This is the mountain of dreams, often set in clouds.

Playgrounds, cable cars, colorful water slides, takeaways and expensive restaurants, hotel towers - and right down in the valley, the real world: Malaysia's Moloch, the capital Kuala Lumpur.

It is not difficult to forget this reality up here on the mountain.

Just like on a private yacht.

Or at one of the blackjack tables in the casino on Singapore's leisure island Sentosa.

Or at Resorts World Las Vegas.

Christoph Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.

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Lim Kok Thay has many places in the world where he can find diversion. Because over the years the 11th richest Malaysian with an estimated $ 2.6 billion fortune has built a global bulwark of entertainment in which people can switch off a little to temporarily hide the hardships of life. The shipyard workers in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania cannot do that. Because their jobs are now on fire. The Hong Kong subsidiary of Lims Genting Group is failing to meet its obligations, and the shipyards there are shaking.

In the large casino of Gentings Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore there is ebb on Wednesday afternoon: The guards at the entrance barriers are waiting for players.

A few mainland Chinese come, wearing brightly colored silk suits.

Even if the bank always wins, even if visitors are welcomed here in good time before the Chinese New Year celebrations with the banner “Take a big leap into the Lunar New Year” on a festive red background - Genting certainly does not earn any money here today.

Shipping company in Hong Kong

But it will take a big leap and a lot of money to avert the shipyard crisis in northern Germany, a 14-hour flight away.

The potential within the listed group seems almost unlimited: As befits an Asian clan, the Lim family also secures their prosperity across a whole range of companies.

In addition to the core, the entertainment industry, this includes real estate, plantations, biomedicine and power plants.

Genting is connected to the ships at all levels: It was Lim's group that bought Equanimity of all things when it was finally on the market: The 91-meter yacht belonged to the submerged fraudster Low Taek Jho, who was in unity with Goldman Sachs Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad looted.

Lim bought it for $ 126 million.

If the equanimity is also the trump card of the old Malaysian money over the nouveau riche gold men, the company is known through its cruise ships. The shipping company, based in Hong Kong, is number three in the world - after Carnival Cruises and Royal Caribbean Cruises. It cannot be ruled out, according to the industry, that the cruise business will also get into the vortex if the shipyards in Germany that were supposed to be flanking it go into a tailspin. That is bitter for German shipbuilders. But also for Lim - because defeat does not fit into the concept of the dynasty.

The father Lim Goh Tong, who died 15 years ago, founded his “dream resort” on the mountain in 1965 - a visionary step in the year when the planned state union between the former British colonies Singapore and Malaysia collapsed. Like so many Chinese billionaires in Southeast Asia, ancient Lim had emigrated from mainland China at a young age. There he had sold plant seeds at a street stall. In Malaysia he traded tools, then machines, then started building. He already made it to the richest Malaysian.

In 2003 he had placed the group in the hands of his then 53-year-old son Kok Thay.

The descendant was qualified: in London he was trained as a civil engineer in the footsteps of his father, and later he took a management course at Harvard Business School in Boston, where many Asian great heirs go for their finishing touches.

The younger of his sons, Loui Lim, gives an insight into family life in Malaysia: “Every evening up to three or four families sat at the table to eat.

I have a feeling that Chinese migrant families are much more traditional and more closely connected;

we still maintain many traditions of our ancestors from China that are actually no longer popular. "