Bullet-riddled body of S. Korean found
1 hour, 39 minutes ago
KABUL, Afghanistan - The bullet-riddled body of a South Korean hostage was found by police Wednesday in central Afghanistan after a purported Taliban spokesman said the militants had killed one of the captives.
The male victim had 10 bullet holes in his head, chest and stomach, and was discovered in the Mushaki area of Qarabagh district in Ghazni province, said police officer Abdul Rahman.
The Taliban spokesman said earlier that the hostage was was killed because Afghan authorities hadn't met their demands to release other militants from prison.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — A police official said Wednesday that Taliban militants told him they shot and killed one of 23 South Korean hostages, while two Western officials said some others from the group of captives were freed and taken to a U.S. military base.
Purported Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said one of the captives had been shot and killed around 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. EDT), and a police official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation said militants told him the hostage was sick and couldn't walk, and therefore was shot.
Ahmadi said the Korean's body was left in the Musheky area of Qarabagh district in Ghazni province. Police said they were going to look for the body.
Some of the Koreans, meanwhile, were freed and were taken to the U.S. base in Ghazni, according to two Western officials who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. The officials did not know how many were freed.
The South Korean news agency Yonhap, citing unidentified Korean officials, reported eight Koreans had been released.
Earlier, a German journalist and two Afghans colleagues apparently kidnapped by Taliban militants in eastern Afghanistan were freed, an Afghan governor said.
Officials found the German and other two captives with the help of villagers in Kunar province, said Gov. Dedar Shalezai.
The three told Shalezai by phone that they are in good health and with Afghan officials.
The German news magazine Stern confirmed that one of its reporters had been in Afghanistan, and the German Foreign Ministry said it was investigating reports of the journalist's abduction.
The South Korean hostages, including 18 women, were kidnapped July 19 while riding a bus through Ghazni province on the Kabul-Kandahar highway, Afghanistan's main thoroughfare.
South Korean negotiators have traveled to Ghazni province to take part in the negotiations.
An Afghan official involved in the negotiations had said a large sum of money would be paid to free eight of the hostages. The official spoke on condition he not be identified citing the sensitivity of the matter, and no other officials would confirm the account.
Foreign governments are suspected to have paid for the release of hostages in Afghanistan in the past but have either kept it quiet or denied it outright.
But Ahmadi had said the Afghan government had not responded to any of the Taliban's demands and that the militants planned to kill "a few" of the captives.
Three previous deadlines have passed with no consequences.
Though some of Ahmadi's statements turn out to be true, he also has made repeated false claims, calling into question the reliability of his information.
The series of recent kidnappings — 26 foreigners have been abducted in the last week — prompted the Afghan government to forbid foreigners living in Kabul from leaving the city without police permission.
Police said officials stationed at checkpoints at the city's main gates would stop foreigners from leaving Kabul unless they informed officials 24 hours in advance of their travel plans, said Esmatullah Dauladzai, Kabul's provincial police chief. The directive, issued Wednesday, is related to the recent kidnappings, he said.
___
Associated Press writers Amir Shah and Jason Straziuso in Kabul, Afghanistan, Burt Herman in Seoul, South Korea, and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Germany, contributed to this report.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Qantas aircraft safety questioned
Qantas aircraft safety questioned and the blame is pointed at SIA Engineering.
Click here and then select "Qantas aircraft safety questioned".
Click here and then select "Qantas aircraft safety questioned".
Monday, July 16, 2007
Ties That Bind
Ties That Bind
Crony capitalism is stunting southeast Asia, says the author of a new book on the region's godfathers.
By Joe Studwell
Newsweek International
July 23, 2007 issue - A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Bob Zoellick, the wise American who now heads the World Bank. The conversation turned to Southeast Asia, a region Zoellick knows intimately, and about which I had recently agreed to write a book. In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, Southeast Asia had been overtaken by China and India as the darlings of developmental economists and multinational business, yet I was optimistic. Zoellick listened quietly as I conjured up images of how the crisis could inspire a cathartic transition from crony capitalism to a market free of manipulation by bureaucrats and politicians. When I was finished, Zoellick looked across the table and said simply: "I am afraid that you may find that is not the case."
He was right, as three years of research have revealed. The architecture of the Southeast Asian economy remains what it was 10 and 50 and 100 years ago. The domestic economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all still dominated by reclusive, enigmatic billionaires and their families, even if fewer of them rank among the richest people in the world. In 1996 no less than eight of the top two dozen billionaires on the Forbes global rich list were Southeast Asian; in 2006 only Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, with a net worth of US$18.8 billion, ranked in the top 24. Nonetheless, while some Southeast Asian tycoons have been overtaken by more entrepreneurial billionaires from other parts of the world, the region remains the global epicenter of rentier family business.
This sits heavily with ordinary citizens. To the extent Southeast Asia has succeeded, it has done so despite the influence of the tycoons. For 40 years the growth of gross domestic product and the creation of jobs in the region have moved in lock step with the expansion of exports, produced either directly by multinational corporations or under contract by small-scale local manufacturers. The billionaires avoid export manufacturing and its requirement for global competitiveness. Instead they prosper from concessions, monopolies and cartels in local service economies that define things like port handling, real estate, telecommunications and gaming.
A decade after the Asian crisis, Southeast Asia's billionaires remain in the ascendancy because promised deregulation has never bitten. Even Hong Kong— lauded by the Heritage Foundation as the world's freest economy (de facto cartels affect the port to supermarkets to electricity to cement) —has failed to pass the kind of antimonopoly statutes that are a central pillar of developed economies around the world. There has been no substantive progress on creating a common free market in services for the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, despite relentless rhetoric. ASEAN is a toothless tiger, with no mechanism for enforcement of rulings, in a jungle of petty vested interests. Unlike the European Union, there are no regional or global brand-name corporations with the capacity to originate new services and technologies. There are simply local billionaires, lionized by domestic media, but running businesses whose productivity is regularly shown by economists to lag both that of Southeast Asian manufacturing and global enterprise in general. Why else, as once example, would container-handling charges at Hong Kong's port be more than twice those in Germany?
Despite now bullish stock markets in the region, the billionaires—with their lousy corporate governance and manipulation of local banks to provide cheap and easy alternative sources of credit—also have contributed to the worst long-term emerging-market-equity performance in the world. From 1993—when the first significant international portfolio investments came into Southeast Asian bourses—to the end of 2006, total dollar returns with dividends reinvested in Thailand and the Philippines were actually negative. Returns in Indonesia and Malaysia were worse than leaving money in a London bank account. Singapore produced less than half the gain of the London or New York markets, with which only Hong Kong was comparable. It is a brave investor who thinks long-term equity returns will improve in the absence of structural economic change.
For working- and middle-class Asians, the past 10 years are mainly defined by rising and palpable inequality. The two wealthy city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore, today boast inequality as measured by the international Gini benchmark that is on par with urban Argentina. Postcrisis, the proportion of people in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia living on less than the World Bank's $2-a-day measure of poverty and near poverty is greater than in Latin America. Today, it seems all too possible that the region's coddled political and economic elites will allow their states to slide into a Latin American morass, as they continue to live high on the hog while the dreams of ordinary people go down the tubes.
Colonialism is partly to blame for this state of affairs, and for the whole tycoon system, though not entirely. In Thailand, which was never formally colonized, kings were employing Persians and Chinese to operate trading monopolies and tax farms from the 16th century. In Indonesia, Chinese entrepreneurs also entered into monopoly management arrangements with Javanese aristocrats before the arrival of Europeans.
Typically, there was a racial division of labor in which locals were political entrepreneurs focused on maintaining political power against indigenous rivals and, later, in partnership with Western colonists. Outsiders, often Chinese immigrants, were the economic entrepreneurs. So in Indonesia, the Dutch gave key ethnic Chinese traders both monopolies and pseudomilitary titles: majoor, kapitein, luitenant. The Spaniards who controlled the Philippines until 1898 named the top Chinese trader the gobernadorcillo de los sangleyes—the governor of the businessmen. In Malaya, the British and local royals sold trading, mining and other licenses to Chinese and Indian immigrants while encouraging rural indigenes to stick to farming.
When independence came, in the 1940s and 1950s, the region's new leaders built on a system in which politics rules the economy. In Thailand, military leaders demanded substantial equity positions and a board presence in ethnic Chinese-run companies; the Malay political elite made its financial expectations of Chinese businessmen very clear, in what became known locally as "the bargain." While the Thai and Malay elites stuck with established Chinese trader families, the two great Southeast Asian dictators of the postwar era—Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines—turned to unknown small-timers of whose absolute loyalty they could be sure. They were men like Liem Sioe Liong, a trader who in a few years became Indonesia's top tycoon, and Lucio Tan, a man who once worked as a janitor but ended up as a Marcos billionaire.
To this day, there are precious few Southeast Asian tycoons whose wealth is not rooted in some form of state-sanctioned monopoly. (The exceptions are a couple of lesser Hong Kong billionaires, Patrick Wang of micromotor maker Johnson Electric and Michael Ying of clothing business Esprit, whose money was made in recent years in manufacturing in mainland China.) Soft-commodity monopolies for consumer items like sugar and flour produced early cash flows for Indonesia's Liem and Malaysia's Robert Kuok. Gaming licenses primed Stanley Ho in Macau and Lim Goh Tong, Ananda Krishnan and Vincent Tan in Malaysia, and lumber concessions made Mohamad (Bob) Hasan, Prajogo Pangestu and Eka Tjipta Widjaya in Indonesia.
In Hong Kong and Singapore, real estate became an effective cartel because of the way British colonial regimes structured the land market—selling off "crown land" in large lots that created a barrier to entry for all but a few big players. In the 1990s land packages in Hong Kong were commanding prices of about US$1 billion. The city-states also restricted access to their banking markets, creating other huge rents for local players; the biggest of all went to the institution that is now known as HSBC.
After access to concessions, access to capital was the second prerequisite of Southeast Asian tycoons. Elsewhere in the region, tycoons used their political influence to secure credit lines from state banks or opened their own institutions, which served as private piggy banks. The Philippines has lurched from one banking crisis to the next for almost a century, some based around state banks and others around private banks set up by tycoons. The country has never recovered from the financial-sector meltdown in the mid-1980s, when Marcos went into exile.
