Vietnam on Friday issued an indictment against the principal suspect and 85 alleged accomplices in the high-profile Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank embezzlement case, state media reported. Van Thinh Phat Group’s Chairwoman Truong My Lan and her alleged accomplices are charged with accepting bribery, violating banking regulations and embezzlement. From Feb. 9, 2018, to Oct. 7, 2022, Lan directed the creation of nearly 920 bogus loan applications, appropriating more than 304,000 billion dong, or US$12.5 billion, from the bank, the indictment said. The case is considered to be one of…
Day: December 15, 2023
Thai Scholar in Iran Plays Role in Hostage Release
washington — As Thai diplomats negotiated for the release of Thai workers taken hostage in Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel, prominent Thai Muslims, including a member of a university alumni association, operated on a parallel, more personal track. Lerpong Sayed, a political science lecturer at Iran’s Al-Mustafa International University, was teaching when Hamas terrorists stormed out of Gaza on October 7, killing 39 Thais and abducting 32 others along with the hundreds of Israelis killed and kidnapped. Lerpong, the president of a Thai-Iran alumni association, immediately began reaching out to…
Merle Goldman, a Leading Expert on Communist China, Dies at 92
In November 1974, a small group of American college presidents spent three weeks traveling through China, visiting universities, communes, factories and even the office of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was still four years away from taking over as Communist Party leader. Though the United States had recently re-established relations with China, it was an insular, even forbidding place, utterly foreign to these Western visitors. Fortunately, the delegation had a famed Sinologist as a guide: Merle Goldman. A historian at Boston University, Dr. Goldman was still relatively early in her…
Race organisers of deadly 2021 ultramarathon in northwestern China sentenced to jail
Ding Keya, chief administrator of the national park where the deaths took place, was also charged with taking bribes and sentenced to 4 years and 10 months in prison in addition to a fine. His deputy, Luo Wentao, received a sentence of 3 ½ years. The tragedy happened the morning of May 22, 2021, when a storm suddenly hit Jingtai county in Gansu. A sudden drop in temperature, coupled with gales, hail and freezing rain, caught the 172 participants of the 100km (62-mile) race unprepared after they had set off…
China’s private firms stuck between a rock and a hard place with Beijing’s support measures ‘mere lip service’
China’s private firms are still finding themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, with their confidence sapped due to a hostile business environment and a bleak outlook, despite scores of government supportive measures, according to a survey from an independent enterprise research institute. Of the businesses surveyed by Beijing Dacheng, 85 per cent said China’s private sector was in a difficult situation, while only 22.5 per cent reported plans to increase investment in the next two years, according to the results published on Tuesday. The survey, which collected…
Engagement Vital to Relations With China, US Ambassador Says
WASHINGTON — The U.S.-China relationship will be defined by strategic competition in the coming decades but must involve engagement when the interests of the two countries align, the U.S. ambassador to China said Friday, one month after President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to stabilize the fraught relations. Nicholas Burns said the U.S. and China are “vying for global power as well as regional power” as they compete militarily, politically and economically. “I think we are systematic rivals, if you think about our national security and economic…
Chinese president stops over in Guangxi on Asean tech and ethnic unity mission
He urged them to help build a China-Asean community with a shared future, deepen and expand cooperation with Asean countries in commerce, labour, industry, science and technology and education. Xi, who is also China’s top military commander, met senior People’s Liberation Army officials stationed in Nanning on Friday morning. A day earlier, Xi visited the China-Asean Information Harbour in the city to inspect digitisation developments in economic and trade cooperation between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), state news agency Xinhua reported. The Chinese government set up…
Tokyo Electron says China is snapping up its less advanced chip tools amid export controls
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Asia’s largest semiconductor equipment maker Tokyo Electron says it has largely managed to offset the impact of controls on exports to China by expanding its sales of less advanced products to the country’s chip industry. The Japanese group has been navigating geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing with a two-track strategy of focusing on regulation-complying products for China while deepening technology development with cutting-edge clients in other key markets. “Of…
Chinese land ownership in US down 2 per cent in 2022 amid heightened national security concerns
In October, for instance, the Arkansas attorney general ordered a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned enterprise ChemChina to sell its holdings in the state. And in a first, the annual USDA report containing the data on foreign land holdings featured a short section on Chinese investment. “Even though Chinese filings are less than 1 per cent of foreign-held agricultural land acres in the US, there is considerable interest in this topic,” the report stated. The largest China-owned landowners were identified as pork producer Murphy Brown LLC, also known as Smithfield Foods,…
Xi Jinping is relying more on his lieutenants to forge ties with China’s political elites
The databank includes a relationship network to show how each of the seven top political leaders is connected to the party’s 20th Central Committee – the pool from which they were drawn. It also shows where they crossed paths based on their official work history. Collectively, the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, including Xi, have more links with the 376 full and alternate members of the decision-making Central Committee than previously – a clear indicator of the concentration of power within the party. But direct associations with Xi…