uawchild
uawchild's JournalUkraine's corruption continues to cost the country dearly
Their country is divided by a war that has killed thousands and displaced more than a million people.
And yet when polled on which is more urgent — the war against pro-Russian rebels or the war against corruption — Ukrainians say it's corruption, by a margin of more than two-to-one.
Such is the scale of disgust with what is seen as rampant thievery by many of Ukraine's ruling elite.
And the current president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, has been at times a reluctant recruit to the anti-corruption campaign.
Despite that hesitancy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid a visit to Ukraine earlier this month. While there, he signed a free trade agreement with Poroshenko and pledged Canada's continuing support for the nation as it battles Russian-backed rebels.
Poroshenko is Europe's richest leader, according to Forbes. The leaked Panama Papers recently revealed that in August 2014, as Ukraine's army retreated from its bloodiest defeat of the war, Poroshenko was registering an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands.
Poroshenko showed his frustration with the topic of corruption during his news conference with Trudeau in Kyiv, where he clearly preferred to talk about Russian aggression than answer questions on the issue.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-costly-corruption-russia-war-1.3683974
Turkey's Erdogan shuts schools, charities in first state of emergency decree
Source: Reuters
President Tayyip Erdogan tightened his grip on Turkey on Saturday, ordering the closure of thousands of private schools, charities and other institutions in his first decree since imposing a state of emergency after the failed military coup.
A restructuring of Turkey's once untouchable military also drew closer, with a planned meeting between Erdogan and the already purged top brass brought forward by several days.
The schools and other institutions are suspected by Turkish authorities of having links to U.S.-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, who has many followers in Turkey. Erdogan has accused Gulen of orchestrating the July 15 coup attempt in which at least 246 people were killed. Gulen denies the accusation.
Critics of Erdogan fear he is using the abortive coup to wage an indiscriminate crackdown on dissent. The foundations targeted include, for example, the Association of Judges and Prosecutors (YARSAV), a secular group that criticised a recent judicial law drafted by Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-emergency-idUSKCN1030BC
How Ukraine's financial elite plundered the nation
Transparency International describes Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe. On its Corruption Perceptions Index Ukraine ranks 130th out of 168 countries, a ranking it shares with, Paraguay, Iran, Nepal, Nicaragua and Cameroon.
Much of the reason for that ranking has to do with the seemingly unopposed fashion in which Ukraine's well-connected oligarchs have looted the country using two key strategies: raiding companies and bank fraud.
After the fall of communism and the opening up of the banking sector, dozens of Ukrainian banks took in billions of dollars in deposits from ordinary Ukrainians.
But as fast as the money came in, it went out in the form of loans to the banks' owners, their cronies and their shell companies, seemingly with no intention that they would ever be repaid.
When the banks started to collapse, the National Bank of Ukraine — with now-President Petro Poroshenko on its board of directors — was slow to step in. According to the Kyiv Post's Legal Quarterly, the delay gave the banks' owners time to finish stripping and laundering assets.
Any savings over $8,000 were wiped out. Up to that amount, savings were insured by the Ukrainian state, which is to say the Ukrainian taxpayer.
Then the liquidated bank's assets were seized by the state and sold at unpublicized auctions, where many were scooped up on the cheap by the same insiders. That practice finally came to an end this year when Ukraine switched to e-auctions based on a technology related to bitcoin.
In all, Ukraine's Deposit Guarantee Fund estimates that nearly $15 billion was stripped from the state and from ordinary Ukrainian savers, with much of that money being shipped overseas.
Raiding companies
Political insiders and the economic elite, including some who hold seats in Ukraine's parliament, have also enriched themselves by raiding companies.
Like the insider-lending racket, there is nothing particularly sophisticated about this fraud.
It simply involves claiming that someone, or their shell company, is the true owner of somebody else's asset. The person making the claim then bribes the corporate registrar to falsify the records or bribes the courts to find in their favour, or both.
A London court recently found that Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Granovsky, a major ally of Poroshenko, is involved in a lengthy ownership dispute over the Sky Mall shopping centre in Kyiv.
The London Court of International Arbitration recently ruled that Granovsky and his senior partner, Andrey Adamovsky — whose company Stockman Interhold S.A. is also named in the dispute — had to return shares of the company to its rightful owner, Hillar Teder's company Arricano Real Estate.