Across Southeast Asia the impact of the 1997 crisis followed the degree of corruption in the banking systems of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The Indonesian case was extraordinary. By 1997 every Indonesian tycoon had his own financial institution, and most banks had more than half their loans made to businesses run by the controlling families, ignoring the legal maximum of 20 percent. Liem's Bank Central Asia, the biggest in the country, was owed 60 percent of its loan portfolio by other Liem companies.
In the wake of the crisis, there was some banking consolidation. Indonesia now has 130 banks, compared with 240 in 1997. Many banks were nationalized. Unfortunately, corrupt governments have an even worse record of managing credit allocation than tycoon-controlled financial institutions. It was notable that the Indonesian billionaire named by Forbes as the country's richest individual in 2006—timber to real-estate tycoon Sukanto Tanoto, worth an estimated $2.8 billion—was listed by state bank Mandiri the same year as one of its six biggest delinquent borrowers.
Those Southeast Asian banks that have been reprivatized have often gone back to the billionaire fraternity; Liem's BCA, for instance, is now controlled by the Hartono tobacco dynasty. Almost no bank in the region is widely held. The obvious exception, HSBC, whose terms of incorporation never allowed any shareholder to own more than 1 percent of its equity, is the only financial institution (and almost the only company) to have broken out to become a global enterprise.
After the financial crisis in Southeast Asia, in state after state, taxpayers picked up the tab, tycoons picked up the pieces and life went on as before. The lesson of the past decade has been that the relationship between political and economic elites in Southeast Asia is more enduring than almost anyone imagined.
Malaysia, which imposed capital controls and raised a finger to the International Monetary Fund as the crisis spread, dealt with its fallout in traditional fashion. The businesses of Halim Saad and Tajudin Ramli, the leading bumiputra (or indigenous) tycoons with close links to the ruling United Malays National Organization, were bailed out with injections of government money and state share purchases. Ananda Krishnan, the Tamil Sri Lankan billionaire and Mahathir confidant with an empire including telecoms and broadcasting, was shored up when state oil company Petronas bought out his interest in the vast Kuala Lumpur City Centre and Twin Towers real-estate development. Most telling was the fact that after the crisis, UMNO began to set up new tycoons on the old model. Within a few years, tycoon-of-the-moment Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhary, a former rice and cattle trader, built a vast conglomerate based in power generation, the operation of Port of Tanjung Pelepas, mining, plantations and hotels through government concessions and the provision of state financing.
Throughout the region, businessmen have been pushing deeper into politics, and Thaksin Shinawatra took this trend to its logical conclusion in Thailand. Backed by other key tycoon families—such as the Chearavanonts of CP Group and the Sophonpanichs, who control Bangkok Bank—he formed a political party and won election as prime minister. As had happened long before in the Philippines, the businessmen overran the political system, blurring the traditional distinction between political and economic elites.
The Thaksin adventure was doomed, however, and not just because middle-class Bangkok opinion was against him. Though Thaksin brought representatives of tycoon families like the Chearavanonts into his cabinet, his fellow tycoons became ever more livid that—in their view—all the spoils of power appeared to go to Thaksin. The prime minister's telecoms and media business boomed (far faster than the Chearavanonts'), and by the fall of 2006, when Thaksin was pushed out in a coup, the other plutocrats were delighted. Today, Thaksin is in exile and buying an English soccer club; Thailand is again ruled by a military junta, and Thaksin's peers are back at work, sailing in familiar political winds.
Almost none of the big players was ruined by the financial crisis in Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines, and so it was in Indonesia, despite the fall of Suharto. The old man's closest confidant and golfing buddy, Hasan, was made an example of with a conviction for fraud; he served a couple of years in a special and commodious prison cell. Despite a $56 billion write-off by the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency, most of which was required to bail out tycoon banks that engaged in illegal lending practices, most billionaires were able to hold on to the bulk of their assets.
Many prominent figures, nervous that they were not quite safe in Jakarta, decamped to Singapore and ran their operations from there. Sjamsul Nursalim, who repaid only about 10 percent of the money he borrowed from IBRA, is today focusing on large and growing businesses in Singapore and China. The most extraordinary escape story was that of the Widjaya family, which crawled out from under a cumulative debt of $13.9 billion owed by their Asia Pulp and Paper business and its subsidiaries. The Widjayas forced almost all their creditors to take a haircut, bought back bonds they issued for pennies on the dollar, survived the attempted intervention of senior European and American politicians with the government in Jakarta and faced down legal suits from Singapore to the United States. The family filed successful suits in Indonesia that declared some of its bond issues to have been illegal under local law and therefore not subject to repayment. The Widjayas, who were responsible for the biggest debt default in Asian history, are today probably richer than ever.
So where do these shenanigans leave Southeast Asia? It is easily forgotten that 150 years after the modern globalization era began, there is still only one significant Asian country that has made the transition all the way from backwardness to developed-nation status: Japan, and that was a century ago. We are not so good at learning the lessons of development as we think, and Southeast Asia richly illustrates the point.
In the absence of a deregulated common market, ASEAN's intraregional trade is currently 20 percent of its total, compared with more than 50 percent in the European Union. Banking systems remain bloated by the region's high savings rate but dysfunctional in their lending practices. Domestic economies are still concession-based, and corporate governance leaves much to be desired. Perhaps more than anything, what stands out in a review of Southeast Asia 10 years after the crisis is the contrast with South Korea and Taiwan, which is starker than it has ever been in the postcolonial period. Where Southeast Asian states stuck with modified colonial rentier systems after the second world war, South Korea and Taiwan took a different course. They successfully implemented land reform—in stark contrast to countries like the Philippines, where political elites have ensured the continuance of a landed ascendancy—and thereby ensured a bottom-up development process. Their governments made a commitment to social equity, reflected in far lower levels of inequality than are present in Southeast Asia, and the existence of independent organized labor. And when South Korea and Taiwan backed leading family businesses—as all developing states are wont to do—they supported local manufacturers rather than cosmopolitan trading elites.
Most obviously, it is clear today that South Korea and Taiwan take political systems seriously as drivers of development. In 1997, Kim Dae Jung, a longtime democracy and human-rights activist, was elected South Korean president and set in motion the most effective reform process to have occurred in the main crisis countries. Reporting and compliance requirements in the Seoul stock market are now stricter than in Southeast Asia, and the judiciary has shown far greater independence and resolve in pursuing those whose actions contributed to the crisis. The families behind Korea's chaebol are today much weaker than their peers in Southeast Asia.
When the colonial era closed at the end of the second world war, South Korea and Taiwan were just as impoverished as the new nations of Southeast Asia: indeed, South Korea was much poorer than the Philippines. Today, with GDP per capita of about US$19,000 in South Korea and US$15,000 in Taiwan, those countries are three to four times richer than Malaysia and 10 to 12 times richer than Indonesia and the Philippines. The difference is political choices that in one part of Asia are creating free societies and globally competitive companies and in another sustain a superannuated economic aristocracy.
Studwell is the author of "Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and South-East Asia."
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Crony capitalism is stunting southeast Asia, says the author of a new book on the region's godfathers.
By Joe Studwell
Newsweek International
July 23, 2007 issue - A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Bob Zoellick, the wise American who now heads the World Bank. The conversation turned to Southeast Asia, a region Zoellick knows intimately, and about which I had recently agreed to write a book. In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, Southeast Asia had been overtaken by China and India as the darlings of developmental economists and multinational business, yet I was optimistic. Zoellick listened quietly as I conjured up images of how the crisis could inspire a cathartic transition from crony capitalism to a market free of manipulation by bureaucrats and politicians. When I was finished, Zoellick looked across the table and said simply: "I am afraid that you may find that is not the case."
He was right, as three years of research have revealed. The architecture of the Southeast Asian economy remains what it was 10 and 50 and 100 years ago. The domestic economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all still dominated by reclusive, enigmatic billionaires and their families, even if fewer of them rank among the richest people in the world. In 1996 no less than eight of the top two dozen billionaires on the Forbes global rich list were Southeast Asian; in 2006 only Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, with a net worth of US$18.8 billion, ranked in the top 24. Nonetheless, while some Southeast Asian tycoons have been overtaken by more entrepreneurial billionaires from other parts of the world, the region remains the global epicenter of rentier family business.
This sits heavily with ordinary citizens. To the extent Southeast Asia has succeeded, it has done so despite the influence of the tycoons. For 40 years the growth of gross domestic product and the creation of jobs in the region have moved in lock step with the expansion of exports, produced either directly by multinational corporations or under contract by small-scale local manufacturers. The billionaires avoid export manufacturing and its requirement for global competitiveness. Instead they prosper from concessions, monopolies and cartels in local service economies that define things like port handling, real estate, telecommunications and gaming.
A decade after the Asian crisis, Southeast Asia's billionaires remain in the ascendancy because promised deregulation has never bitten. Even Hong Kong— lauded by the Heritage Foundation as the world's freest economy (de facto cartels affect the port to supermarkets to electricity to cement) —has failed to pass the kind of antimonopoly statutes that are a central pillar of developed economies around the world. There has been no substantive progress on creating a common free market in services for the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, despite relentless rhetoric. ASEAN is a toothless tiger, with no mechanism for enforcement of rulings, in a jungle of petty vested interests. Unlike the European Union, there are no regional or global brand-name corporations with the capacity to originate new services and technologies. There are simply local billionaires, lionized by domestic media, but running businesses whose productivity is regularly shown by economists to lag both that of Southeast Asian manufacturing and global enterprise in general. Why else, as once example, would container-handling charges at Hong Kong's port be more than twice those in Germany?
