Gap may widen between rich and poor in Myanmar – Economists

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Economists warn that although the super rich in Myanmar may get richer, the gap between the rich and poor may grow wider in the next 10 years.

Currently there are only 40 people in Myanmar who own more than US$ 30 million in personal wealth. By 2022 the super rich will increase to 307 according to Wealth-X, a global leader on ultra high net worth (UHNW) individuals.

This is in a country still considered one of the poorest in East Asia, according to the World Bank, with an estimated GDP per capita of between US$ 800 and US$ 1,000.

“At the moment, the gap between the rich and the poor of Myanmar is the highest in the world,” said the economist Dr. Aung Ko Ko.

“The existence of the gap between the rich and the poor depends on the country’s policy of income distribution. If the country is depending on selling the country’s resources such as oil and gas, the gap may continue to exist,” he added.

As the government embarks on a series of political and economic reforms, foreign investors and capital are pouring in as companies vie for lucrative contracts in new hotel businesses, construction, natural gas and energy. Myanmar looks set to embrace the economic growth witnessed by the emerging Southeast Asian economies in the early 90’s.

However, economists fear that if Myanmar fails to rethink some of its economic policies on how to balance the distribution of income, the rich will only grow richer while the poor will grow poorer. Such income inequality can lead to political instability and lower growth in the future.

Myanmar connection-Godfather of Heroin-lo hsing han_ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ ေသဆုံးသြားပါျပီ။

source niknayman

ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ ေသဆုံးသြားပါျပီ။

ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ (Godfather of Heroin) ကို ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ ့ကေန ၁၉၇၃ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ဖမ္းဆီးမိခဲ့ျပီး ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြ လက္ထဲကို လႊဲေျပာင္းေပးအပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြက ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ကို ေသဒဏ္အမိန္ ့ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ၁၉၈၀ ခုႏွစ္မွာ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ကေန လႊတ္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ဟာ ၁၉၉၂ ခုႏွစ္မွာ သူရဲ ့သားျဖစ္သူ စတီဖန္ေလာ (Stephen Law) နဲ ့ Asia World ကုမၸဏီကို တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြဟာ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ခြန္ဆာ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္တို ့ကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာက မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးအမွဳေတြနဲ ့ အလိုရွိေနတာေတာင္ အပ္ႏွံလြဲေျပာင္းျခင္း မရွိဘဲ၊ တရား၀င္လက္ခံထားျပီး အေယာင္ျပ ျပစ္ဒဏ္ေတြခ်မွတ္ျပခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ဆုံးမွာ မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးေၾကာင့္ ရရွိခဲ့တဲ့ ေငြမည္းေတြ ေငြျဖဴျဖစ္ေအာင္ ၀ိုင္း၀န္းကူညီေဆာင္ရြက္ျပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ တရား၀င္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ကိုင္ခြင့္ေတြ ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြရဲ ့ ဘယ္သူေသေသ ၄င္းတို ့အက်ဳိးစီးပြားအတြက္သာ ေရွ ့တန္းတင္ကာ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ေတြနဲ ့ ဆက္ဆံေရးကိုသာ အေလးေပးျပီး၊ ျမန္မာရဲ ့ အနာဂတ္လူငယ္ေတြၾကား မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးေတြ ပ်ံ ့ႏွံ ့ေရာက္ရွိမွာကို အလ်ဥ္းဂရုစိုက္ျခင္း မရွိခဲ့ပါဖူး။

ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြနဲ ့ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ေတြ ပုလင္းတူ ဗူးဆို ့ ေပါင္းဖက္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ ့ အနာဂတ္ၾကယ္ပြင့္ေလးမ်ား မူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးနဲ ့ ပ်က္ဆီးမွဳေတြ မ်ားျပားစြာ ရွိေနတာမို ့ အမ်ဳိးသားအေရး ထိခိုက္လွ်က္ရွိတာ ၾကာပါျပီ။ ဘိန္းဘုရင္ ေလာစစ္ဟန္ ေသဆုံးသြားေပမယ့္ သူ ့ရဲ ့ ေနာက္ဆက္တြဲ ကြင္းဆက္ေတြနဲ ့ ျမန္မာအာဏာရွင္ေတြကေတာ့ ဆက္လက္ အသက္၀င္လွဳပ္ရွားေနဆဲပါဘဲ။

Aung San Suu Kyi @ World Economic Forum “Myanmar? rule of law?”-BENGALI-ETHNICS-VIDEOS-ENGL.

Burma: Discussion on Donation of Ex-Junta’s Cronies Tycoons for Charitable Good Causes -VIDEO

Burma_Myanmar bans social media use under telecoms bill

12. november 2012   A new telecommunications bill could prohibit the use of social media and unregistered gadgets in Myanmar.

