In a recent article, I argued that humanity has built institutions capable of accelerating development on a global scale, but has not established adequate institutions to govern the environmental consequences of development.

This article takes that argument further by zo…

Read more

Hui Ka Yan, the founder and former chairman of China Evergrande Group, once the largest Chinese property developer with a stockmarket valuation above $50 billion, was sentenced to life in prison on corruption charges on Aug. 20 by the Intermediate People’s Court of Shenzhen.

It is rare for a private businessman to be jailed for life in China, and the severity of Hui’s sentence is partly due to the fact that he controlled Chinese banks by bribing bankers. Hui topped the Forbes list of Asia’s wealthiest people in 2017.

Fifty-six others were sentenced the same day to prison terms ranging from one year and 10 months to 18 years in connection with the defunct company, which was delisted in 2025, according to Xinhua.

This is likely the largest number of people imprisoned for one commercial case in Chinese history and the guilty include Hui’s sons Peter Xu and Xu Zhijiang. All were fined or had their assets seized – it will be the job of the court to find the assets, some of which are still concealed.

The court also stripped Hui of his political rights and confiscated his assets. At the same time, Hong Kong courts are hearing cases by creditors seeking to recover assets from Evergrande.

Hui’s staggering fall from the heights of what had been China’s hottest property company at a time of staggering growth marks a milestone in Evergrande’s collapse, which “seriously disrupted” the Chinese property market, the court said.

Evergrande defaulted on $305 billion of debt in late 2021, the largest corporate default ever in China. The collapse triggered the cratering of China’s property market.

Hui rose from humble rural origins and at the peak of his power and fame he was routinely lauded for his rags to riches saga as a symbol of China’s economic success. He publicly backed the Communist Party.

The court found Hui, who is also known as Xu Jiayin, fully responsible for the operations and crimes of Evergrande, which was headquartered in Shenzhen. Evergrande was fined RMB8.82 billion S$1.3 billion) and its main subsidiary, Hengda Real Estate Group, was fined RMB7 billion.

“The amounts involved were extremely huge, the nature of the crimes was exceptionally serious, resulting in extremely large economic damage and exceptionally severe harm to society, [the defendants] should be severely punished,” Xinhua wrote.

“China Evergrande Group and Xu Jiayin [Hui] gained control of financial institutions through bribery. They illegally obtained loans and insurance funds for Evergrande’s use. They bribed banks to illegally issue loans,” said the Xinhua report.

Hui pleaded guilty in Shenzhen on April 14 to embezzling public funds, fraudulently raising funds, fraudulently issuing bonds and securities, illegally using funds, failure to disclose material information, abuse of position and bribery.

Hui once created a subsidiary to employ a cast of young Chinese women, the Evergrande Song and Dance Troupe, to entertain rich and powerful men and to corrupt Chinese officials, according to Asia Sentinel on April 15.

Hui “used his position as chairman of Evergrande to falsify financial reports to embezzle company assets in the name of dividends,” Xinhua wrote. The court said that from 2016 to 2021 the defendants inflated assets, concealed debt, illegally took funds from the public, fraudulently raised funds and fraudulently issued securities.

Evergrande overstated its revenues by hundreds of billions of RMB, due to its aggressive approach to recognising revenues, said a judgement in Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal on Jan. 2. This resulted in “a dramatic reversal” of $99 billion in revenues recorded by Evergrande for 2021, said the Hong Kong judgement.

Evergrande lied about its completed properties held for sale and properties under development, the judgement added. It inappropriately classified developments as investment properties and overstated their values, the judgement added.

The misstatements were made under the direction of Hui and Xia Haijun, a former vice chairman of Evergrande, said the Hong Kong judgement. Xia resigned from the company in 2022.

Hong Kong’s Accounting and Financial Reporting Council (AFRC) sanctioned US accounting giant PwC and two of its former partners, Cheung Siu Cheong and Chow Sai Keung, for misconduct in connection with audits of Evergrande’s financial statements, the regulator announced on April 23.

The watchdog fined PwC HK$300 million ($38 million), restricted its practice in Hong Kong for six months and fined the two former partners HK$10 million.

The Evergrande case raises broader issues for the US, including foreign creditor rights in corporate restructurings in China, risks in how Chinese firms are structured, operate, and report, and the extent to which China market risks are sufficiently disclosed, said a US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on May 12.

“Congress might assess China’s property market and debt levels with an eye to US investment exposure to China,” the report suggested.

Toh Han Shih is a Singaporean writer in Hong Kong and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel.

Humanity has entered the Anthropocene, an era in which human activity shapes Earth’s climate, ecosystems, rivers, and natural processes at planetary scale. Yet many institutions guiding development were built around a narrower vision of environmental impacts, focusing on individual projects while cumulative ecological consequences can extend over time and across ecosystems, regions, and national borders.

Today, climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion are interconnected consequences of how societies produce energy, build infrastructure, use land, and extract resources. Decisions made in one place can reshape ecosystems, economies, and communities far beyond it.

Mainland Southeast Asia’s river basins reveal the challenge clearly. The Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy show how hydropower, mining, industrial growth, and climate change can transform interconnected ecosystems. The issue is not whether development should continue, but whether it can remain sustainable if the ecological systems that support it are irreversibly weakened.

The crises facing Mainland Southeast Asia’s river basins reveal a broader mismatch between planetary-scale environmental change and development institutions still organized around individual projects and national boundaries. The Anthropocene requires a new approach to development governance—one that aligns economic progress, ecological resilience, and human well-being while strengthening regional cooperation.

Development and Governance in an Interconnected World

Modern environmental governance was built around national sovereignty. A dam was evaluated by the country that built it, a mine regulated by the government that approved it, and development measured through growth and infrastructure. Safeguards typically focused on individual projects rather than cumulative and transboundary effects.

This approach is increasingly insufficient. Rivers cross borders, fish migration links watersheds, sediment sustains downstream deltas, pollution travels across regions, and greenhouse gas emissions affect the global climate. Earth functions as an interconnected system, while governance remains fragmented by borders, sectors, and institutions.

International development institutions have reduced poverty and improved welfare, but many were designed for a world in which economic progress and environmental protection were treated separately. In the Anthropocene, development must be redefined around the life-support systems that make prosperity possible: rivers, forests, oceans, biodiversity, and climate stability.

Mainland Southeast Asia’s River Basins: Early Warnings of the Anthropocene

The river basins of Mainland Southeast Asia illustrate this governance gap. These rivers are not merely waterways; they sustain communities, economies, biodiversity, agriculture, fisheries, transportation, and regional stability.

The Mekong illustrates the cumulative consequences of intensive development. According to the Stimson Center’s Mekong Dam Monitor, hundreds of dams across the basin have altered flows, trapped sediment, accelerated riverbank erosion, disrupted fish migration, deepened salt intrusion, and increased pressure on fisheries, agriculture, and wetlands in the Mekong Delta.

Hydropower has expanded electricity access and supported economic development, including Laos’ ambition to become the “Battery of Southeast Asia.” But the Mekong also shows the limits of evaluating projects individually when their combined effects reshape an entire river system.