Despite now bullish stock markets in the region, the billionaires—with their lousy corporate governance and manipulation of local banks to provide cheap and easy alternative sources of credit—also have contributed to the worst long-term emerging-market-equity performance in the world. From 1993—when the first significant international portfolio investments came into Southeast Asian bourses—to the end of 2006, total dollar returns with dividends reinvested in Thailand and the Philippines were actually negative. Returns in Indonesia and Malaysia were worse than leaving money in a London bank account. Singapore produced less than half the gain of the London or New York markets, with which only Hong Kong was comparable. It is a brave investor who thinks long-term equity returns will improve in the absence of structural economic change.
For working- and middle-class Asians, the past 10 years are mainly defined by rising and palpable inequality. The two wealthy city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore, today boast inequality as measured by the international Gini benchmark that is on par with urban Argentina. Postcrisis, the proportion of people in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia living on less than the World Bank's $2-a-day measure of poverty and near poverty is greater than in Latin America. Today, it seems all too possible that the region's coddled political and economic elites will allow their states to slide into a Latin American morass, as they continue to live high on the hog while the dreams of ordinary people go down the tubes.
Colonialism is partly to blame for this state of affairs, and for the whole tycoon system, though not entirely. In Thailand, which was never formally colonized, kings were employing Persians and Chinese to operate trading monopolies and tax farms from the 16th century. In Indonesia, Chinese entrepreneurs also entered into monopoly management arrangements with Javanese aristocrats before the arrival of Europeans.
Typically, there was a racial division of labor in which locals were political entrepreneurs focused on maintaining political power against indigenous rivals and, later, in partnership with Western colonists. Outsiders, often Chinese immigrants, were the economic entrepreneurs. So in Indonesia, the Dutch gave key ethnic Chinese traders both monopolies and pseudomilitary titles: majoor, kapitein, luitenant. The Spaniards who controlled the Philippines until 1898 named the top Chinese trader the gobernadorcillo de los sangleyes—the governor of the businessmen. In Malaya, the British and local royals sold trading, mining and other licenses to Chinese and Indian immigrants while encouraging rural indigenes to stick to farming.
When independence came, in the 1940s and 1950s, the region's new leaders built on a system in which politics rules the economy. In Thailand, military leaders demanded substantial equity positions and a board presence in ethnic Chinese-run companies; the Malay political elite made its financial expectations of Chinese businessmen very clear, in what became known locally as "the bargain." While the Thai and Malay elites stuck with established Chinese trader families, the two great Southeast Asian dictators of the postwar era—Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines—turned to unknown small-timers of whose absolute loyalty they could be sure. They were men like Liem Sioe Liong, a trader who in a few years became Indonesia's top tycoon, and Lucio Tan, a man who once worked as a janitor but ended up as a Marcos billionaire.
To this day, there are precious few Southeast Asian tycoons whose wealth is not rooted in some form of state-sanctioned monopoly. (The exceptions are a couple of lesser Hong Kong billionaires, Patrick Wang of micromotor maker Johnson Electric and Michael Ying of clothing business Esprit, whose money was made in recent years in manufacturing in mainland China.) Soft-commodity monopolies for consumer items like sugar and flour produced early cash flows for Indonesia's Liem and Malaysia's Robert Kuok. Gaming licenses primed Stanley Ho in Macau and Lim Goh Tong, Ananda Krishnan and Vincent Tan in Malaysia, and lumber concessions made Mohamad (Bob) Hasan, Prajogo Pangestu and Eka Tjipta Widjaya in Indonesia.
In Hong Kong and Singapore, real estate became an effective cartel because of the way British colonial regimes structured the land market—selling off "crown land" in large lots that created a barrier to entry for all but a few big players. In the 1990s land packages in Hong Kong were commanding prices of about US$1 billion. The city-states also restricted access to their banking markets, creating other huge rents for local players; the biggest of all went to the institution that is now known as HSBC.
After access to concessions, access to capital was the second prerequisite of Southeast Asian tycoons. Elsewhere in the region, tycoons used their political influence to secure credit lines from state banks or opened their own institutions, which served as private piggy banks. The Philippines has lurched from one banking crisis to the next for almost a century, some based around state banks and others around private banks set up by tycoons. The country has never recovered from the financial-sector meltdown in the mid-1980s, when Marcos went into exile.
Across Southeast Asia the impact of the 1997 crisis followed the degree of corruption in the banking systems of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The Indonesian case was extraordinary. By 1997 every Indonesian tycoon had his own financial institution, and most banks had more than half their loans made to businesses run by the controlling families, ignoring the legal maximum of 20 percent. Liem's Bank Central Asia, the biggest in the country, was owed 60 percent of its loan portfolio by other Liem companies.
In the wake of the crisis, there was some banking consolidation. Indonesia now has 130 banks, compared with 240 in 1997. Many banks were nationalized. Unfortunately, corrupt governments have an even worse record of managing credit allocation than tycoon-controlled financial institutions. It was notable that the Indonesian billionaire named by Forbes as the country's richest individual in 2006—timber to real-estate tycoon Sukanto Tanoto, worth an estimated $2.8 billion—was listed by state bank Mandiri the same year as one of its six biggest delinquent borrowers.
Those Southeast Asian banks that have been reprivatized have often gone back to the billionaire fraternity; Liem's BCA, for instance, is now controlled by the Hartono tobacco dynasty. Almost no bank in the region is widely held. The obvious exception, HSBC, whose terms of incorporation never allowed any shareholder to own more than 1 percent of its equity, is the only financial institution (and almost the only company) to have broken out to become a global enterprise.
After the financial crisis in Southeast Asia, in state after state, taxpayers picked up the tab, tycoons picked up the pieces and life went on as before. The lesson of the past decade has been that the relationship between political and economic elites in Southeast Asia is more enduring than almost anyone imagined.
Malaysia, which imposed capital controls and raised a finger to the International Monetary Fund as the crisis spread, dealt with its fallout in traditional fashion. The businesses of Halim Saad and Tajudin Ramli, the leading bumiputra (or indigenous) tycoons with close links to the ruling United Malays National Organization, were bailed out with injections of government money and state share purchases. Ananda Krishnan, the Tamil Sri Lankan billionaire and Mahathir confidant with an empire including telecoms and broadcasting, was shored up when state oil company Petronas bought out his interest in the vast Kuala Lumpur City Centre and Twin Towers real-estate development. Most telling was the fact that after the crisis, UMNO began to set up new tycoons on the old model. Within a few years, tycoon-of-the-moment Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhary, a former rice and cattle trader, built a vast conglomerate based in power generation, the operation of Port of Tanjung Pelepas, mining, plantations and hotels through government concessions and the provision of state financing.
Throughout the region, businessmen have been pushing deeper into politics, and Thaksin Shinawatra took this trend to its logical conclusion in Thailand. Backed by other key tycoon families—such as the Chearavanonts of CP Group and the Sophonpanichs, who control Bangkok Bank—he formed a political party and won election as prime minister. As had happened long before in the Philippines, the businessmen overran the political system, blurring the traditional distinction between political and economic elites.
The Thaksin adventure was doomed, however, and not just because middle-class Bangkok opinion was against him. Though Thaksin brought representatives of tycoon families like the Chearavanonts into his cabinet, his fellow tycoons became ever more livid that—in their view—all the spoils of power appeared to go to Thaksin. The prime minister's telecoms and media business boomed (far faster than the Chearavanonts'), and by the fall of 2006, when Thaksin was pushed out in a coup, the other plutocrats were delighted. Today, Thaksin is in exile and buying an English soccer club; Thailand is again ruled by a military junta, and Thaksin's peers are back at work, sailing in familiar political winds.
Almost none of the big players was ruined by the financial crisis in Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines, and so it was in Indonesia, despite the fall of Suharto. The old man's closest confidant and golfing buddy, Hasan, was made an example of with a conviction for fraud; he served a couple of years in a special and commodious prison cell. Despite a $56 billion write-off by the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency, most of which was required to bail out tycoon banks that engaged in illegal lending practices, most billionaires were able to hold on to the bulk of their assets.
Many prominent figures, nervous that they were not quite safe in Jakarta, decamped to Singapore and ran their operations from there. Sjamsul Nursalim, who repaid only about 10 percent of the money he borrowed from IBRA, is today focusing on large and growing businesses in Singapore and China. The most extraordinary escape story was that of the Widjaya family, which crawled out from under a cumulative debt of $13.9 billion owed by their Asia Pulp and Paper business and its subsidiaries. The Widjayas forced almost all their creditors to take a haircut, bought back bonds they issued for pennies on the dollar, survived the attempted intervention of senior European and American politicians with the government in Jakarta and faced down legal suits from Singapore to the United States. The family filed successful suits in Indonesia that declared some of its bond issues to have been illegal under local law and therefore not subject to repayment. The Widjayas, who were responsible for the biggest debt default in Asian history, are today probably richer than ever.
So where do these shenanigans leave Southeast Asia? It is easily forgotten that 150 years after the modern globalization era began, there is still only one significant Asian country that has made the transition all the way from backwardness to developed-nation status: Japan, and that was a century ago. We are not so good at learning the lessons of development as we think, and Southeast Asia richly illustrates the point.
In the absence of a deregulated common market, ASEAN's intraregional trade is currently 20 percent of its total, compared with more than 50 percent in the European Union. Banking systems remain bloated by the region's high savings rate but dysfunctional in their lending practices. Domestic economies are still concession-based, and corporate governance leaves much to be desired. Perhaps more than anything, what stands out in a review of Southeast Asia 10 years after the crisis is the contrast with South Korea and Taiwan, which is starker than it has ever been in the postcolonial period. Where Southeast Asian states stuck with modified colonial rentier systems after the second world war, South Korea and Taiwan took a different course. They successfully implemented land reform—in stark contrast to countries like the Philippines, where political elites have ensured the continuance of a landed ascendancy—and thereby ensured a bottom-up development process. Their governments made a commitment to social equity, reflected in far lower levels of inequality than are present in Southeast Asia, and the existence of independent organized labor. And when South Korea and Taiwan backed leading family businesses—as all developing states are wont to do—they supported local manufacturers rather than cosmopolitan trading elites.
