Anti-US fury rises over provocative film

September 16, 2012

Kabul, September 16: The Taleban claimed responsibility yesterday for an attack on a sprawling British base in southern Afghanistan that killed two US Marines and wounded several other troops, saying it was to avenge an anti-Islam film and also because Britain's Prince Harry is serving there.

The US-led NATO coalition said in a statement that nearly 20 insurgents armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades and explosive vests infiltrated the perimeter of Camp Bastion. The huge British base is adjacent to Camp Leatherneck, which houses US Marine operations in southern Helmand province.

The coalition said the attack, which began shortly after 10 p.m. Friday, killed two NATO service members, wounded several others and damaged multiple aircraft and structures.

Coalition forces returned fire and killed 18 militants. One other insurgent, who was wounded, has been detained and is being given medical treatment, the coalition said. NATO service members, who cleared the base of attackers early Saturday, were still assessing the damage to aircraft and buildings on the air field.

There were few protests against the film in Afghanistan on Friday and yesterday. A few hundred of university students protested in the eastern city of Khost, shouting “Death to America” and burning an effigy of President Barack Obama.

In a separate attack, two international soldiers were shot dead by a member of the local police in southern Afghanistan yesterday, NATO said.

Hundreds of men, women and children from an Islamic group protested yesterday in Indonesia against the United States over the film.

About 500 protesters from the Hizb ut-Tahrir organization gathered in Surabaya and Malang, two cities in East Java province.

In Malang, about 120 km south, more than one hundred protesters from the group gathered in the city center, carrying banners reading “When Islam is insulted, Jihad must be the solution” and “Crush America.”
Riot police clashed with about 200 protesters at the US Consulate in Sydney yesterday as demonstrations spread to Australia.

Ten Network television news showed a policeman knocked unconscious as the mostly male crowd hurled bottles and other missiles. Many of the protesters were wearing Muslim dress.

Police used pepper spray against the protesters, who chanted “Obama, Obama, we love Osama” and waved placards saying “Behead all those who insult the Prophet.” A total of six police officers were injured, including two who were taken to a hospital. Two protesters were treated for police dog bites and 17 others for the effects of pepper spray, police said in a statement. There were no details of their condition.

Eight people were arrested on charges including assaulting police and resisting arrest. Police were unsure who organized the protest.

Prime Minister Julian Gillard said the protest was unacceptable.

Egyptian police yesterday cleared out protesters who have been clashing with security forces for the past four days near the US Embassy.

Security forces erected a concrete wall blocking the main street leading to the embassy in Cairo after finally dispersing several hundred youths who had been battling with police, trying to get to the building. They also cleared nearby Tahrir Square where protests were being held.

Meanwhile, A California man convicted of bank fraud was taken in for questioning yesterday by officers investigating possible probation violations stemming from the making of the anti-Islam film that triggered violent protests in the Muslim world.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, voluntarily left his home in the early hours yesterday morning for the meeting in a sheriff's station in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said.

“He will be interviewed by federal probation officers,” Whitmore said. He said Nakoula had not been placed under arrest but would not be returning home immediately. “He was never put in handcuffs... It was all voluntary.” Nakoula, who has denied involvement in the film in a phone call to his Coptic Christian bishop, was ushered out of his home and into a waiting car by several sheriff's deputies, his face shielded by a scarf, hat and sunglasses.

The US is positioning military forces so that it can respond to unrest in as many as 17 or 18 places in the Islamic world, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced.

“We have to be prepared in the event that these demonstrations get out of control,” Panetta told Foreign Policy magazine. He did not offer any specifics. But the magazine said that the Pentagon was discussing, but had not yet decided, whether to send a third platoon of 50 specially trained Marines to protect the US Embassy in Sudan that found itself on Friday under assault. If approved, this deployment will follow the roughly 100 Marines that already have landed in Libya and Yemen.

US President Barack Obama urged Americans yesterday not to be disheartened by images of anti-American violence in the Islamic world, expressing confidence that the ideals of freedom America stands for will ultimately prevail.

“I know the images on our televisions are disturbing,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “But let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom, and dignity, and hope that our flag represents.”

Obama assured that his administration was doing everything it could to protect Americans who were serving abroad.
“We are in contact with governments around the globe, to strengthen our cooperation, and underscore that every nation has a responsibility to help us protect our people,” he said. “We have moved forward with an effort to see that justice is done for those we lost, and we will not rest until that work is done.”

The Yemen-based branch of Al-Qaeda urged Muslims to step up protests and kill more US diplomats in Muslim countries. “Whoever comes across America's ambassadors or emissaries should follow the example of Omar Al-Mukhtar's descendants ( Libyans), who killed the American ambassador,” the group said, referring to Tuesday's attack on the US Consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab called on Muslims to attack the West in retaliation against the movie. “Al-Shabab mujahideen are urging people of Somalia to show their love for Islam and particularly to our Prophet Muhammad by making attacks against the West,” its spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage said by telephone, without specifying any targets.
On Friday and yesterday in Mogadishu, a handful of people staged peaceful demonstrations chanting slogans that criticized the movie “Innocence of Muslims.”

Abdullahi Sheikh Osman, a respected spiritual leader in Mogadishu, came to talk to the protesters. “Don't kill innocent people for something they have not done,” he urged Muslims. “The man who made the nasty film is the Al-Qaeda of Christians. If Muslims make havoc, then they are rewarding the crazy man,” he said.

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Vietnamese billionaire Truong My Lan sentenced to DEATH for $44bn fraud

News Network

April 11,2024

Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced Thursday to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh city in southern Vietnam in the country's largest financial fraud case ever, state media Thanh Nien said.

It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime, i.e. looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years.

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.

"There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.

A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.

The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.

Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.

She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.

Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.

All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.

By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.

According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

She was also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinised. One of those who was tried used to be a chief inspector at the central bank, who was accused of accepting a $5m bribe.

The mass of officially sanctioned publicity about the case channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose fatigued, unmade-up appearance in court was in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people had seen of her in the past.

But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.

"I am puzzled," says Le Hong Hiep who runs the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

"Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.

"It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."

David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.

"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.

"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."

At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen.

He has been one of the longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the authority of the party's conservative wing to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does not want to risk permitting enough openness to undermine the party's hold on political power.

But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.

Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.

"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."

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