The Salween offers a different warning. As one of Asia’s last major free-flowing rivers, it remains comparatively intact but faces rising hydropower and mining pressure. It shows why preventive governance matters: ecological systems should be protected before irreversible changes occur.

The Irrawaddy shows that the challenge is not limited to transboundary rivers. Myanmar’s largest river sustains agriculture, fisheries, and millions of livelihoods, yet it also has the highest concentration of mining sites in Mainland Southeast Asia. Together with proposed hydropower projects, land-use change, and climate pressures, these cumulative impacts underscore the need for basin-wide governance and long-term ecological assessment.

The Stimson Center’s River Basins Dashboard identifies 2,699 mining sites on or near rivers across Mainland Southeast Asia, including substantial activity in the Mekong and Irrawaddy basins. Rare earth, gold, and other minerals are essential for renewable energy, electric vehicles, and electronics, but poorly managed extraction can introduce heavy metals, disrupt sediment systems, degrade forests, and harm downstream communities.

Together, these basins reveal a fundamental lesson: environmental impacts accumulate across landscapes and borders, while governance often remains limited to individual projects and jurisdictions.

The challenge of the Anthropocene is to ensure that our institutions see as comprehensively as the systems they seek to govern.

Toward Planetary Development Governance

The solution is not to weaken national sovereignty or create a single global authority. Nations must retain the ability to develop and improve living standards. But sovereignty in the Anthropocene must evolve from an exclusive right to control territory into a responsibility to protect shared ecological systems.

A decision made within one country can affect rivers, forests, climate systems, and communities beyond its borders. Recognizing these connections does not diminish sovereignty; it strengthens governance by aligning national decisions with ecological reality.

The future requires a development paradigm that treats economic progress, environmental protection, and human well-being as mutually dependent. The goal is not to slow advancement, but to ensure that its ecological foundations are not destroyed.

The river sees the ecosystem in its entirety. Governance often does not.

An ASEAN Opportunity

The 2025 ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment is an important regional recognition of environmental rights. But principles must become institutions and procedures capable of turning shared responsibility into action.

One practical institutional model worthy of regional consideration would be an ASEAN Transboundary Environmental Protection Mechanism (ATEPM). It would not replace ASEAN, national governments, the Mekong River Commission, development banks, or existing cooperation frameworks. Instead, it would connect and strengthen them by addressing a critical gap: cumulative environmental impacts that cross borders and exceed the capacity of any single jurisdiction to govern effectively.

ATEPM could focus on four practical functions:

• First, regional environmental monitoring using satellite data, water-quality monitoring, biodiversity assessments, sediment measurements, and climate information to identify emerging risks.

• Second, independent transboundary environmental review for major projects that may affect shared ecosystems before irreversible impacts occur.

• Third, protection of environmental knowledge and defenders, including communities, Indigenous peoples, scientists, journalists, and civil society groups whose observations provide essential early warnings.

• Fourth, transparency and cooperation to ensure environmental information is accessible and that trust becomes the foundation for regional action.

ATEPM should operate as a lean coordinating mechanism rather than a large bureaucracy. Funding could come from ASEAN contributions, development banks, climate and environmental funds, and partners. Over time, ASEAN could establish a Regional Environmental Stewardship Fund to support monitoring, scientific assessment, ecological restoration, and community participation.

Humanity’s Responsibility to Transform Global Development

The river basins of Mainland Southeast Asia are more than ecosystems under pressure; they are early warnings that humanity’s ability to transform the planet has grown faster than its institutions’ ability to govern the consequences.

No single country, institution, or generation can meet this challenge alone. Governments must recognize that sovereignty carries obligations beyond borders. Development banks and international institutions must move from project-by-project assessment toward ecosystem-scale risk management, while businesses and investors ensure that growth does not shift environmental costs onto vulnerable communities.

Citizens, scientists, Indigenous peoples, environmental and human rights defenders, and civil society must be protected and empowered as sources of knowledge, early warning, accountability, and public oversight.

The climate, rivers, oceans, forests, and atmosphere that sustain human life are interconnected across borders, linking humanity in a shared ecological fate. In the Anthropocene, cooperation is no longer optional; it is a condition for long-term prosperity, stability, and sustainability.

The task is not to halt development, but to align it with ecological realities: sovereignty paired with stewardship, prosperity with environmental protection, and innovation with human dignity.

History shows that institutions evolve when circumstances demand it. The climate and ecological crises of the Anthropocene urgently require a similar evolution in the way development is governed.

The planet has changed; in the Anthropocene, humanity must adapt as well to safeguard the ecological foundations on which present and future generations depend. This planet is the only known home capable of sustaining life, nurturing humanity, and making civilization possible. Protecting it is not merely an environmental obligation; it is a duty to ourselves and to those who will inherit the Earth after us.

Humanity transformed the planet together. To safeguard it, humanity must now act together.

Phạm Phan Long, P.E., is a professional engineer and former president of the Viet Ecology Foundation, with experience in environmental engineering, water management, and sustainable infrastructure.

In a dusty rural town 50 kilometers south of Manila, an elderly male patient sits in a simple clinic as he seeks medical treatment for the painful red spots on his ankles. During his medical consultation, he notices his attending doctor running a description of his ailment symptoms through ChatGPT before diagnosing his medical condition, prescribing the appropriate medication to alleviate his symptoms, and sending him on his way in a matter of minutes.

This illustrates the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on healthcare delivery and service quality in lower-income regions, from Africa to Southeast Asia. Physicians with limited training or experience are increasingly using their phones to call up AI as a supplementary tool for diagnosis and prescription decisions.

Beyond that, AI is supporting faster screening, improving diagnostic accuracy, and reducing prescription errors. According to a recent study, AI-assisted tuberculosis screening reduced misdiagnosis rates by more than 30 percent and improved predictive forecasting of seasonal disease outbreaks by more than 80 percent.

AI adoption within public healthcare systems has seen remarkable growth in the past few years. However, this exponential growth in routine clinical adoption remains highly uneven between countries and health systems along socioeconomic wealth and median income lines. In the Asia-Pacific, the growing usage of healthcare AI serves more than anything else to highlight how the world’s most populous region continues to see some of the largest unmet healthcare needs and the strongest potential for technology to compensate for shortages of human expertise.

According to the World Health Organization, over the past two years, healthcare AI across the world has experienced increasing policy attention, experimentation, and early implementation. As far back as 2021, the WHO listed six guiding principles within a groundbreaking global report on AI healthcare ethics meant to provide fundamental guardrails for AI adoption in improving healthcare provisions. These six guiding principles focus on keeping human autonomy at the heart of any AI-enabled healthcare system and medical decision-making framework, with appropriate transparency and accountability in using appropriately inclusive and representative datasets for safeguarding the public interest across diverse societies.

In the Asia-Pacific, AI has already been used to improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosis and screening, while also highlighting applications in clinical care and public health. For instance, last year in the Philippines’ Sulu province an hub-and-spoke teleradiology model system with potential AI application pathways was introduced with specific intent to address diagnostic-imaging gaps in one of the archipelago country’s most underserved healthcare areas. Like many other lower-income countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific with a record of outsized but binary healthcare professional contributions outside of their own borders, the Philippines is increasingly reliant on telemedicine to provide the necessary healthcare infrastructure to overcome geographic and specialist-access barriers, while AI is developing as a separate but increasingly relevant layer of its digital-health ecosystem.