Most obviously, it is clear today that South Korea and Taiwan take political systems seriously as drivers of development. In 1997, Kim Dae Jung, a longtime democracy and human-rights activist, was elected South Korean president and set in motion the most effective reform process to have occurred in the main crisis countries. Reporting and compliance requirements in the Seoul stock market are now stricter than in Southeast Asia, and the judiciary has shown far greater independence and resolve in pursuing those whose actions contributed to the crisis. The families behind Korea's chaebol are today much weaker than their peers in Southeast Asia.
When the colonial era closed at the end of the second world war, South Korea and Taiwan were just as impoverished as the new nations of Southeast Asia: indeed, South Korea was much poorer than the Philippines. Today, with GDP per capita of about US$19,000 in South Korea and US$15,000 in Taiwan, those countries are three to four times richer than Malaysia and 10 to 12 times richer than Indonesia and the Philippines. The difference is political choices that in one part of Asia are creating free societies and globally competitive companies and in another sustain a superannuated economic aristocracy.
Studwell is the author of "Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and South-East Asia."
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Big shock at hospital over missing sister
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Big shock at hospital over missing sister
Sister had been moved to another bed, but nurse said she had died
Letter from Neo Beng Lin
I recently had an extremely disturbing encounter at Changi General Hospital.
My younger sister was admitted to the hospital on June 24 for an infection. And she was originally assigned to Bed 8 in Ward 25 when we visited her that same night.
The following night, my wife and I visited my sister in the same ward and did not see her. We concluded that she must have been relocated to another ward and approached the reception for information.
We spoke to a nurse and politely gave her my sister's name.
To our deepest horror, the nurse told us coldly: "The patient has passed away." Shocked, we restated her name in full and again, the nurse gave a similar reply: "Yes, Bed 8 right? She passed away last night."
Despite our requests for her to check the records again, the nurse simply repeated the same answer. This was when I lost my patience and called my sister's husband.
He told me my sister had been transferred to Bed 29 within the same ward. We heaved a huge sigh of relief and rushed to find her at Bed 29. There, we found her alive and well.
I went back to confront the nurse again and demanded to see the records to understand how she could have made such an error. Even with my sister standing right beside me, the nurse was adamant that the patient who passed away shared the same name as my sister.
I found this absurd and was furious that no one offered an apology for the grave error.
I would like to know how Changi General Hospital manages patients' records within the wards.
How could the hospital staff not register or track a routine task such as a patient's relocation within the same ward?
How could a staff of an established, award-winning hospital commit such a blunder? Where is the sensitivity of its staff when they disclose the deaths of patients to their loved ones?
What if the wrong news were communicated to an elderly visitor with weak health? I cannot imagine the consequences if my parents were in my shoes that night.
If the hospital cannot even record simple information correctly, how can the public entrust their loved ones to the hospital's care?
How would we know if the hospital gives patients the proper medication they need? What if the wrong medication was served to a patient who has changed to another bed?
I would like the hospital's full explanation and the actions it will take to prevent others from going through what I had experienced.
Big shock at hospital over missing sister
Sister had been moved to another bed, but nurse said she had died
Letter from Neo Beng Lin
I recently had an extremely disturbing encounter at Changi General Hospital.
My younger sister was admitted to the hospital on June 24 for an infection. And she was originally assigned to Bed 8 in Ward 25 when we visited her that same night.
The following night, my wife and I visited my sister in the same ward and did not see her. We concluded that she must have been relocated to another ward and approached the reception for information.
We spoke to a nurse and politely gave her my sister's name.
To our deepest horror, the nurse told us coldly: "The patient has passed away." Shocked, we restated her name in full and again, the nurse gave a similar reply: "Yes, Bed 8 right? She passed away last night."
Despite our requests for her to check the records again, the nurse simply repeated the same answer. This was when I lost my patience and called my sister's husband.
He told me my sister had been transferred to Bed 29 within the same ward. We heaved a huge sigh of relief and rushed to find her at Bed 29. There, we found her alive and well.
I went back to confront the nurse again and demanded to see the records to understand how she could have made such an error. Even with my sister standing right beside me, the nurse was adamant that the patient who passed away shared the same name as my sister.
I found this absurd and was furious that no one offered an apology for the grave error.
I would like to know how Changi General Hospital manages patients' records within the wards.
How could the hospital staff not register or track a routine task such as a patient's relocation within the same ward?
How could a staff of an established, award-winning hospital commit such a blunder? Where is the sensitivity of its staff when they disclose the deaths of patients to their loved ones?
What if the wrong news were communicated to an elderly visitor with weak health? I cannot imagine the consequences if my parents were in my shoes that night.
If the hospital cannot even record simple information correctly, how can the public entrust their loved ones to the hospital's care?
How would we know if the hospital gives patients the proper medication they need? What if the wrong medication was served to a patient who has changed to another bed?
I would like the hospital's full explanation and the actions it will take to prevent others from going through what I had experienced.
No help for dying dad at Woodlands checkpoint
July 16, 2007
No help for dying dad at Woodlands checkpoint
ON JUNE 29, my family and I were on our way to Johor Baru. At about 11.30pm, just after clearing the Malaysian checkpoint at the Causeway, my father had chest pains and breathing difficulty. We had to cancel our trip and return to Singapore. I immediately made a U-turn.
At about 12.10am, when we arrived at Woodlands checkpoint, I called 995. A Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) operator assured me an ambulance would be dispatched as soon as possible and I would be kept informed of its arrival.
I proceeded to booth 15. As there were two cars ahead of us, to save precious time, I pulled up and, leaving the engine running, I ran to the booth, hoping to jump the queue and get our passports endorsed quickly so we could secure medical help for my father.
Seeing the immigration officer engaged, I tapped on the glass panel in desperation. Without allowing me to explain, she slammed the glass door in my face and pushed aside our passports I had placed on her counter to continue serving the two cars before us.
The whole episode took a good 10 minutes and by the time I went back to drive my car to the booth, my father's condition had taken a turn for the worse.
Finally, after our passports had been endorsed, I drove to the red lane for Customs clearance to seek assistance from Customs officers. Another rude shock awaited me there.
Not a single officer came forward to help at first. Subsequently, an officer who noticed my father gasping for breath called for an ambulance. The ambulance eventually arrived but, by then, it was too late as my father had slipped into unconsciousness.
I was appalled by the way the officers conducted themselves.
Also, the assurance by the SCDF operator that an ambulance would be rushed to the scene and I would be kept informed of its whereabouts was false. Isn't 995 meant for emergency only and shouldn't cases involving a dying man be attended to as quickly as possible?
When I sought assistance at the red lane, none of the officers could perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Aren't front-line officers manning checkpoints supposed to be trained in CPR? Alternatively, shouldn't a paramedic team be stationed there in the event of an emergency?
If only help had been at hand, it might have saved my father's life.
Norhafiz Zahid
No help for dying dad at Woodlands checkpoint
ON JUNE 29, my family and I were on our way to Johor Baru. At about 11.30pm, just after clearing the Malaysian checkpoint at the Causeway, my father had chest pains and breathing difficulty. We had to cancel our trip and return to Singapore. I immediately made a U-turn.
At about 12.10am, when we arrived at Woodlands checkpoint, I called 995. A Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) operator assured me an ambulance would be dispatched as soon as possible and I would be kept informed of its arrival.
I proceeded to booth 15. As there were two cars ahead of us, to save precious time, I pulled up and, leaving the engine running, I ran to the booth, hoping to jump the queue and get our passports endorsed quickly so we could secure medical help for my father.
Seeing the immigration officer engaged, I tapped on the glass panel in desperation. Without allowing me to explain, she slammed the glass door in my face and pushed aside our passports I had placed on her counter to continue serving the two cars before us.
The whole episode took a good 10 minutes and by the time I went back to drive my car to the booth, my father's condition had taken a turn for the worse.
Finally, after our passports had been endorsed, I drove to the red lane for Customs clearance to seek assistance from Customs officers. Another rude shock awaited me there.
Not a single officer came forward to help at first. Subsequently, an officer who noticed my father gasping for breath called for an ambulance. The ambulance eventually arrived but, by then, it was too late as my father had slipped into unconsciousness.
I was appalled by the way the officers conducted themselves.
Also, the assurance by the SCDF operator that an ambulance would be rushed to the scene and I would be kept informed of its whereabouts was false. Isn't 995 meant for emergency only and shouldn't cases involving a dying man be attended to as quickly as possible?
When I sought assistance at the red lane, none of the officers could perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Aren't front-line officers manning checkpoints supposed to be trained in CPR? Alternatively, shouldn't a paramedic team be stationed there in the event of an emergency?
If only help had been at hand, it might have saved my father's life.
Norhafiz Zahid
Sunday, July 15, 2007
I was told that my wife was already brain dead due to a lack of blood.
200 blood donors couldn't save her
WHAT was to have been a celebration of two new lives turned into the death of their mother.
Madam Swee Lay Kuan was so excited about having twins that she went about buying baby clothes in pairs - one in pink and one in baby blue.
The excited mum had also thought of names for her baby girl and boy. Now, she will never get the chance to cradle her babies in her arms.
The 44-year-old sub-contractor died from massive bleeding two days after giving birth. She did not regain consciousness.
She could not be saved despite being given more than 20 packets of blood.
Madam Swee's family claim that staff of Raffles Hospital, where Madam Swee was warded, had told them that its blood supply was running low and that they did not have enough blood.
NOT ENOUGH BLOOD?
Now, Madam Swee's husband, Mr Jason Low, 43, has only one question: Why wasn't there enough blood in the hospital?
But a Raffles Hospital spokesman said that a continuous supply of blood was available for Madam Swee.
'There was full support and assistance given to Madam Swee by the Bloodbank@HSA to ensure that supply of blood were given without delay.'
Speaking to The New Paper at her wake at Kim Tian Road yesterday, Mr Low said that he was appreciative of the hard work put in by Raffles Hospital.
'But I felt that the process of obtaining blood for transfusion was too slow.'
Madam Swee was admitted to hospital last Thursday for bleeding - a result of a low-lying placenta (placenta praevia). The delivery was due on 23 Aug.
But because there was a threat of premature labour, and in the interests of the twins' safety, she was scheduled for Caesarean section last Saturday.
