Institute this week.

The Australian-born media baron who owns newspapers, broadcasters and publishing houses across the world, said that unlike China, India had opened up the country for the free flow of information. He said India was a “good place to do business” because its political structure at the top is “absolutely clean.”

Murdoch’s Star TV was the first foreign broadcaster to transmit from India and his media conglomerate remains a market leader in the region. He said News Corp had taken two cases to India’s Supreme Court and had won on both occasions. “It is a real, working democracy,” remarked Murdoch turning enthusiastically to include fellow panelist Nobel laureate and economist Gary Becker in the India conversation.

David Rubenstein, managing director of the Carlyle Group who also shared the stage with Murdoch and Becker said; “China and India are poised to be the largest economies in the world in about 30 years.” But he said India needed to improve its creaky infrastructure to attract foreign investment while China needed to be more transparent.

However, when Rubenstein was asked where he would invest his money during a slowdown of the US economy, he had a prompt answer; “Emerging markets.” He listed renewable resources, infrastructure, and commodities as sectors with long-term growth prospects.