Another example can be found in Singapore’s adoption of the SELENA+ AI software system into its national diabetic-retinopathy screening infrastructure since 2020. Singapore has one of the highest rates of childhood myopia in the Asia-Pacific with almost one in three children requiring the usage of glasses by the age of 7 and significant diabetic retinopathy along similar statistical lines. The exponential growth in ophthalmologic screening access enabled by a centralized national tele-ophthalmology infrastructure with trained human graders examining retinal photographs at a central reading center in Singapore saw annual screening numbers balloon to over 100,000 by 2019.

That has provided major impetus for the development of SELENA+ in 2018 as a deep-learning AI system built on analyzing over 500, 000 retinal images and corresponding locally-generated datasets taken for screening diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration health issues. After 2021, SELENA+ has been widely recognized as a successful example of AI being used to extend scarce specialist healthcare capacity to cope with a wider screened population with quicker diagnostic triaging.

According to Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), since 2022, AI has been successfully leveraged in expanding the healthcare workforce capability in lower-income countries to analyze and interpret antimicrobial susceptibility testing beyond pure reliance on fully-trained microbiologists through its Antibiogo offline smartphone application. MSF has also successfully used AI to enable greater throughput and accuracy of tuberculosis community screening in the Philippines since 2024.

AI is increasingly being considered as a component of future health-system infrastructure especially in enabling lower-income countries to catch up to their higher-income developed counterparts, but many developing economies remain at the stage of establishing the digital-health foundations needed for large-scale deployment. The two main obstacles can be roughly classified into hardware capability and software data relevancy, given the high energy demands of datacenters critical for AI computational processing and the still-entrenched Western-centric datasets used as default by predominantly Western AI companies in their model developments.

The issue of high energy demands in existing AI processing infrastructure is an acutely growing concern for the Asia-Pacific, particularly when multiple countries have already been driven to energy rationing and curtailing in-person office work due to the ongoing price shock fallout from Iran’s disruption of Middle Eastern maritime energy imports since February this year. According to the UN, the Asia-Pacific is projected to account for 85% of global power-demand growth in 2026 with much of it driven by increased electricity demands from data centers.

Furthermore, evidence for a positive-impact growing adoption of generative AI and their corresponding large language models in routine healthcare information provision, clinical decision support, and administrative tasks continue to remain limited. This is an issue that will be resolved in time, but only if conscious effort is put into progressive integration of AI-assisted diagnostics and triage into existing physical and telemedicine infrastructure, rather than a fully established AI-enabled, but solely telemedicine model.

While police raids on online scam operations in Indonesia are no longer a rare occurrence, with victims falling for sophisticated romance scams for a decade, the magnitude of fraud is astonishing, with the country ranked the second most fraud-vulnerable in the world after Pakistan according to the Glob…

Read more

After millennia of folk belief in the efficacy of rhino horn for fever, tiger bone for strength, and captive bear bile for various ailments, China has emerged as a powerhouse in the global biotech sector, becoming a major player on the world stage through such advances as precision cancer-killing drugs and many others.

Although the turnar…

Read more

For much of the past three years, the world’s strategic attention has been fixed on the Red Sea crisis, instability around the Strait of Hormuz, recurring disruptions at the Suez Canal, and Eastern European calamities. Ukraine has even understandably dominated maritime policy. In the process, the Arctic has quietly slipped down the political agenda.

That is a strategic mistake. Whatever its importance to Europe, what is going on in the Arctic today is expected to fundamentally reshape how Asia reconfigures its global supply chains, energy security and geopolitical influence as a northern passage opens, creating a new global ceiling. China, with its massive trade regime, will inevitably be the biggest beneficiary. But every country in Asia is expected to be affected positively, if not environmentally.

The Arctic is often portrayed as a region whose significance belongs to some distant future, to be addressed once geopolitical or climate tensions subside. Yet history suggests precisely the opposite. The most consequential governance decisions are rarely made when new realities fully emerge; they are made years beforehand. By the time commercial opportunities become obvious, institutional choices have already been taken—or neglected.

Nearly two decades ago, Anis H. Bajrektarević, chairperson and professor in international law and global political studies, Vienna, argued that the melting Arctic should not be understood merely as an environmental phenomenon. Rather, it represented the emergence of a new geopolitical and geo-economic space in which climate, commerce, sovereignty and security would increasingly converge. At the time, this appeared a forward-looking proposition. Today it reads less as a prediction than as a description of reality.

Can Europe govern the Arctic?

Aside from Asia, the question confronting the EU and the rest of Europe is therefore no longer whether the Arctic will matter. It already does. The real question is whether Europe is preparing the governance architecture required to manage its long-term implications.

Until recently, the Northern Sea Route—often referred to as the North Passage—was increasingly discussed as a viable complement to the traditional maritime routes linking Europe and Asia. Retreating sea ice, advances in navigation technology, and the prospect of significantly shorter transit times encouraged governments and shipping companies alike to explore its commercial potential. While few believed Arctic shipping would replace the Suez Canal, many recognized that it could eventually become an important element in a more diversified and resilient global trading system.

Then geopolitics intervened: The war in Ukraine fundamentally transformed Europe’s relationship with the Arctic. Trade wars, military tensions and the collapse of political trust have severely constrained practical cooperation across the High North (Arctic/Litoral 5). Since much of the Northern Sea Route to Asia remains under Russian jurisdiction, European commercial engagement (even with Canada’s Hudson Bay) has become increasingly uncertain. As a consequence, strategic debate has largely shifted elsewhere.

This change in political circumstances, however, should not be mistaken for a reduction in the Arctic’s strategic importance.

No pausing climate change

Climate change has not paused because diplomacy has stalled. Arctic ice continues to retreat. Technological innovation continues to reshape maritime navigation. The global race for critical minerals continues to intensify – so does the calamity all over West Asia. Scientific research continues to reveal the region’s growing environmental and economic importance. Whether relations between Europe and Russia improve next year or in the next decade, these structural transformations will continue.

The Arctic therefore represents one of the rare geopolitical theatres where long-term trends are advancing independently of short-term politics. Canadians and Americans are understanding it well. That distinction matters because infrastructure can be built relatively quickly; institutions cannot.

Europe has devoted considerable attention to strengthening supply chains, modernizing ports, improving digital logistics and enhancing maritime resilience. These are essential investments. Yet physical infrastructure alone cannot govern an increasingly complex maritime domain.

The Arctic presents questions that extend well beyond navigation. They concern environmental protection, search and rescue capabilities, digital maritime services, subsea infrastructure, energy security, scientific cooperation, resource management, indigenous communities and the legal frameworks governing international waters. Above all, they concern the ability of states to cooperate under conditions of growing strategic competition.

These are governance challenges long before they become commercial ones. History repeatedly demonstrates that institutional responses tend to lag behind technological and geopolitical transformation. New shipping routes emerge faster than regulatory systems. Commercial interests expand more rapidly than mechanisms for international cooperation. Competition develops long before governance adapts. The Arctic is unlikely to prove an exception.