Mr Low, an operations manager, said: 'She was very excited about the birth. When she was wheeled into the operating theatre that afternoon, she was smiling at me and waving goodbye.'
Mr Low waited outside the operating theatre and, at about 3.30pm, the twins were pushed out.
'I was so happy and proud when the staff and people around me kept saying how cute my babies were,' said Mr Low, who has two other daughters, 17 and 11.
But not long after, the doctor asked to see Mr Low.
He recalled: 'The doctor told me that my wife was bleeding profusely and to save her life, they needed to remove her womb.'
Mr Low signed the consent form.
Madam Swee was out of the operating theatre at around 7pm.
But half an hour later, doctors told Mr Low that his wife was still bleeding even after they had stitched her up.
Madam Swee was taken back to the operating theatre.
This time, it was a long agonising wait for Mr Low as he saw medical staff going in and out of the operating theatre.
Said Mr Low: 'I was told that there were eight doctors helping my wife. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't stop her bleeding as her blood wouldn't clot.'
At about 3am the next day, a doctor came and told Mr Low his wife's condition 'does not look good'.
'I was told that more than 20 packets of blood was given to her but no matter how much blood they pumped in, she continued to bleed,' he said.
Madam Swee's blood type was B+.
The hospital spokesman said that blood transfusion is given based on clinical needs and all bleeding emergencies are given top priority.
Said the spokesman: 'No approval from the hospital's higher authority is needed.'
Mr Low said he pleaded with the doctors not to give up on his wife.
That was when a staff suggested to him that he could get friends and relatives to donate blood at the Bloodbank@HSA and indicate that the blood is for his wife.
So, that Sunday morning, about 200 of their relatives and friends turned up to donate blood at the Bloodbank@HSA.
After that, Mr Low said, blood was released. But Madam Swee died the following night at about 9.30pm.
Mr Low said: 'I was told that my wife was already brain dead due to a lack of blood.'
Unable to accept his wife's death, a teary Mr Low said: 'It was supposed to be a joyous occasion for us.
'We were so thrilled and was all prepared to welcome the two new additions to the family.'
He said his wife had even thought of the names for the babies, but he had rejected them.
'She wanted to name the boy 'Jacko' and the girl 'Jacinda'. But who would name their kids 'Jacko'?
'I told her I didn't like the names. But now, I think I would use them as she'd wanted. After all, this was her last wish.'
The babies are now at Singapore General Hospital's intensive care unit as they were born premature. They are healthy.
The couple had been married for 13 years. Describing his wife as cheerful and outgoing, Mr Low said that her health had always been good.
'The pregnancy was a pleasant surprise to both of us. But she didn't even have the chance to see how adorable our twins are.'
Mr Low said their two elder daughters are holding up well.
'I have to be strong for them. Now, I have to play the role of both the mother and father.'
Her funeral is on Saturday at 1pm
---
A quote taken from here
From: Chupacabra (callipok) 16:42
To: goodnessm1 unread 19 of 19
146348.19 in reply to 146348.13
You talk cock. Countries like Australia and Canada got high taxes to fund their health cost which is free!
All the taxes in sinkapore including cigerettes taxes cannot fund a blood bank meh????? How many people need blood a year compared to other developed countries?
You talk as if people choose to be in that position.
All the hospital charges including lab testing and staff pay already added to hospital bill, to charge money for blood is billing you twice for the same services.
That is why there is no transperency, because if there is, people like you won't be saying what you said. Understand?!?!?!?!
=========================================================================
REPLY:
I fully agree with u! U'r words make alot of sense!
---
Originally posted by: The Republic
Sunday Times post a one page article making the hospital look faultless and throwing medical terms into it.
But it did not explain why did 200 families and friends turn up in quick time if there was enough blood.
It did not address the husband's two points. One is medical staff telling him higher authorization needed if more blood is needed while wife is dying. Second is why did the staff at Blood Bank tell him it is not time to open shop yet when he went there personally.
It seems, in such a crisis situation, the whole situation was poorly handled by the hospital and blood bank. Was their staff untrained for such situations ?
Is this poor QC on staff by both blood bank and hospital ?
It seems a farce that 200 people need to turn up in a quick notice, the husband get answers like higher authorization needed when wife is dying and he personally needed to go blood bank and was told time to open has no started.
Many questions remained unanswered and the worse thing is, the husband is paying private hospital premium price.
If the quality of medical staff and doctors had dropped in Singapore, the Health Ministry should investigate and solve this issue fast lest another similiar situation happen.
---
In my honest opinion, it is not 200 blood donors who couldn't save her, but rather the system that's bound down by all the red tape. Condolences to the family.
WHAT was to have been a celebration of two new lives turned into the death of their mother.
Madam Swee Lay Kuan was so excited about having twins that she went about buying baby clothes in pairs - one in pink and one in baby blue.
The excited mum had also thought of names for her baby girl and boy. Now, she will never get the chance to cradle her babies in her arms.
The 44-year-old sub-contractor died from massive bleeding two days after giving birth. She did not regain consciousness.
She could not be saved despite being given more than 20 packets of blood.
Madam Swee's family claim that staff of Raffles Hospital, where Madam Swee was warded, had told them that its blood supply was running low and that they did not have enough blood.
NOT ENOUGH BLOOD?
Now, Madam Swee's husband, Mr Jason Low, 43, has only one question: Why wasn't there enough blood in the hospital?
But a Raffles Hospital spokesman said that a continuous supply of blood was available for Madam Swee.
'There was full support and assistance given to Madam Swee by the Bloodbank@HSA to ensure that supply of blood were given without delay.'
Speaking to The New Paper at her wake at Kim Tian Road yesterday, Mr Low said that he was appreciative of the hard work put in by Raffles Hospital.
'But I felt that the process of obtaining blood for transfusion was too slow.'
Madam Swee was admitted to hospital last Thursday for bleeding - a result of a low-lying placenta (placenta praevia). The delivery was due on 23 Aug.
But because there was a threat of premature labour, and in the interests of the twins' safety, she was scheduled for Caesarean section last Saturday.
Mr Low, an operations manager, said: 'She was very excited about the birth. When she was wheeled into the operating theatre that afternoon, she was smiling at me and waving goodbye.'
Mr Low waited outside the operating theatre and, at about 3.30pm, the twins were pushed out.
'I was so happy and proud when the staff and people around me kept saying how cute my babies were,' said Mr Low, who has two other daughters, 17 and 11.
But not long after, the doctor asked to see Mr Low.
He recalled: 'The doctor told me that my wife was bleeding profusely and to save her life, they needed to remove her womb.'
Mr Low signed the consent form.
Madam Swee was out of the operating theatre at around 7pm.
But half an hour later, doctors told Mr Low that his wife was still bleeding even after they had stitched her up.
Madam Swee was taken back to the operating theatre.
This time, it was a long agonising wait for Mr Low as he saw medical staff going in and out of the operating theatre.
Said Mr Low: 'I was told that there were eight doctors helping my wife. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't stop her bleeding as her blood wouldn't clot.'
At about 3am the next day, a doctor came and told Mr Low his wife's condition 'does not look good'.
'I was told that more than 20 packets of blood was given to her but no matter how much blood they pumped in, she continued to bleed,' he said.
Madam Swee's blood type was B+.
The hospital spokesman said that blood transfusion is given based on clinical needs and all bleeding emergencies are given top priority.
Said the spokesman: 'No approval from the hospital's higher authority is needed.'
Mr Low said he pleaded with the doctors not to give up on his wife.
That was when a staff suggested to him that he could get friends and relatives to donate blood at the Bloodbank@HSA and indicate that the blood is for his wife.
So, that Sunday morning, about 200 of their relatives and friends turned up to donate blood at the Bloodbank@HSA.
After that, Mr Low said, blood was released. But Madam Swee died the following night at about 9.30pm.
Mr Low said: 'I was told that my wife was already brain dead due to a lack of blood.'
Unable to accept his wife's death, a teary Mr Low said: 'It was supposed to be a joyous occasion for us.
'We were so thrilled and was all prepared to welcome the two new additions to the family.'
He said his wife had even thought of the names for the babies, but he had rejected them.
'She wanted to name the boy 'Jacko' and the girl 'Jacinda'. But who would name their kids 'Jacko'?
'I told her I didn't like the names. But now, I think I would use them as she'd wanted. After all, this was her last wish.'
The babies are now at Singapore General Hospital's intensive care unit as they were born premature. They are healthy.
The couple had been married for 13 years. Describing his wife as cheerful and outgoing, Mr Low said that her health had always been good.
'The pregnancy was a pleasant surprise to both of us. But she didn't even have the chance to see how adorable our twins are.'
Mr Low said their two elder daughters are holding up well.
'I have to be strong for them. Now, I have to play the role of both the mother and father.'
Her funeral is on Saturday at 1pm
---
A quote taken from here
From: Chupacabra (callipok) 16:42
To: goodnessm1 unread 19 of 19
146348.19 in reply to 146348.13
You talk cock. Countries like Australia and Canada got high taxes to fund their health cost which is free!
All the taxes in sinkapore including cigerettes taxes cannot fund a blood bank meh????? How many people need blood a year compared to other developed countries?
You talk as if people choose to be in that position.
All the hospital charges including lab testing and staff pay already added to hospital bill, to charge money for blood is billing you twice for the same services.
That is why there is no transperency, because if there is, people like you won't be saying what you said. Understand?!?!?!?!
=========================================================================
REPLY:
I fully agree with u! U'r words make alot of sense!
---
Originally posted by: The Republic
Sunday Times post a one page article making the hospital look faultless and throwing medical terms into it.
But it did not explain why did 200 families and friends turn up in quick time if there was enough blood.
It did not address the husband's two points. One is medical staff telling him higher authorization needed if more blood is needed while wife is dying. Second is why did the staff at Blood Bank tell him it is not time to open shop yet when he went there personally.
It seems, in such a crisis situation, the whole situation was poorly handled by the hospital and blood bank. Was their staff untrained for such situations ?
Is this poor QC on staff by both blood bank and hospital ?
It seems a farce that 200 people need to turn up in a quick notice, the husband get answers like higher authorization needed when wife is dying and he personally needed to go blood bank and was told time to open has no started.
