'Calls to boycott Chinese goods in India won't have political effect

Beijing, Oct 20: A campaign to boycott Chinese goods in India due to differences over India's bid for NSG membership and UN ban on JeM chief Masood Azhar will not have much "political effect" and will fail to "fundamentally change the bilateral trade ties, state-run Chinese media said today.

Quoting Indian media reports, an article in the state-run Global Times said that "some politicians and citizens in India have recently launched campaigns to boycott Chinese products".

"They blame China for India's failure to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), and for Beijing blocking India's UN bid on sanctioning a commander in Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based military group.

"Beijing and New Delhi are currently negotiating about these two issues and it is believed that mutual understanding will be reached eventually," said the article written by Liu Xiaoxue, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.

India is seeking a UN ban on Azhar, chief of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) which has been blamed for the January 2 Pathankot attack.

Scuttling India's move, China has recently put a second technical hold on Azhar's UN ban issue.

Underlining that Sino-Indian relationship has always been "haunted" by border disputes and China's ties with Pakistan, the article, said, "However, the two sides have long realised that setting aside divergences is beneficial for both sides' overall development than being hostile to each other."

"...A boycott of Chinese goods will not only result in little of the political effect that people who initiated the movement would like to see, but will also fail to fundamentally change India's current trade ties with China. In the end, it will be nothing more than a tiny incident," it said.

Referring to improvement in India-China political ties since the visit of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, the daily said economic and trade ties have also been boosted following which China has become India's largest trading partner since 2013.

"Of course, apart from political issues, some economic factors have also disrupted Sino-Indian trade development. Unresolved problems between the two nations sometimes influence their political mutual trust and have led to the non-tariff barriers in India against Chinese capital and products, such as security checks in major projects in the fields of defence, telecommunications, Internet and transportation," it said.

On the growing trade deficit, the daily said, "Economically, India has unbalanced trade ties with China. The increasing trade deficit with China has been irritating New Delhi. India's trade deficit with China jumped to USD 51.45 billion in 2015."

"As a country with a long-term account deficit which faces balance of payments problems, India is always vigilant against trade deficits. Chinese products can hence be easily turned into the target of India's anti-dumping sanctions," it said.

"After Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi started promoting the slogan 'Make in India', some of the country's media and citizens have tended to hype up the substantial quantities of made-in-China balloons, coloured lanterns and ribbons that always appear in the nation's Hindu spring festival by asking, 'should our valuable foreign currency be wasted on these products?' or 'Are Indian manufacturing industries too backward to produce those goods?" it said.

"However, for consumers, attractive goods with a reasonable price are naturally their first option. Moreover, the merchandise, which is mentioned by Indian media all the time, is only a small part of Chinese exports to India," the daily said.

"Being a major exporter of high-tech goods, today's China mainly exports high-tech products to India, including electrical equipment, telecommunications equipment, train locomotives, computers and telephones. These are all necessary for India's economic development and its people's everyday lives," it said.

"Will Indian people answer the call of boycott? How long can the campaign last? What specific influence will it have on Sino-Indian trade relations? Even the Indian media pushing for a ban does not have the answers," the daily said.

"It is believed that after this round of patriotic passion, businessmen and consumers in India will make a rational choice," it 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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