Waiting for political conditions to improve before preparing governance frameworks would therefore reverse the proper sequence of strategic planning. Institutions should not be improvised once new patterns of trade emerge. They should be designed while options remain open. For Europe, this requires abandoning an increasingly outdated habit of treating the Arctic as an isolated frontier rather than as an integral component of its wider maritime strategy.

Future changes will influence long-term

Developments in the High North are no longer detached from the EU/Europe’s broader strategic environment. Disruptions affecting southern maritime corridors inevitably reinforce interest in northern alternatives (especially under the current situation when the fast and cheap blue and green lanes – such as the trans-Siberian, Hormuz-Red Sea-Suez, or Africa corridor are under question). Likewise, future changes in Arctic navigation will influence Europe’s long-term connectivity, supply-chain resilience and economic security. The Arctic should therefore be viewed not as a distant (mental, geographic or political) periphery but as part of a wider maritime system whose resilience depends less on any single route than on the quality of governance that connects them (see GAFG Connectivity Doctrine).

This carries particular significance for the Nordic countries (not only the Arctic 5). Their geographic proximity gives them an immediate stake in the Arctic’s future, but the implications extend well beyond Northern Europe. The EU (led by Denmark for that matter), Britain and other Atlantic partners all share an interest in ensuring that future Arctic governance is based on cooperation, predictability and internationally accepted (UNCLOS-based) rules rather than strategic improvisation.

Preparing for that future does not require predicting when the Northern Sea Route will once again become commercially attractive. Such forecasts remain hostage to political developments beyond anyone’s control. It requires something more fundamental: recognizing that governance must precede opportunity.

This is precisely the rationale behind the Global Maritime Governance Forum of the Global Academy for Future Governance (GAFG), whose inaugural meeting is planned for Gibraltar this September. Rather than becoming another conference on shipping, ports or maritime security, the GAFG Forum seeks to establish a permanent international platform where policymakers, port authorities, industry leaders, insurers, academics and international organizations can jointly examine the governance of an increasingly interconnected maritime system.

At a time when the Arctic is becoming strategically more significant even as political cooperation grows more difficult, such dialogue is not a luxury—it is an investment in institutional preparedness. Its ambition is simple but timely: to begin shaping the governance architecture before changing geopolitical realities make it indispensable.

No waiting for Russia to stabilize

Europe should therefore resist the temptation to postpone its Arctic thinking until relations with Russia eventually stabilize. Strategic foresight cannot depend upon diplomatic timing. The Arctic will continue to evolve regardless of political cycles, because the forces transforming it—climate change, technological innovation, resource competition and shifting patterns of global trade—operate on a different timeline.

The greatest strategic mistake would not be failing to predict precisely when the Arctic will become Europe’s next great maritime frontier. It would be waiting until that moment arrives before preparing the institutions capable of governing it. The Arctic is not waiting for the world to prepare. Neither should it wait to govern the Arctic.

Maria Elena Ahner is the Copenhagen-based Head of Coherence & Control for the Global Academy for Future Governance

Six hundred miles from its headwaters in southeast China, the Red River flows through Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, and then through a broad, fertile delta on its way to the South China Sea. About 45 minutes’ drive downriver from Hanoi is Khoai Chau district of Hung Yen province, long rich in farms and orchards and now the fortuitous site of a US$1.5 billion resort development project with a familiar name floating up around it.

That is the name associated with the family of the President of the United States, in particular the elder sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Following their father’s return to the presidency in 2024, the two assumed managerial control over the global real estate and licensing empire. The brothers have been heavily involved in expanding and operating the family’s vast portfolio, which includes hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties, a progression that has speeded up as the president’s term proceeds.

Plans for the 990-hectare (roughly 2,500-acre) project area include two golf courses, a five-star hotel, and luxury villas. A top Vietnamese firm, the Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation, is managing construction and providing capital. The Trump Organization’s ostensible role in the project is simply to provide its good name for a fee of US$5 million for brand use. Across the world, that private business name is becoming associated with the power of the US government.

Directly on returning to power in January 2025, the second Trump Administration, deploring a “lack of reciprocity in bilateral trade relationships,” began pressing trading partners to negotiate and finalize agreements on “reciprocal, fair and balanced trade.” Specifically, it noted that the third largest US goods trade deficit was with Vietnam.

Spooked by worry that Trump, while launching several more ventures in other countries (mostly in the Middle East), might abandon his plans for Hung Yen, provincial authorities have been authorized to fast-track the Trump project, skipping legally required steps in order to shorten project implementation time by six to seven months.

Presuming that (1) American and Vietnamese negotiators can do the larger deal on bilateral trade that they’ve been straining at for the past 18 months, and (2) all agree to pretend that Donald Trump has not benefited personally (i.e., only his sons) from the Hưng Yên mega-resort, the project now seems certain to go forward. Champagne corks have already popped at a groundbreaking ceremony hosted by Donald Jr. and attended by Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính.

Not everyone’s a winner, however. The approximately 5,000 Vietnamese households forced to accept trivial sums for their fields and orchards are unquestionably losers.

If the confiscation of their farmland were treated as a market-value business transaction, they might have received US$30 or more per square meter. The catch is that under Vietnamese law, land that is ‘reclaimed’ by the state is compensated at a far lower rate; less than half what the land would sell for in a private transaction.

It’s no surprise that farmers in the nearly four square mile “Trump International” project tract are both boiling mad and helpless to do anything about the confiscation of their homes, fields and orchards. Or of their family graves, other than to exhume the coffins and rebury them elsewhere if they can afford to do so.

A colleague who spoke to farmers in the tract area earlier this year was told that local authorities have fiddled their compensation, hastily calculating land value at its 2019 price and not the current market price. There were lots of other complaints – that the authorities have failed to distribute documents, missed deadlines, cut short public comment and refused to show how amounts were calculated or to grant extensions. Training for non-agricultural jobs was promised but has yet to be provided. “We don’t oppose the project,” my colleague was told; “we just ask that it be fair, clear and in accord with law and market prices.”

Behind the emotional scenes and confrontations between brutal police and peaceful young demonstrators in Delhi that have gripped international attention in recent weeks, lies India’s unrealized “demographic dividend” which was expected to boost the country’s economy with expertise and drive.

For more than 25 years, India has reveled in the potential benefits of the high percentage of youth in what is now the 1.45 billion population. More than 65 percent (950 million) are under 35 but as many as many as 40 percent (estimates vary) are unemployed or not in education, showing how the dividend has been wasted. Successive governments have failed to rise to this challenge and reform corrupt and ineffective education systems and inadequate skill-learning opportunities. They have also failed to make a priority of generating adequate and appropriate job opportunities at all levels of economic activity.

That has turned the dividend into a social liability and created political risk for the government. It has also disillusioned many of the young aspirational voters who will have voted in general elections for prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party but now feel let down.

The bitter frustrations caused by these government failures lay behind the demonstrations that started after more than 2.2 million students sat for an entrance exam for healthcare colleges known as NEET-UG. Just over a week later, the authorities shocked the students when they cancelled the completed exam and ordered a resit because question papers had leaked and been available for sale.

Four days later, on 16 May, the students’ Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was founded online, satirically named because India’s chief justice had compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” who drifted into social media and allegedly undermined the Indian constitution. The next move came rapidly when, after just three weeks, the first CJP student demonstrations were held in Delhi, leading to a massive round-the-clock protest.

