One of the sad things about being a poor country is that the worldwide press never bothers to get the facts right about anything that happens in a poor country.
In Madagascar, Daewoo gave a statement to the Financial Times saying they had a deal to lease large tracts of land in Madagascar at zero payment to the government in exchange for the construction of some infrastructure.
The government had never accepted that deal. The Financial Times did not even ask for comment from a government official. The Financial Times subsequently published a retraction from Daewoo saying, well, this is what we were asking for but nobody from the government ever agreed to it.
The fact that the president had given away large amounts of land to Daewoo was used as a pretext for a coup that was clearly engineered by other forces for other reasons. No one has even bothered to correct the facts about Daewoo and the land.
Now it is true that I had some conversations with President Ravalomanana prior to the coup about the idea of trying to build a city, but this would be on a very small piece of land compared to what any of these agricultural projects involve. There was never any public discussion of the charter city proposal in this coup period. I know that there are reports out there, but the facts are very different from the ones that are often cited.