According to the the Jewish Chronicle, this is not Adamovsky's first brush with the law. The U.K. newspaper reports that a court in the British Virgin Islands ruled in 2015 that he "defrauded former business partners to the tune of $34.7 million."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-elite-plunder-nation-bank-fraud-1.3686374
ASEAN in discord ahead of meeting with top China, U.S. diplomats
Source: Reuters
Southeast Asian nations were thrown into disarray after Cambodia on Saturday blocked them from issuing a statement referring to an international court ruling against China's territorial claims in the South China Sea, diplomats said.
The U.N.-backed Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague handed an emphatic legal victory to the Philippines in the maritime dispute earlier this month, denying China's sweeping claims in the strategic seaway.
Foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will meet for the first time since the ruling on Sunday, before hosting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi among others.
The disputed sea, through which more than $5 trillion in global trade passes each year, is the most contentious issue for the 10 ASEAN members.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-ruling-asean-idUSKCN1030KU
"Cambodia is China's closest ASEAN ally and is the only country opposing any reference to the ruling in a statement due to be issued after ASEAN foreign ministers meet on Sunday, an ASEAN diplomat told Reuters.
Cambodia is also pushing to strike out any reference to the militarization of the South China Sea, watering down the language in statements issued previously by ASEAN this year.
Cambodia is heavily dependent on Chinese aid and investment. Last week, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen announced China would give his government around $600 million in soft loans.
"Cambodia is unbelievable," one diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "It is blocking any phrase about the arbitration and about militarization." "
And so it goes... isn't that how international politics usually works, countries go with what's in THEIR own vested interests?
Make Cambodia a better offer.
South China Sea air strips’ main role is ‘to defend Hainan nuclear submarine base’
China’s underwater military strategy in the South China Sea, which remained concealed for the past two decades, suddenly emerged after an international tribunal rejected most of Beijing’s territorial claims in the hotly contested waters.
On July 12 – the same day the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague announced that China’s claims over the resource-rich and strategically vital South China Sea region had no legal basis – a photograph of China’s most advanced nuclear-powered submarine was “leaked” and published on many mainland military websites.
The photograph, revealing the expanded type 094A “Jin-class” submarine, led to speculation that the vessel might be capable of delivering China’s new generation, intercontinental-range ballistic missile, the JL-3, whose estimated range of 12,000km would enabling it to reach the United States from the South China Sea.
The first photo of China’s type 094A strategic nuclear submarine, an improved version of the type 094 submarine, which was posted online on July 12, the day South China Sea ruling was announced in the Hague. Photo: SCMP Pictures
“I believe the type 094A, which has been closely monitored by the US, was deliberately ‘leaked’ to warn the US,” Macau-based military observer Antony Wong Dong told the South China Morning Post.
On Monday Admiral Wu Shengli, of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, told visiting US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson in Beijing that China would not compromise its sovereignty and would press ahead with construction of facilities in the South China Sea.
Wu also warned that “the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with military provocation.”
As Beijing’s state media repeatedly attacked the ruling of the tribunal – which Beijing has refused to recognise – President Xi Jinping said that China’s “territorial sovereignty and marine rights” in the seas would not be affected.
The South China Sea is one of the world’s busiest trade routes, through which more than US$5 trillion of maritime trade passes each year between the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean.
However, Beijing has another – arguably more important – reason for prizing the 3.5 million square km area of waterway. It regards the waterway as crucial for providing its expanded submarine fleet, stationed the Yulin naval base in Hainan, with unrestricted access to the waters of Pacific Ocean.
Islamic State said to shun withdrawal offer in surrounded Syrian city
Source: Reuters
Islamic State appeared to have shunned an offer for its fighters to withdraw safely from the Syrian city of Manbij and clashes with U.S.-backed forces raged ahead of its expiry, a spokesman for Washington-backed forces said on Saturday.
The Syria Democratic Forces alliance, made up of Arab and Kurdish fighters and backed by the United States, made rapid advances against the jihadists last month after launching a campaign to flush them out of territory along the Turkish border, through which they had for years moved weapons and fighters.