Students attacked

Widespread support for the protests quickly grew across India, especially when police and a paramilitary force attacked the students violently, using teargas, anti-riot guns and plastic pellets. There was also concern for a veteran education reformer and climate activist, Sonam Wangchuk, who joined the protesters and became a symbol of the campaign when he went on an “indefinite” fast that lasted for 26 days.

This led last weekend to Modi caving-in to mass protests for the third, and most significant, time since he became prime minister in 2014. (The first was in 2019 when protests in north-east India and Delhi led to implementation of controversial citizenship laws being delayed. Then, in 2021, contested agricultural laws were cancelled after over a year of mass protests by Punjab and Haryana famers).

Modi sacked the education minister, which was the students’ primary demand, having already removed the top education bureaucrat. He also tackled the protestors’ original complaint about mass leaking of exam papers and appointed a task force to reform the examination system led by Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of the Infosys IT company and respected creator of the Aadhaar identity scheme.

Compensation was also agreed for the families of possibly as many as 21 would-be medical students who tragically died by suicide after they were told they had to re-sit the exams.

Wasted dividend

Investment brokers started talking up the demographic dividend in the mid-late 1990s, and in 2005 economists estimated that it opened a 50-year window of potential benefits lasting until 2055.

No government, however, has developed a long-term plan and, with 21 of the 50 years gone, estimates of the numbers who do not have jobs vary from 16 percent aged 15-29, to 40 percent of the 15-25 age group.

The problem affects all levels of employment – at the top, fewer than 7 percent of male graduates find a permanent salaried job within a year of graduating.

For the past 15 to 20 years, there has been speculation about whether – and when – the masses of unemployed youth would erupt into a rebellion, echoing protests that escalated rapidly across the country over corruption and rape in 2011 and 2012-3 and rattled the then Congress-led government.

When the Ministry of Railways announced recruitment drives in January 2022 for low-level entry posts, there were over 12 million applications for just 35,000 jobs. Frustrated youth blocked tracks, clashed with security forces and set train coaches on fire in the poor northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Similarly, the introduction in April 2022 of a new military recruitment policy caused immediate nationwide demonstrations because it replaced a permanent military career that poor rural youth depend on for a permanent one, with four-year contracts. This led to highway blockades, hunger strikes and arson.

Inability to generate jobs

There have been many attempts by governments to generate jobs, but they have not met the main need – to create constructive gainful employment that would reap the dividend.

While economic growth has been strong at around 6 percent, there has been little impact on job creation. Traditional manufacturing industry, which used to absorb surplus labor, has stagnated at around 14-17 percent of GDP. Automation-driven technology and services have limited need for labor and mostly require specialized skills that the vast majority of Indian graduates do not possess due to a chronically and badly targeted education system that successive governments have failed to tackle.

There have been some successful initiatives such as the MGNREGA “right to work” begun in 2005 (replaced recently by a Modi government scheme) that guaranteed 100 days of unskilled labor a year for rural households. There have also been various skill development, micro-lending and other schemes along with macro initiatives such as Modi’s “Make in India” and “Startup India.”

But none of these have tackled the basic tasks of creating a variety of employment opportunities at all levels of the economy and educating youth equipped to take those jobs.

The quality of public education remains poor, ranging from primary schools that lack books and reliable teachers to universities that are inadequate both in numbers of vacancies available and in the qualifications of the graduates they turn out. Interwoven is massive corruption at all levels, illustrated by the leaking exam papers.

Education reform a must

If Modi wants his legacy to be a strong and stable economy along with his Hindu nationalism, he needs to reform the whole of the education system from the bottom upwards. At the top, he needs to ensure it provides graduates and other students with expertise that attracts Indian and foreign investment, while also maintaining social stability.

Nandan Nilekani’s task force on examinations has been created to meet the immediate demands of the protestors, but it only covers a fraction of the overall demographic challenge.

Meanwhile, Modi’s authority has been diminished. The crisis has energized the weak Congress-led political opposition and created a new base for challenging the government, both in parliament, on the streets, and on social media.

Already, an E20 Janta Party has been founded to oppose a widely opposed new fuel blend containing 20 percent ethanol. It gained 34,000 followers within 24 hours of appearing on social media. Whether it can any way near the sort of support won by the Cockroach students remains to be seen, but it shows there is a new feeling of both freedom and confidence to challenge the government.

John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s South Asia correspondent. He blogs at Riding the Elephant. He is the author of IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality

India’s renewed debate over whether passports prove citizenship has revived anxieties among Muslims, particularly as political leaders speculate about a possible nationwide update of the National Register of Citizens that critics say could disenfranchise as many as 80 million people as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year-old Hindutva…

Read more

As China’s rapacious miners increase their resource extraction in various countries to feed an economy that is the world’s biggest consumer and producer of transition minerals, allegations of human rights abuses and environmental damage have increased across the globe. Ironically, some transition materials mined by Chinese polluters are …

Read more

Kenneth Jeyaretnam, a trained economist who gave up a career in finance to take over his father’s opposition Reform Party as secretary-general to tilt at unassailable Singaporean political windmills, died in London on July 18 at age 67, leaving a fragmented and cowed opposition with one less voice.

Mr. Jeyaretnam’s wife, Amanda, announced his death after a lingering illness in a Facebook post on July 19. She said her husband had “died peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family.” Funeral details for a small family service are still being finalized, she told local media, and that a memorial to celebrate his life will be arranged at a later date.

“Kenneth was inured to the prospect of personal or political hardship and failures from watching his father’s dogged perseverance and political persecution as Singapore’s first elected opposition MP since its independence in 1965,” Amanda Jeyaretnam told Asia Sentinel. “Both father and son viewed political pluralism and civic participation as principles worth advancing regardless of personal electoral success. They believed that Singaporeans should have meaningful electoral choices and opportunities to exercise their democratic rights, even in a political landscape dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and their unbroken supermajority in Parliament.”

The opposition figure, his wife said, had been anxious to return to Singapore to face charges brought against him by the Singapore government and to return to the political fray, a wish he also expressed in conversations with Asia Sentinel, but as his illness progressed, he was never able to do so.

Although the Reform Party found little success at the polls, Mr. Jeyaretnam remained a tenacious critic of the Singapore government, and paid for it with numerous correction demands under the country’s controversial false news statute, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, which gives individual ministers the power to decide what constitutes a “falsehood” and issue correction directions, rather than submitting the issues to a test by impartial legal bodies when evaluating criticisms.

He was under constant investigation by the police and the POFMA office for possible offences as well as possible contempt of court. Officials issued at least 10 such POFMA demands between 2023 and 2025 regarding government spending, lucrative property rentals by cabinet ministers, the National Investment Returns Contribution (NIRC), and auxiliary police hiring, many of his criticisms issued from his bed in London, where he suffered from deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary embolism that ultimately contributed to ending his life.

Mr Jeyaretnam never managed to secure a full-time career in Singapore despite his double first-class honors in economics from Cambridge, facing multiple rejections from various government agencies and civil service departments, according to recently disclosed details online, which said he lost his first and only full-time job working as an assistant manager in HSBC’s merchant banking arm, Wardley, in 1987. Mr Jeyaretnam was reportedly compelled to resign after only weeks in his job following political pressure applied through one of Lee Kuan Yew’s permanent secretaries, according to the report.