Many questions remained unanswered and the worse thing is, the husband is paying private hospital premium price.
If the quality of medical staff and doctors had dropped in Singapore, the Health Ministry should investigate and solve this issue fast lest another similiar situation happen.
---
In my honest opinion, it is not 200 blood donors who couldn't save her, but rather the system that's bound down by all the red tape. Condolences to the family.
Huh?
Basic foundation in a second language is important: MM Lee
By May Wong, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 14 July 2007 2224 hrs
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew says it is important for parents to give their children the basic foundation in a second language.
This is so that when a situation arises, they will be able to make use of their knowledge to converse.
Mr Lee was speaking at the opening of the Nanyang Technological University's Confucius Institute at One North on Saturday evening.
Many young Singaporeans use English more frequently than their mother tongue.
That is why Mr Lee suggests parents allow their children to pick up on the tones and words used in a second language.
Using a computer analogy, he says, the child can then store it for life, in the hard disc or brain.
MM Lee said: "My Chinese is inside the megabytes so when I'm using it, it comes out it's hyper-linked. When I'm not using it, I must put down control F to look for the word."
Mr Lee says learning two languages is not easy, something these students can identify with.
He acknowledges that one may face problems with many words and phrases in a second language like Chinese.
But he says at least they will learn the basic sentence structure and be able to convey ideas across.
MM Lee said: "So my advice to all parents is: never mind how much trouble your children are having in primary school and in secondary school. Get them to catch the sounds, sentence structure, words. They don't have to score A or A star, even a B or a C, but they've got as sense of the language, they can talk, they can listen."
Mr Lee says when he was prime minister, he encouraged the Chinese children to learn their mother tongue and Confucian values.
This was to act as ballast against the increasing influence of western values and culture because English is the first language in Singapore schools and workplaces.
But emphasis on retaining the second language is not lost.
Mr Lee said: "So for the Malays, we want them to keep their Malay language alive then when we do business with Malaysia, with Indonesia is easy and we want some of our non-Malay officers also to understand Malay. For the Indians, they've got to keep the languages alive, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and even our Arabs, we're trying to get our Arabs to revive their Arabic so that they can connect with the Gulf states and we can do business with them. So two languages for Singaporeans will gives us a cultural and an economic advantage."
Mr Lee adds Singapore still has a Chinese-speaking population in the heartlands, while some students watch and understand Chinese features.
So he says do not lose touch with the language or something precious will be lost. - CNA/ch
By May Wong, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 14 July 2007 2224 hrs
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew says it is important for parents to give their children the basic foundation in a second language.
This is so that when a situation arises, they will be able to make use of their knowledge to converse.
Mr Lee was speaking at the opening of the Nanyang Technological University's Confucius Institute at One North on Saturday evening.
Many young Singaporeans use English more frequently than their mother tongue.
That is why Mr Lee suggests parents allow their children to pick up on the tones and words used in a second language.
Using a computer analogy, he says, the child can then store it for life, in the hard disc or brain.
MM Lee said: "My Chinese is inside the megabytes so when I'm using it, it comes out it's hyper-linked. When I'm not using it, I must put down control F to look for the word."
Mr Lee says learning two languages is not easy, something these students can identify with.
He acknowledges that one may face problems with many words and phrases in a second language like Chinese.
But he says at least they will learn the basic sentence structure and be able to convey ideas across.
MM Lee said: "So my advice to all parents is: never mind how much trouble your children are having in primary school and in secondary school. Get them to catch the sounds, sentence structure, words. They don't have to score A or A star, even a B or a C, but they've got as sense of the language, they can talk, they can listen."
Mr Lee says when he was prime minister, he encouraged the Chinese children to learn their mother tongue and Confucian values.
This was to act as ballast against the increasing influence of western values and culture because English is the first language in Singapore schools and workplaces.
But emphasis on retaining the second language is not lost.
Mr Lee said: "So for the Malays, we want them to keep their Malay language alive then when we do business with Malaysia, with Indonesia is easy and we want some of our non-Malay officers also to understand Malay. For the Indians, they've got to keep the languages alive, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and even our Arabs, we're trying to get our Arabs to revive their Arabic so that they can connect with the Gulf states and we can do business with them. So two languages for Singaporeans will gives us a cultural and an economic advantage."
Mr Lee adds Singapore still has a Chinese-speaking population in the heartlands, while some students watch and understand Chinese features.
So he says do not lose touch with the language or something precious will be lost. - CNA/ch
Friday, July 13, 2007
MINDEF takes PM Lee's son to task for contravening orders
MINDEF takes PM Lee's son to task for contravening orders
By S Ramesh/Gamar Abdul Aziz, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 12 July 2007 2348 hrs
SINGAPORE: The Defence Ministry has formally charged and reprimanded a full-time National Service officer after he contravened orders by broadcasting a letter of complaint to other servicemen.
Second Lieutenant Li Hongyi, who is a son of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, had apparently sent an email to the Defence Minister to lodge a complaint against another serviceman.
2LT Li is believed to have copied the email to other servicemen who are not directly under his command and are not in an official capacity to deal with the matter.
His action has been a subject of several on-line discussions here.
MINDEF says there are proper channels within the SAF to address grievances or concerns.
And in this incident, 2LT Li is said to have written a complaint against another officer whom he alleged had been absent without leave on two occasions.
According to a statement by MINDEF, 2LT Li had also said in his letter that he had reported the matter to the officer's supervisors but disciplinary action had not been carried out.
MINDEF adds that arising from 2LT Li's complaint, an investigation was conducted and appropriate disciplinary action has been meted out to the officers concerned.
The officer who was found to have been absent without leave will be court-martialled.
Two supervising officers have been issued warning letters for poor judgement in administering inappropriate disciplinary action.
MINDEF says to maintain organisational discipline, all SAF servicemen with complaints or grievances should take them up through proper channels for redress.
This is to ensure due process and to protect confidential information.
All complaints which are not anonymous are investigated and dealt with properly. - CNA/ir
---
The email that was sent out can be viewed (albeit with some names edited away) on tomorrow.sg
By S Ramesh/Gamar Abdul Aziz, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 12 July 2007 2348 hrs
SINGAPORE: The Defence Ministry has formally charged and reprimanded a full-time National Service officer after he contravened orders by broadcasting a letter of complaint to other servicemen.
Second Lieutenant Li Hongyi, who is a son of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, had apparently sent an email to the Defence Minister to lodge a complaint against another serviceman.
2LT Li is believed to have copied the email to other servicemen who are not directly under his command and are not in an official capacity to deal with the matter.
His action has been a subject of several on-line discussions here.
MINDEF says there are proper channels within the SAF to address grievances or concerns.
And in this incident, 2LT Li is said to have written a complaint against another officer whom he alleged had been absent without leave on two occasions.
According to a statement by MINDEF, 2LT Li had also said in his letter that he had reported the matter to the officer's supervisors but disciplinary action had not been carried out.
MINDEF adds that arising from 2LT Li's complaint, an investigation was conducted and appropriate disciplinary action has been meted out to the officers concerned.
The officer who was found to have been absent without leave will be court-martialled.
Two supervising officers have been issued warning letters for poor judgement in administering inappropriate disciplinary action.
MINDEF says to maintain organisational discipline, all SAF servicemen with complaints or grievances should take them up through proper channels for redress.
This is to ensure due process and to protect confidential information.
All complaints which are not anonymous are investigated and dealt with properly. - CNA/ir
---
The email that was sent out can be viewed (albeit with some names edited away) on tomorrow.sg
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Eatery closed for selling cardboard-stuffed buns
Eatery closed for selling cardboard-stuffed buns
By Alice Gu 2007-7-12
BEIJING authorities yesterday closed a dim-sum restaurant that sold steamed cardboard-stuffed buns, Beijing Times reported today.
The cardboard was a substitute for pork. The restaurant owner fled and is wanted for questioning.
The raid came after the restaurant in Beijing's Chaoyang District was reviewed by a local TV station a few days earlier.
The stuffing of the bun was made of cardboard and pork fat, said the TV program.
The recipe went like this: Cardboard was soaked in water and an industrial-use caustic soda, a poisonous chemical, was added. The cardboard lost its normal color and became fragile under the soda's strong causticity, making it look more like pork. Finally, pork-smell essence and pork fat were stirred into the concoction to make the stuffing more "vivid."
"It may save me almost 1,000 yuan (US$132.14) a day," said the shop owner, according to the program.
It was unclear how long the restaurant was serving the cardboard-filled dumplings.
The buns were prepared at a kitchen in nearby Taiyanggong Village to avoid people finding out. Officials with the Zuojiazhuang Industrial and Commercial Administration closed down the prep kitchen yesterday.
The prep-kitchen's landlord is being questioned, said the Beijing Times report.
Chaoyang District's Industrial and Commercial Administration said it will inspect the district's 58 dim-sum restaurants soon.
Pork prices in 36 major cities nationwide continued to rise last month due to a supply shortage.
Pig leg was sold at 19.56 yuan per kilogram on average in June, jumping 12.3 percent from May, and continuing April's upward trend, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
The video showed an under-cover review over the prep-kitchen:
http://news3.xinhuanet.com/video/2007-07/12/content_6363132.htm
By Alice Gu 2007-7-12
BEIJING authorities yesterday closed a dim-sum restaurant that sold steamed cardboard-stuffed buns, Beijing Times reported today.
The cardboard was a substitute for pork. The restaurant owner fled and is wanted for questioning.
The raid came after the restaurant in Beijing's Chaoyang District was reviewed by a local TV station a few days earlier.
The stuffing of the bun was made of cardboard and pork fat, said the TV program.
The recipe went like this: Cardboard was soaked in water and an industrial-use caustic soda, a poisonous chemical, was added. The cardboard lost its normal color and became fragile under the soda's strong causticity, making it look more like pork. Finally, pork-smell essence and pork fat were stirred into the concoction to make the stuffing more "vivid."
"It may save me almost 1,000 yuan (US$132.14) a day," said the shop owner, according to the program.