Critics have lashed out against the bill, which was made public on November 7, saying it is oppressive and violates the rights of individuals.

Tin Nyunt, chief editor of the Itzen Journal, noted that one of the articles under the proposed telecommunications prohibits the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

“Article 66 needs detailed and clear definition of using social media, which is widely used across the world. If it is not explained more definitely, this paragraph will oppress freedom of speech,” said Ei Maung, the project manager of Fairway Web Development Company.

Under Article 64, “anyone who possesses or uses an electronic apparatus without licence shall be sued and punished up to three years in prison or pay a fine or both if his or her act is found guilty”.

Corruption in Burma: Part-I+ III Getting a Government Job

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More than 3,000 teak logs seized in sting operation

CHIANG MAI: Authorities have confiscated more than 3,000 teak logs estimated to be worth more than 200 million baht and believed to have been smuggled into Thailand from Burma.

A security force led by the Department of Special Investigation seized more than 3,000 teak logs worth about 200 million baht in Chiang Mai. The logs are alleged to have been smuggled into Thailand from Burma through nearby Mae Hong Son. CHEEWIN SATTHA

A joint operation between the Department of Special Investigation, Customs Department and Royal Forestry Department raided two sawmills owned by Suksawat Group Co yesterday and seized the logs.

The operation was carried out following a complaint from Justice Minister Pirapan Salirathavibhaga that a company had imported teak wood illegally from Burma through Mae Hong Son.

DSI deputy chief Narat Savetnant alleged Anton Co had falsely declared the confiscated logs to the Customs Office in Mae Hong Son as sawn timber using 57 documents that claimed the imports had been approved by Burmese officials.

The import documents were later found to be counterfeit, Mr Narat said.

The crackdown has raised questions over whether local officials responsible for approving the import of the confiscated wood were aware of the company’s activities.

No charges have been made against officials but they will face an inquiry to determine if they had anything to do with the illegal wood imports and whether they should take responsibility, Mr Narat said.

The DSI unit which investigates special criminal cases in the North has been looking into the case since February. It had learned by September that Anton Co had imported sawn teak from Burma under suspicious circumstances.

The company owner was charged by the DSI with violating regulations on the import of sawn timber.

Anton Co said last month it was considering suing the Forestry Department for refusing to renew its licence to transport teak logs from Burma through Salawin National Park in Mae Hong Son.

Phichet Lertlum-umphaiwong, the company’s deputy managing director, said its permission to transport teak expired a month ago and the department had refused to renew it, even though it had previously been renewed on a yearly basis.

Natural Resources and Environment Minister Suwit Khunkitti claimed at the time that the company did not have an export licence from Burma and no source-of-origin documents to prove where the logs came from. Anton Co insisted legal documents were issued by Myanmar Timber Enterprise, the government-owned corporation and sole extractor of timber in Burma.

http://www.bangkokpost.com./news/local/211504/more-than-3000-teak-logs-seized-in-sting-operation?

 

Military junta rewards arms traffickers with ‘Thiri Pyanchi’ for their “contribution” to football development

AsiaNews.it

Rangoon (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Instead of people who made positive contributions to society, cronies associated with Burma’s military junta are given prizes. Tay Za and Zaw Zaw, two of the most powerful and richest businessmen in the country, were awarded on 4 January, Independence Day, one of Burma’s highest honours, the “Thiri Pyanchi,” a prize dropped in 1978 by then dictator Ne Win but recently reintroduced. State-run media made no mention of the honours conferred on the two men, both of whom are viewed as arms traffickers by the international community, The Irrawaddy reported.

Tay Za chairs the Htoo Group of Companies and Zaw Zaw runs the Max Myanmar Group of Companies. They were honoured with the title for their “outstanding work” in helping Burma develop its economy and for their contributions to the development of professional football (soccer) in the country. In fact, their close ties to the junta’s top generals have won them lucrative business concessions in a number of key industries, including logging, gems and jewellery, tourism and transportation.

In complete disregard of the law and human rights, the two have been involved in international trade, exporting rice, rubber and other agricultural products and importing machines. Last year, they both entered the field of professional sports promotion, playing a key role in the creation of Burma’s new national football league. They are also among the largest investors in the regime’s newly built Yadanabon Cyber City near Mandalay.

Although dominant figures in Burma’s business world, they are international pariahs. Both they and their companies are under Western sanctions.

According to the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Tay Za is “an arms dealer and financial henchman of Burma’s repressive junta,” whilst Zaw Zaw’s Max Myanmar has provided important services in support of the regime, particularly in the form of construction projects.

Chan Tun, a veteran politician in Rangoon, said that in the past, the title of Thiri Pyanchi was awarded to hardworking officials and businessmen whose efforts benefited the people. “Now it is for cronies who contribute to the businesses of the generals.”