“I admired Kenneth for his convictions — for his belief in fighting for the underprivileged and for those on the margins of society,” said Lim Tean, Secretary-General, People’s Alliance for Reform, another splinter opposition party. “When he believed in something, he never wavered, no matter how unpopular that cause might be. That was the measure of the man, and it was his father’s spirit living on in him. On behalf of the People’s Alliance for Reform, I extend our deepest condolences to his wife Amanda and his son Jared. Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this most difficult time.

Other opposition leaders issued similar accolades.

Mr. Jeyaretnam was the eldest son of the late opposition icon J.B. Jeyaretnam – popularly known as JBJ –the first opposition politician elected to the post-independence Singapore Parliament in 1981. JBJ established the Reform Party in 2008 after Singapore government officials repeatedly sued him, harassed him with legal actions, bankrupted his original Worker Party, and sought to put him in jail. The father was a mortal foe of Singapore’s modern founder Lee Kuan Yew and jousted with him on the floor of parliament repeatedly. After his father’s death, Mr. Jeyaretnam contested three general elections against then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s team but was unsuccessful.

He didn’t contest in the 2025 election, explaining that he decided against doing so after “the advice of doctors over some recent health issues,” which he didn’t specify. Deep vein thrombosis, which often occurs during long-haul international flights, involves the formation of a blood clot that forms in a deep vein, usually in the calf, thigh, or pelvis. It is dangerous because the clot can break loose, travel through the bloodstream to the lungs, and block an artery—a life-threatening emergency known as a pulmonary embolism.

Jeyaretnam studied at the United World College of South-East Asia and the Charterhouse School in England. In 1983, he graduated from Cambridge and went on to pursue a career in finance, first as a credit analyst at Wardley, HSBC’s merchant banking subsidiary, before moving to Continental Bank, Banque Indosuez, Lehman Brothers, and Nomura International.

In a letter to members and supporters posted on Facebook late on July 19, Reform Party chairman Mahaboob Batcha said RP was “deeply saddened” by Jeyaretnam’s passing. “Throughout his political career, he fiercely championed democracy and consistently put the needs of Singapore above his own political ambitions,” he said.

Besides his wife Amanda, Mr. Jeyaretnam is survived by their son Jared and his younger brother, High Court judge Philip Jeyaretnam.

Singapore officials have extended their unbeaten streak in domestic libel and contempt of court cases against the international press and local opposition leaders stemming from the 1980s with a decision by High Court Justice Audrey Lim, who on July 14 awarded Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng damages of S$230,000 (US$177,874) each for defamation by the leading global business reporting organisation Bloomberg and its reporter, Dexter Low De Wei.

As nearly as it can be determined, Singapore officials have never lost a case filed locally against international journalists or opposition politicians since 1983, when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew allegedly demoted a sitting judge to a backwater position after the judge ruled against the government in a case involving then opposition leader Joshua B Jeyaretnam. Nor have they filed one outside their own jurisdiction. The current case had been closely watched by press organizations to see if Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took over a year ago from Lee Hsien Loong, the last representative of the Lee clan, to see if Wong’s administration would cut the courts some unofficial slack in their decisions involving critics of the ruling People’s Action Party political establishment. It was not to be.

Condemnation against this ruling has been swift in coming. “We are alarmed by Tuesday’s court decision, which will chill public interest reporting,” said Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi of the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists In a prepared release. “As a regional financial and media hub, Singapore must show it is open for business and public scrutiny, including of property transaction deals. Singaporean public officials should cease using defamation laws to target the media for their reporting.” The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has also condemned the ruling as a “textbook SLAPP suit against Bloomberg and journalist Low De Wei and demanded that authorities “end their legal harassment of trustworthy journalists.”

SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate or silence critics by saddling them with expensive damages and legal costs. “Nothing has changed in 30 years since The New York Times published an opinion piece skewering the compliant court system in Singapore being used by its political leaders to silence or intimidate their domestic opponents and to discourage critical commentary about Singapore in foreign publications that are distributed or have business interests in Singapore”, stated an anonymous political observer of Singaporean politics to Asia Sentinel.

A significant aspect of Bloomberg and Low’s defense was centered around their invocation of the Reynolds privilege — a defense developed in English defamation law — because they had exercised their duty to communicate important information to the general public. Justice Lim rejected that argument. She said the Singapore Court of Appeal had previously held that the Reynolds privilege is not part of Singapore law, but was a development brought about by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Human Rights Act (UK). Furthermore, Justice Lim also explicitly stated that constitutional free speech in Singapore is limited to Singaporean Citizens only, with no extension of such individual liberty afforded to foreign media entities employing them for covering Singapore-related news.

Not only has the timing of the defamation lawsuit been questionable, it had managed to evolve into fundamentally questioning whether the Bloomberg article should have been written at all. In the current case, stemming from a December 2024 news story titled “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy.” by Bloomberg, the facts were not in dispute. The references to Shanmugam and Tan appeared to be factual, only pointing out their individual roles in the growing collective trend of secretive high-value private property transactions in Singapore.

Tan in 2023 purchased a S$27.3 million (US$21.3 million) Good Class Bungalow (GCB) located within the Brizay Park enclave, while Shanmugam had sold his Astrid Hill GCB in August 2023 for a whopping S$88 million (US$68.7 million). The property transactions were cited as examples to illustrate the booming yet increasingly secretive nature of Singapore’s GCB property market, which saw half of its 2024 transactions, including those of both government ministers, without publicly declared and accessible caveats.

The Bloomberg article noted Singapore’s attractiveness to rich foreigners as a politically stable tax and wealth haven to purchase and own luxury properties as part of their asset portfolios.

However, the article noted, this is tempered by concerns about the increasing usage of shell companies and anonymous trusts to purchase multimillion-dollar GCBs, with potential negative ramifications for Singapore’s global reputation for clean and accountable financial management. Indeed, somewhat embarassingly Shanmugam acknowledged in testimony that he had sold his house for S$88 million at 10 times profit to a buyer who did not use a bank loan and that he didn’t know the buyer’s identity, generating much comments on social media.

Singapore analysts describe this as very much Shanmugam’s personal vendetta against Bloomberg, with Tan See Leng strung along as cover. Shanmugam’s Astrid Hill ownership status was a major sore point for him in 2023 when he, along with Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, faced intense public and political scrutiny for their renting of state-owned colonial bungalows at allegedly below market rates and maintained on taxpayer dollars.

Justice Lim, however, agreed with Shanmugam’s argument in rejecting Bloomberg’s argument that the article merely examined a broader trend of non-caveated GCB transactions and that the ministers were cited only as examples. Instead, according to local media, Justice Lim said the article, when read as a whole, linked the ministers’ personal private property transactions with claims about secrecy, opacity and money laundering. Therefore, the Bloomberg article could not be seen as “responsible journalism”, but managed to create a defamatory impression.