It was unclear how long the restaurant was serving the cardboard-filled dumplings.
The buns were prepared at a kitchen in nearby Taiyanggong Village to avoid people finding out. Officials with the Zuojiazhuang Industrial and Commercial Administration closed down the prep kitchen yesterday.
The prep-kitchen's landlord is being questioned, said the Beijing Times report.
Chaoyang District's Industrial and Commercial Administration said it will inspect the district's 58 dim-sum restaurants soon.
Pork prices in 36 major cities nationwide continued to rise last month due to a supply shortage.
Pig leg was sold at 19.56 yuan per kilogram on average in June, jumping 12.3 percent from May, and continuing April's upward trend, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
The video showed an under-cover review over the prep-kitchen:
http://news3.xinhuanet.com/video/2007-07/12/content_6363132.htm
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
PM's son's army gaffe and why we have to worry
Taken from here:
PM's son's army gaffe and why we have to worry
Read this from the HardwareZone's forums and confirmed the story with a friend in the military. A few bloggers have blogged about it too.
2LT Lee Hong Yi, better known as PM Lee's son, had fired off an e-mail within the military network lambasting the "quality of leadership" in the SAF to the top brass, including the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Defence Force.
He had done it after being punished for an error that was largely not his.
What was his fault, however, was involving just about the entire military force of Singapore in this one small matter of his, by addressing the e-mail to entire battalions of people. Committed by an ordinary serviceman, the offence would have warranted a formal military charge - and in an officer's case, his rank may be stripped.
Nothing so far (or so I hear) has been done to 2LT Lee, save that the Commanding Officer of his unit gave a speech to the entire unit the next day about "following the chain of command".
While one might argue that the e-mail comes from the military intranet and should not have been circulated in the general public (i.e. in HardwareZone), 2LT Lee surely could not have expected the matter not to leak out when he addressed it to so many people, most of them National Servicemen rather than full-time regulars.
If you looked through the thread, what's worrying is not the blatant abuse of family ties, by a person who is highly likely to take up an important position in our society in future.
Neither is it the fact that he is being given favourable treatment on two counts: first, the lack of punishment for his offence,and second, his pending disruption from the army (which he mentioned in the article), despite not being bonded under a government scholarship, which, as far as I know, is the only official way of obtaining disruption.
And of course, it's definitely not the "quality of leadership" in the SAF that 2LT Lee questioned that worries me.
No, it is the perceptible sense of fear in the Hardwarezone thread where the topic was discussed. No one dared to give the full details: one had to sieve through several pages of the thread before getting the full picture. Nicknames like "Bored Dragon" and "Golden bar" were given to the persons involved. There were even warnings given by concerned forum members about the ISD and MSD surveilling the thread.
If it were in other democratic countries like the US, such an incident would have been a scandal and generated a media frenzy. Questions would be asked about his conduct and his suitability for an important position in future. The public would have a field day airing their views on his actions.
What would have been the effect? 2LT Lee would learn a painful lesson in humility, and the transparency of the government would be highlighted, because they did not shield even the son of the most important official when he had done wrong.
The resulting fire of the public would simmer and die down, and the public would have been satisfied that their views were heard and their indignation expressed. That fire would have been a cleansing one.
Instead, the entire deed is hushed up. The original thread on HardwareZone was deleted. But perhaps the worst thing of all is that the public is censoring itself. People dare not to speak up about the topic.
Instead of fire, the incident is met only with self-defeat and fear. The public has lost its voice and its own opinion, and surrendered its position as the main critic of the government. And as we know, the local media surrendered its own position a long time ago.
It shouldn't be this way.
Governments should fear people, not the other way round.
It's just a minor incident - after all, there've been worse offences committed by officers in the SAF - but it speaks of a larger, darker, and insiduous problem.
"It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing...one loud noise, and it’s gone...Noise is relative to the silence preceding it - the more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap.- V, V for Vendetta
Errata: Li Hongyi does have the PSC Overseas scholarship, my bad.
PM's son's army gaffe and why we have to worry
Read this from the HardwareZone's forums and confirmed the story with a friend in the military. A few bloggers have blogged about it too.
2LT Lee Hong Yi, better known as PM Lee's son, had fired off an e-mail within the military network lambasting the "quality of leadership" in the SAF to the top brass, including the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Defence Force.
He had done it after being punished for an error that was largely not his.
What was his fault, however, was involving just about the entire military force of Singapore in this one small matter of his, by addressing the e-mail to entire battalions of people. Committed by an ordinary serviceman, the offence would have warranted a formal military charge - and in an officer's case, his rank may be stripped.
Nothing so far (or so I hear) has been done to 2LT Lee, save that the Commanding Officer of his unit gave a speech to the entire unit the next day about "following the chain of command".
While one might argue that the e-mail comes from the military intranet and should not have been circulated in the general public (i.e. in HardwareZone), 2LT Lee surely could not have expected the matter not to leak out when he addressed it to so many people, most of them National Servicemen rather than full-time regulars.
If you looked through the thread, what's worrying is not the blatant abuse of family ties, by a person who is highly likely to take up an important position in our society in future.
Neither is it the fact that he is being given favourable treatment on two counts: first, the lack of punishment for his offence,
And of course, it's definitely not the "quality of leadership" in the SAF that 2LT Lee questioned that worries me.
No, it is the perceptible sense of fear in the Hardwarezone thread where the topic was discussed. No one dared to give the full details: one had to sieve through several pages of the thread before getting the full picture. Nicknames like "Bored Dragon" and "Golden bar" were given to the persons involved. There were even warnings given by concerned forum members about the ISD and MSD surveilling the thread.
If it were in other democratic countries like the US, such an incident would have been a scandal and generated a media frenzy. Questions would be asked about his conduct and his suitability for an important position in future. The public would have a field day airing their views on his actions.
What would have been the effect? 2LT Lee would learn a painful lesson in humility, and the transparency of the government would be highlighted, because they did not shield even the son of the most important official when he had done wrong.
The resulting fire of the public would simmer and die down, and the public would have been satisfied that their views were heard and their indignation expressed. That fire would have been a cleansing one.
Instead, the entire deed is hushed up. The original thread on HardwareZone was deleted. But perhaps the worst thing of all is that the public is censoring itself. People dare not to speak up about the topic.
Instead of fire, the incident is met only with self-defeat and fear. The public has lost its voice and its own opinion, and surrendered its position as the main critic of the government. And as we know, the local media surrendered its own position a long time ago.
It shouldn't be this way.
Governments should fear people, not the other way round.
It's just a minor incident - after all, there've been worse offences committed by officers in the SAF - but it speaks of a larger, darker, and insiduous problem.
"It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing...one loud noise, and it’s gone...Noise is relative to the silence preceding it - the more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap.- V, V for Vendetta
Errata: Li Hongyi does have the PSC Overseas scholarship, my bad.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Pants on fire
June 30, 2007
Atrocious manners from Max Brenner staff and supervisor
ON MAY 30, my friend and I decided to patronise the Max Brenner Cafe at the Esplanade at around 10pm.
However, upon our arrival, we noticed that the cafe was packed and decided to wait behind a signage that was placed in the middle of the entrance which had a notice with instructions to wait to be seated.
After waiting for five minutes, I decided to go in to enquire if it was closed as no one attended to us although a lot of eye contact was exchanged between me and some of the staff who were not or seemed to be doing nothing.
Another reason we thought it might be closed was due to the placement of the signage in the middle of the entrance. Upon asking, I was informed that it would be closing at 11pm and after thanking the female staff for the information, I went back to wait with my friend.
After a further five minutes of waiting and with plenty more eye contact, my friend and I went in to ask the same female worker if we were going to be served.
She said she thought that I was going to leave after I had found out the closing time. I told her that if that were the case, my friend and I would not still be standing there and exchanging glances with her for five minutes.
To defend herself, she kept insisting that she thought we would be leaving and that it was a full house.
We requested to speak to the supervisor. To our horror, the supervisor had an even worse attitude then the worker.
After hearing what we had to say, he made some comments, such as: 'So what do you want me to do now?', 'I have observed you two since just now and I know you guys just came here to make a scene', 'Sorry ah! You want me to kneel down in front of you?' and the worst of all, 'I know you guys just want complimentary drinks. If you want, just say so and I will give to you'.
Seeing that there was no point in trying to explain to either supervisor or staff, my friend and I decided to leave.
I e-mailed this incident to the manager and his solution was to offer the usual 'Please allow us to make it up to you with a complimentary drink/meal' excuse as well as an investigation.
I did not take him up on his offer and, after two weeks of investigation, the manager has still not even got back to me.
Ong Weisheng
---
July 4, 2007
Customer who complained of service was unreasonable
I AM writing to clarify Mr Ong Weisheng's letter ('Atrocious manners from Max Brenner staff and supervisor'; ST Online Forum, June 30) pertaining to an incident at my shop on May 30. Following his initial feedback, I conducted an investigation. I also had an eyewitness account from another customer present that the situation was entirely provoked, resulting in the unpleasant exchange between my supervisor and Mr Ong.
I had told Mr Ong he would be updated on the outcome of my probe in an earlier e-mail reply. However, I am not surprised at his lack of patience in allowing due process in the matter as he displayed the same impatience while waiting outside my shop on May 30.
My CCTV recording paints the full picture as follows:
Mr Ong and a friend arrived outside my shop and waited a grand total of 48 seconds before approaching staff who were all busy with a full house inside. Mr Ong and his friend then returned to the queue post and waited a further two minutes before approach the same female employee and that is when the exchange took place with my supervisor joining in to assist the female employee.
Despite Mr Ong's inflated claim of how long he waited and the eyewitness who came forward to vouch for my employee's behaviour, I have asked both staff to resign in view of the fact that we are, after all, in the service industry and that means good service to all - regardless of the situation. Mr Ong has been told of the outcome of my investigation in an e-mail reply.
Kenning Koh
Managing Director
Max Brenner Chocolate Bar
Atrocious manners from Max Brenner staff and supervisor
ON MAY 30, my friend and I decided to patronise the Max Brenner Cafe at the Esplanade at around 10pm.