The SDF quickly surrounded Manbij, but the fight to take the city has been tougher, with slow advances inside it in recent weeks.
On Thursday the SDF-allied Manbij Military Council said Islamic State militants would be allowed to leave the city with light weapons, without a fight, if their departure took place within 48 hours.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-islamic-state-idUSKCN1030BO
German finance minister says it's not up to rest of Europe to cushion Brexit
Source: Reuters
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he saw no reason for other countries to try to cushion the blow of Britain's exit from the European Union with more spending.
"I believe that is a matter that the Britons need to deal with themselves," he said on Saturday following talks with British counterpart Philip Hammond at a G20 meeting in China.
He said he currently did not see the decline of the pound following last month's Brexit vote posing fresh risks to financial markets.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-china-germany-idUSKCN1030DQ
Short statement, that's all of it.
Poland votes that WWII massacre by Ukraine was ‘genocide’
Source: EurActiv
Poland’s right-wing dominated parliament on Friday (22 July) recognised as “genocide” a massacre of 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian nationalists seven decades ago, in a move that quickly drew criticism from Kyiv.
“The victims of the crime committed in the 1940s by Ukrainian nationalists were not duly commemorated, and the mass murder was not defined as genocide in accordance with the historical truth,” said a resolution adopted by 432 lawmakers in the 460-seat parliament.
Ukraine has refused to recognise the crime as genocide and its President Petro Poroshenko on Friday to expressed his “regret” over the Polish move, warning it could be used against his crisis-hit country.
Between 1942 and 1945, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) hacked Polish victims to death and drowned women, children and the elderly in wells in the Volhynia region of what is now northwest Ukraine. The UPA’s main objective was to win Ukraine’s independence by ousting Nazi and later Soviet occupiers and to clear Poles from territories that were historically Ukrainian land.
Read more: http://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/poland-votes-that-wwii-massacre-by-ukraine-was-genocide/
"The killing provoked bloody reprisals by Polish partisans grouped in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Home Army (AK). They killed 20,000 Ukrainians. Friday’s resolution also recognises these crimes saying: “Nor can one dismiss or downplay acts of Polish revenge on Ukrainian villages, during which civilian populations also perished.”
It also “expresses parliament’s respect for and gratitude to Ukrainians who risked their lives to save Poles”.
Poroshenko, meanwhile, invoking the teachings of late Polish-born pope John Paul II, called on people to “forgive and ask for forgiveness” while cooperating in order to “determine all the facts of this tragic page of our joint history”. "
Hmmm. Poroshenko about got it right, even if the remark “determine all the facts of this tragic page of our joint history” comes across as not a 100% acceptance of the facts in hand.
But he did own up about "this tragic page", as he put it, of the two countries joint history.
It's important to acknowledge the past, especially of the dark periods in any nation's history, but it's not reasonable to infer that the present Ukrainian government bears any responsibility for the events of almost 80 years ago.
Turkey coup attempt: Detentions 'tip of the iceberg'
Source: BBC
Turkey's deputy prime minister has described as "the tip of the iceberg" the infiltration of state institutions by the group the government blames for last Friday's failed coup.
Nurettin Canikli told the BBC that the number of arrests could grow
.
At least 60,000 state employees have been detained or suspended in an internationally criticised purge.
But Mr Canikli criticised Turkey's allies for "only half-heartedly" condemning the "coup-makers".
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36868230
Up to 20 dead as northern Mali fighting threatens peace deal
Source: Reuters
Up to 20 people were killed and at least 40 others wounded, according to health workers, in two days of fighting in northern Mali between Tuareg rebels and pro-government militia threatening a shaky year-old peace deal.
The Tuareg-dominated Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) and rival Gatia militia fighters, who had peacefully shared control of the town of Kidal since February, clashed for a second day on Friday before pro-government fighters withdrew.
Both groups signed a United Nations-backed deal a year ago with the government in Bamako, the capital in southern Mali, that was meant to end a decades-long cycle of uprisings and let the army focus on defeating jihadist groups in the desert north.
A nurse at the main health center in Kidal, one of the largest towns in northern Mali, said she had seen about 20 dead, both at the clinic and on the town's streets.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mali-violence-idUSKCN1020VF
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