After the story ran, the Singapore government ran into an unexpected problem. Officials first invoked Singapore’s notorious Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), giving individual ministers the power to to decide what constitutes a “falsehood” and issue correction directions, rather than submitting the issues to a test by impartial legal bodies when evaluating criticisms. The article, the two said, “attack[s] the transparency of property transactions in Singapore” and demanded that it be taken down, with the government’s statement to be printed prominently on its website.

Almost unheard of for a major news organization, Bloomberg refused to back down, saying on December 20, 2024: “Under Singapore’s Prevention of Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, Bloomberg is required under threat of sanction to publish this Correction Direction. Bloomberg respectfully disagrees with it and reserves its right to appeal and challenge the Correction Direction. We stand by our reporting.” It was only after Bloomberg lost their defamation defense in court in July 2026 that they finally retracted the article as demanded by the Singapore government.

In other cases, when press organizations ignored the order, the government ordered their publications and websites banned in Singapore. Bloomberg’s initial challenge effectively dared the government to block its electronic transmissions into the island republic, which would have resulted in significant disruption for its business community. Its terminals, the essential tool for professional traders and investors, are in virtually every financial office in Singapore, providing crucial real-time data and articles on almost every financial transaction that takes place anywhere on the globe. Without that information, Singapore’s financial industry, which competes with Hong Kong as Asia’s premier financial enter, would have simply come to a stop.

Faced with this impasse, both ministers instead decided to file suit for defamation, a potent weapon in its own right as borne out by Justice Lim’s decision. Both posted on Facebook that they considered the piece to be libelous and indicated on December 16 that they would be issuing Letters of Demand to Bloomberg and other outlets that reproduced the article in whole or in part.

In a statement published by Bloomberg News, the US company’s chief editor John Micklethwait said it was “very disappointed by this ruling but we will of course respect it.” Bloomberg, he said, “We at trial that our reporting was accurate and served an important public interest, and we continue to believe that the ministers have imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story. “Our newsroom – and our reporter – conducted themselves with integrity, and met all our editorial standards in preparing the story at the center of this trial. We continue to stand by them.”

In April, Thai Police Lt. Gen. Jirabhop “Kong” Bhuridej, boss of the Thai government’s new “Anti Cyber Scam Center,” was photographed having lunch in a Bangkok restaurant with a notorious Cambodian cyberscam center operator, Rithy Raksmei. The photograph, initially dated May 2025, soon went viral and left Jirabhop looking decidedly red-faced.

The photograph raised immediate questions about the nature of the meeting and the identity of those present. Raksmei, for instance, was directly sanctioned by the US govt in April 2026 for his involvement in criminal cyberscam operations. The Thai police and ACSC responded quickly with a press release that stated that the get-together was a bilateral meeting between Thai and Cambodian law enforcement. They also stated that the meeting took place in November 2024, not May 2025.

The fact is that Thailand has largely escaped widespread notice of its deep entanglement in the cyberscam ecosystem as its immediate neighbors Cambodia and Myanmar have reaped massive negative publicity. The country is thought to act as a major transit point for human trafficking, a base for money laundering networks, and a victim of staggering domestic fraud. Jirabhop ‘s presence at that lunch is evidence that the presence of cyberscam networks is bolstered by corruption, with organized crime elements deeply intertwined with local officials and foreign syndicates.

The question that remains completely unanswered by the Thai police was what someone as notorious as Rithy Raksmei was doing at an important bilateral meeting. This failure to even mention Raksmei in the press release inevitably led to further negative speculation. Other Cambodians were at that November 2024 lunch meeting as well – the two most prominent being two Deputy Commissioner Generals of the Cambodian National Police, Neth Sovoeun, who is also Deputy Prime Minister of Cambodia – and Sam Vannvirak.

The attendance of senior Cambodian police officials gave some credence to the Thai police’s explanation but, given that Raksmei’s involvement in operating Cambodian-based cyber scam centers had been known for years - the US government’s 2026 sanctions press release makes it clear Raksmei had been operating since 2019. What was Raksmei doing there? Another individual at the meeting was former Thai Police General Visanu Prasatthong-Osoth. However, if we accept the Thai police’s November 2024 date for the “bilateral meeting” by that point Visanu, who had retired from the Thai police in late 2023, was no longer a serving officer.

In fact, in November 2024, Visanu was serving as the Chairman of Airports of Thailand (AOT). And once again we come to the same question, only this time with a different name and two queries. In the first instance, what was the Chairman of one of Thailand’s most important state enterprises doing at a bilateral meeting to discuss law enforcement issues, and secondly, what was the Chairman of AOT doing meeting known cyber scam center operators?

Despite an earlier request to AOT’s press team from the authors of this article, there’s been no explanation as to why the Chairman of AOT was at this meeting. And the Thai police have offered no explanation either.

Of course, the usual outcome of a serious bilateral meeting between the law officials of two nations wouldn’t be random photographs released 18months later of various police officers, a company chairman and a wanted cyber scam center criminal all sitting down for lunch together. In most circumstances, there’d be official joint statements, press announcements before and after the event, memorandums of understanding, notes of the meeting, etc. None of this exists, and it seems the official bilateral meeting between Thai and Cambodia law enforcement held in a Bangkok restaurant in November 2024 only came into existence once photographs of it emerged on the CSI LA Facebook page in 2026

However, there’s more. Our blog - thaiscamwatch.blogspot.com - has recently published a troubling photograph of the Chairman of AOT, Police General Visanu, meeting another notorious cyber scam operator, Ly Yong Phat. The photograph dates from sometime in 2024 - with the most likely date being Aug 2024 - and was taken at the Phnom Penh Hotel in the Cambodian capital. By September 2024, Ly Yong Phat was placed on the sanctions list by the US Government for his involvement in the cyber scam industry. As the US Government press release states, several of Ly Yong Phat’s cyber scam compounds had been raided both in 2022 and early 2024 prior to the sanctions being placed. As was made clear above, in 2024, Visanu was the Chairman of AOT.

While a photograph in and of itself of the Chairman of AOT meeting yet another well-known cyber scam operator is not evidence of any wrongdoing, it should’ve certainly raised concerns at a board level within the company due to the reputational damage it could cause to a publicly listed company. AOT, whilst majority-owned by the Thai Government, has other shareholders and investors to whom it is answerable. One of AOT’s shareholders is the Government Pension Fund of Norway (usually referred to as the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund) who supposedly has an “ethical” investment policy. Are they aware that the Chairman of AOT was repeatedly hanging out with criminals involved in running enterprises that human rights organisations’ investigations reveal include rape, torture, murder and human trafficking?

Directorships at large companies during and post-career for senior Thai Police and military officers like Visanu are considered to be an expected “perk” of their rank. Thailand’s company boards are stuffed full of generals, admirals and air marshals. Even the aforementioned Jirabhop, while currently serving in a senior and very important role as head of the cybercrime unit, is also on the board of directors at both AOT and the retail arm of Thai energy giants, PTT. Needless to say, both Visanu and Kong have built up significant personal wealth that far outstrips what they could acquire from their police salaries/pensions, collecting expensive cars, watches, jewelry, weapons, boats, and property. And that’s just what they’ve publicly declared.