However, upon our arrival, we noticed that the cafe was packed and decided to wait behind a signage that was placed in the middle of the entrance which had a notice with instructions to wait to be seated.
After waiting for five minutes, I decided to go in to enquire if it was closed as no one attended to us although a lot of eye contact was exchanged between me and some of the staff who were not or seemed to be doing nothing.
Another reason we thought it might be closed was due to the placement of the signage in the middle of the entrance. Upon asking, I was informed that it would be closing at 11pm and after thanking the female staff for the information, I went back to wait with my friend.
After a further five minutes of waiting and with plenty more eye contact, my friend and I went in to ask the same female worker if we were going to be served.
She said she thought that I was going to leave after I had found out the closing time. I told her that if that were the case, my friend and I would not still be standing there and exchanging glances with her for five minutes.
To defend herself, she kept insisting that she thought we would be leaving and that it was a full house.
We requested to speak to the supervisor. To our horror, the supervisor had an even worse attitude then the worker.
After hearing what we had to say, he made some comments, such as: 'So what do you want me to do now?', 'I have observed you two since just now and I know you guys just came here to make a scene', 'Sorry ah! You want me to kneel down in front of you?' and the worst of all, 'I know you guys just want complimentary drinks. If you want, just say so and I will give to you'.
Seeing that there was no point in trying to explain to either supervisor or staff, my friend and I decided to leave.
I e-mailed this incident to the manager and his solution was to offer the usual 'Please allow us to make it up to you with a complimentary drink/meal' excuse as well as an investigation.
I did not take him up on his offer and, after two weeks of investigation, the manager has still not even got back to me.
Ong Weisheng
---
July 4, 2007
Customer who complained of service was unreasonable
I AM writing to clarify Mr Ong Weisheng's letter ('Atrocious manners from Max Brenner staff and supervisor'; ST Online Forum, June 30) pertaining to an incident at my shop on May 30. Following his initial feedback, I conducted an investigation. I also had an eyewitness account from another customer present that the situation was entirely provoked, resulting in the unpleasant exchange between my supervisor and Mr Ong.
I had told Mr Ong he would be updated on the outcome of my probe in an earlier e-mail reply. However, I am not surprised at his lack of patience in allowing due process in the matter as he displayed the same impatience while waiting outside my shop on May 30.
My CCTV recording paints the full picture as follows:
Mr Ong and a friend arrived outside my shop and waited a grand total of 48 seconds before approaching staff who were all busy with a full house inside. Mr Ong and his friend then returned to the queue post and waited a further two minutes before approach the same female employee and that is when the exchange took place with my supervisor joining in to assist the female employee.
Despite Mr Ong's inflated claim of how long he waited and the eyewitness who came forward to vouch for my employee's behaviour, I have asked both staff to resign in view of the fact that we are, after all, in the service industry and that means good service to all - regardless of the situation. Mr Ong has been told of the outcome of my investigation in an e-mail reply.
Kenning Koh
Managing Director
Max Brenner Chocolate Bar
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Singapore has 2% GST hike while....
Jul 5, 2:33 AM EDT
Australia raises minimum wage 2 percent effective Oct. 1
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australia's 1.2 million minimum wage workers were given a 2 percent pay increase Thursday by the government's Fair Pay Commission, the second pay increase in 10 months.
The commission raised the weekly federal minimum wage 10.26 Australian dollars (US$8.79; €6.45) to 522.12 Australian dollars (US$447.49; €328.60) effective Oct. 1, the commission said in a statement.
Hourly wages were boosted A$0.27 to A$13.74 from A$13.47 an hour. The new increase will apply to workers on pay scales up to A$700 a week.
Economists said the hikes, which fell well short of the A$28 per week demanded by unions, was too small to ignite inflation and put additional upward pressure on interest rates.
"These are very low numbers... It does mean that there is no extra impetus for higher wages in the economy from this decision," said Rob Henderson, senior economist at nabCapital.
"Therefore it is likely it will not feed into higher inflation and therefore higher interest rates," Henderson added.
Business groups had lobbied for a rise of A$10 per week. Unions had argued that rising costs of gasoline, healthcare and education warranted a more significant rise in the base wage.
Australia raises minimum wage 2 percent effective Oct. 1
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australia's 1.2 million minimum wage workers were given a 2 percent pay increase Thursday by the government's Fair Pay Commission, the second pay increase in 10 months.
The commission raised the weekly federal minimum wage 10.26 Australian dollars (US$8.79; €6.45) to 522.12 Australian dollars (US$447.49; €328.60) effective Oct. 1, the commission said in a statement.
Hourly wages were boosted A$0.27 to A$13.74 from A$13.47 an hour. The new increase will apply to workers on pay scales up to A$700 a week.
Economists said the hikes, which fell well short of the A$28 per week demanded by unions, was too small to ignite inflation and put additional upward pressure on interest rates.
"These are very low numbers... It does mean that there is no extra impetus for higher wages in the economy from this decision," said Rob Henderson, senior economist at nabCapital.
"Therefore it is likely it will not feed into higher inflation and therefore higher interest rates," Henderson added.
Business groups had lobbied for a rise of A$10 per week. Unions had argued that rising costs of gasoline, healthcare and education warranted a more significant rise in the base wage.
Ex-NKF chairman Richard Yong arrested in HK
Ex-NKF chairman Richard Yong arrested in HK
FORMER National Kidney Foundation chairman Richard Yong has been arrested in Hong Kong after fleeing the country illegally and failing to hand over his assets after declaring bankruptcy.
Yong, 65, will be brought to court there on Thursday to face extradition proceedings.
The Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) said that the Hong Kong Department of Justice has confirmed that Richard Yong has been arrested by local authorities on Wednesday morning in line with Singapore's request.
Hong Kong police have also arrested Yong's wife, Ong Shu Kio, also in her 60s.
The Subordinate Courts had earlier issued a warrant for his arrest, and Yong was declared a wanted man on June 13.
The charges: Fleeing the country illegally on May 17 and failing to hand over assets as required by the Bankruptcy Act.
Yong's departure came in the wake of revelations on May 9 that he had sold three apartments for $7.5 million shortly after losing a suit the NKF had filed against him, ex-board members Loo Say San and Matilda Chua, as well as former chief T.T. Durai.
The charity's lawyers on May 11 obtained a Mareva Injunction - requiring Yong to give details of his assets, and to prevent him from disposing of them.
Three days later, the NKF filed a police report against Yong alleging that he sold his property to escape paying the $11 million he owes the charity in damages.
On May 16, Yong was convicted on criminal charges and fined the maximum $5,000 for failing to exercise due diligence and allowing for over-payment to an Indian software firm.
He was also declared a bankrupt on the same day for failing to pay nearly $1 million to the charity after losing the civil suit earlier this year. But he crossed the border into Malaysia late that night before the immigration authorities could be alerted.
Yong was supposed to have filed a Statement of Affairs -a written declaration of a bankrupt's assets and liabilities - to the OA (Official Assignee) on May 15. The statement came to the Insolvency and Public Trustee's Office, but only after it had closed for the day.
The OA is an officer of the court who administers the affairs of bankrupts.
In a statement on June 13, the Ministry of Law said that the OA had worked with relevant authorities to determine if Yong fraudulently disposed of his property.
On May 21, Yong had filed a brief affidavit from Kuala Lumpur stating that he had only $247 in a bank account and that the cash from selling his properties had gone towards repaying loans and legal fees.
The Bankruptcy Act states that it is an offence for a bankrupt to give away or transfer assets for a period of five years prior to the date of the bankruptcy order.
Those found guilty face up to three years in jail and a maximum $10,000 fine.
Bankrupts who leave the country without permission face up to two years in jail and a maximum $10,000 fine.
FORMER National Kidney Foundation chairman Richard Yong has been arrested in Hong Kong after fleeing the country illegally and failing to hand over his assets after declaring bankruptcy.
Yong, 65, will be brought to court there on Thursday to face extradition proceedings.
The Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) said that the Hong Kong Department of Justice has confirmed that Richard Yong has been arrested by local authorities on Wednesday morning in line with Singapore's request.
Hong Kong police have also arrested Yong's wife, Ong Shu Kio, also in her 60s.
The Subordinate Courts had earlier issued a warrant for his arrest, and Yong was declared a wanted man on June 13.
The charges: Fleeing the country illegally on May 17 and failing to hand over assets as required by the Bankruptcy Act.
Yong's departure came in the wake of revelations on May 9 that he had sold three apartments for $7.5 million shortly after losing a suit the NKF had filed against him, ex-board members Loo Say San and Matilda Chua, as well as former chief T.T. Durai.
The charity's lawyers on May 11 obtained a Mareva Injunction - requiring Yong to give details of his assets, and to prevent him from disposing of them.
Three days later, the NKF filed a police report against Yong alleging that he sold his property to escape paying the $11 million he owes the charity in damages.
On May 16, Yong was convicted on criminal charges and fined the maximum $5,000 for failing to exercise due diligence and allowing for over-payment to an Indian software firm.
He was also declared a bankrupt on the same day for failing to pay nearly $1 million to the charity after losing the civil suit earlier this year. But he crossed the border into Malaysia late that night before the immigration authorities could be alerted.
Yong was supposed to have filed a Statement of Affairs -a written declaration of a bankrupt's assets and liabilities - to the OA (Official Assignee) on May 15. The statement came to the Insolvency and Public Trustee's Office, but only after it had closed for the day.
The OA is an officer of the court who administers the affairs of bankrupts.
In a statement on June 13, the Ministry of Law said that the OA had worked with relevant authorities to determine if Yong fraudulently disposed of his property.
On May 21, Yong had filed a brief affidavit from Kuala Lumpur stating that he had only $247 in a bank account and that the cash from selling his properties had gone towards repaying loans and legal fees.
The Bankruptcy Act states that it is an offence for a bankrupt to give away or transfer assets for a period of five years prior to the date of the bankruptcy order.
Those found guilty face up to three years in jail and a maximum $10,000 fine.
Bankrupts who leave the country without permission face up to two years in jail and a maximum $10,000 fine.
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