In the background to all this are the thousands of victims of the cyber scam operators. As Amnesty International’s recent report, Falling Through the Cracks: Cambodia’s ‘Crackdown’ on Scamming Compounds and the Victims it has Failed, makes clear the cyber scam industry perpetuates gross human rights violations, with confinement, human trafficking, rape, torture and murder all being proven, along with financial crimes being perpetrated against victims in the USA and other wealthier nations. In July 2025, Cambodian PM Hun Manet stated that Cambodian authorities were committed to cracking down on the cyber scam industry and engaged in a number of raids on compounds owned by, among others, Ly Yong Phat.

Which brings us back to another name/face in the photographs alluded to above: Deputy Commissioner General of the Cambodian National Police, Lt. Gen. Sam Vannvirak. Vannvirak is present at both the November 2024 lunch gathering in Bangkok with Rithy Raksmei and the Phnom Penh Hotel soiree with Ly Yong Phat and Visanu. It seems infeasible, given that both Raksmei and Ly Yong Phat’s criminal activities were well-known to the Cambodian police as far back as 2019, that Vannvirak didn’t know who they both were.

The photographs, the official statements, and the publicly available evidence leave a series of troubling and, so far, unanswered questions. They do not, however, amount to definitive proof of wrongdoing on the part of the Thai nationals named in this article.

What they do reveal is a pattern of unexplained associations, inconsistent official accounts and repeated encounters with individuals who, according to US government sanctions and other public reporting, occupied central positions within Cambodia’s cyber scam industry.

That pattern inevitably gives rise to speculation about corruption and collusion — speculation that many observers would argue is not entirely unreasonable given the Royal Thai Police’s long-standing reputation for corruption and Thailand’s recent decline in international corruption rankings.

Thaiscamwatch.blogspot.com has chosen to remain anonymous, saying it is concerned individuals who believe these unanswered questions deserve public scrutiny, and who are committed to exposing organized criminal networks and the corruption that enables them. Asia Sentinel agreed to publish periodic articles from the group.

For more than 80 years, the killing of Father Francis Xavier Trương Bửu Diệp on 12 March 1946 at Tắc Sậy has been contested. In southern Vietnam, one narrative long dominated collective memory: that he was killed by Việt Minh forces amid the chaotic early postwar…

Read more

The killing and maiming of children globally has increased to alarming levels, particularly in the murderous struggle between Israel and its foes, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Myanmar and Somalia as out-of-control conflicts continue on the boil, according to a series of UN and other reports. The investigations into childre…

Read more

US authorities, in recent operations coordinated with Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia and Cambodia, have sanctioned individuals and companies, arrested suspects connected to the notorious Cambodia-based Prince Holding Group and seized the financial infrastructure of Huione G…

Read more

The arrest last week of journalist and bookseller Leticia Wong Man-huen on sedition charges brings to at least 29 journalists who have been arrested in Hong Kong since China ordered its sweeping crackdown on the city in 2020. At least nine journalists and press freedom defenders are currently imprisoned, according to data compiled by press freedom organizations, including Jimmy Lai, the founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, six of his former editors and executives, and additional journalists and editors such as those from Stand News.

Wong, the owner of Hunter Bookstore, was arrested by National Security Police along with an unnamed 32-year-old male, reportedly her husband, according to news reports. Police said Wong, a former Sing Tao Daily political reporter and proprietor of Hunter Bookstore in Sham Shui Po in northwestern Kowloon, had been arrested for displaying items with seditious intent and selling publications that incited hatred against the Hong Kong government, judiciary, and law enforcement agencies.

They were also accused of violating Section 25 of the Organized and Serious Crimes Ordinance for receiving remittances funded by foreign political organizations. Wong and her companion posted bail and were released from Sham Shui Po police station the next day. They must report back to the police on July 24.

In addition to running the bookshop, Wong had been the editor-in-chief of Status Quo, a magazine that features interviews, essays, and reporting on Hong Kong society and culture. Among the allegedly seditious items and books that police seized in Wong’s shop was a copy of “The Troublemaker,” a biography written by former journalist Mark Clifford of Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2026, news reports said. Clifford is now president of the New York-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, created to work for freedom in and the release of all political prisoners.

“The arrest of a journalist and editor over items sold through an independent bookstore shows Hong Kong authorities are expanding national security laws ever deeper into the city’s publishing sector,” said Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Authorities should immediately release Wong and stop treating publishing activities as threats to national security.”

Beijing imposed the harsh national security law on the city in 2020 after months of virulent anti-government protests over China’s refusal to allow democratic processes to go ahead, as promised in the 1997 agreement between the UK and China that ended colonial rule, ​sparking international criticism that the freedoms promised to the city at the ​handover were being curtailed.

Hardline Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu, a former police commissioner, and authorities in Beijing have ignored demands by the Group of Seven, the European Union, the US State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a long list of other international critics regarding what they describe as a severe and ongoing deterioration of civil liberties under the sweeping “patriots-only” law. The drumbeat of criticism from overseas has increased over the past couple of years as authorities have begun targeting the families and associates of exiled activists in an attempt to suppress overseas dissent, especially in the UK and the United States, where domestic authorities have arrested Chinese nationals harassing those who have left the onetime British colony.

China consistently ranks as the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 50 behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In Hong Kong, despite international complaints, more than 60 organizations including unions, churches, media groups, and political parties, many of them decades old, have been disbanded, according to a study by the independent publication Hong Kong Free Press, which said the trend accelerated in the second half of 2021, with bastions of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement crumbling within months. The New York-based Human Rights Watch put the figure even higher, estimating that more than 100 NGOs, independent media outlets, and labor unions have been forced to disband or relocate entirely, resulting in the establishment of overseas advocacy hubs, adding to Beijing’s irritation.

The crackdown has reduced what was once one of Asia’s most vibrant cities in regard to human rights and protest against the government to sullen conformity, despite upbeat pronunciations by local civic leaders and other boosters. Any criticism of the government, either in the press or among the civic organizations including unions and churches, has simply stopped. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong describes public sentiment as “mixed, marked by a contrast between a stabilizing macroeconomic environment and underlying social strain. While many appreciate the city’s strengthened physical security and economic resilience, residents continue to grapple with elevated stress levels and cautious public optimism.”

“For months, authorities waged an administrative campaign against Hunter Bookstore co-owner Leticia Wong, hoping to exhaust her resolve to keep selling books Hong Kongers have a right to read, but the regime would rather they didn’t,” according to a statement by the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation. “They gave up the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach and just arrested Wong, a former journalist and Civic Party district councillor, for alleged sedition and money laundering linked to remittances from foreign organizations.”

In a statement to AFP, Clifford said, “When authorities target booksellers for carrying a biography, they’re sending a message that even peaceful ideas and documented facts are no longer safe. A government that fears a book fears the truth.”

India’s Supreme Court last week delivered a landmark judgment measuring the monetary worth of a homemaker’s unpaid care work, the second decision in recent months pushing the boundaries of the rights of women in a country where they have often been ignored. The ruling, delivered by Justices Sanjay Ka…

Read more

Multinational pharma giant Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro (tirzepatide), the dual GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonist, is at the center of a rapidly escalating public health storm in East Asia. While clinically approved as a life-saving treatment for Type 2 diabetes, the drug has been effectively deified on social media as the ultimate cosmetic weight-los…

Read more