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US-born businessman arrested in Russia for multimillion-dollar fraud
9 Dec, 2021 14:33
© Telegram / Объединённая пресс-служба судов Санкт-Петербурга
A St. Petersburg court has detained a US-born businessman on suspicion of large-scale fraud. August Meyer is a co-owner of Russia’s third-largest cosmetics chain, Rive Gauche, and e-commerce site Ulmart.
Meyer – one of the most prominent foreign investors in Russia – is being investigated on two counts of fraud involving loans from Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, worth 2.4 billion rubles ($31 million).
The funds were provided to Ulmart just weeks before the internet trading firm was declared bankrupt at the start of 2020. One of the company’s co-founders also faces charges of fraud worth more than $13 million.
The St. Petersburg court’s press service shared videos from Wednesday’s hearing at the courtroom via its Telegram channel, showing Meyer speaking English and saying that he is a citizen of Russia, Malta and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Meyer was born in Chicago, but said he gave up his US citizenship.
Meyer has been placed under a two-month arrest, until February 7, 2022. His lawyers sought a bail of 5 million rubles ($68,000) but the court rejected it. The businessman denies any guilt. Meyer’s wife, Inna, was also detained as part of the case.
According to Forbes, Meyer is number 181 in its list of 200 of the wealthiest businessmen in Russia, with a net worth of $650 million.
Maybe, a little less today! Was this a case of the bank being reckless, or did Meyer hide some of the facts when he applied for the loan?
Nobel Peace Prize winner sentenced to prison
Political corruption in Myanmar sends Suu Kyi to prison
6 Dec, 2021 09:22
Myanmar’s deposed state counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been sentenced to four years in prison on the first charges leveled against her by the ruling military junta. Former President Win Myint received a similar sentence.
Suu Kyi was found guilty on Monday of inciting unrest and violating Covid-19 restrictions, a source familiar with the case told the media. The proceedings were closed to journalists and other spectators.
The incitement charge was reportedly linked to posts the National League for Democracy party shared online after its leaders, who had included Suu Kyi, were detained by the military in early 2021. In them, the party had called on other nations not to cooperate with the junta.
The purported Covid-19 rules violation occurred during an election campaign event in November 2020. Suu Kyi denied she had broken the rules of her house arrest by waving to a National League for Democracy party campaign convoy that had passed in front of her house in the capital, Naypyidaw.
The 76-year-old politician, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent struggle against military rule, faces a total of 11 charges, including anti-corruption law violations and misappropriating funds, which could see her being sentenced to up to 102 years behind bars, according to some reports. The UN has previously denounced the trial as politically motivated.
Suu Kyi’s co-defendant, ousted president Win Myint, was also sentenced to four years in jail. Suu Kyi became the state counsellor – a post equivalent to prime minister – after her party won a landslide victory in the 2015 parliamentary elections.
In 2020, her party won the election again, but the military declared the results to be fraudulent and deposed Suu Kyi’s government in a coup d’état on February 1, 2021. There has been public resistance to the military administration ever since, with Suu Kyi’s supporters staging mass protests that sparked violent crackdowns by the junta.
On Sunday, during one such protest in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, a security forces vehicle rammed the crowd, killing five protesters.
The military just refuse to let go of power, not for the sake of Myanmar (Burma), but for their own sakes. They will never allow democracy to raise its head again.
Economic superpower faked stats for years
16 Dec, 2021 13:01
The Japanese government has tampered with official statistics for years, the country’s prime minister has admitted. It's a blow to the credibility of data that investors rely on and brings into question Japan's claimed GDP.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida confirmed on Wednesday allegations made by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that for years, the government overstated the value of some construction orders received from building companies.
The newspaper reported that the infrastructure ministry instructed local government officials to inflate construction contract figures for the past eight years, a possibly illegal act that may have distorted key economic statistics of the world's third largest economy.
The Asahi Shimbun cites several ministry sources as saying that about 10,000 reports were rewritten every year.
“It is regrettable that such a thing has happened,” said the prime minister, promising to examine what steps could be taken to avoid such an incident from happening again.
The government has announced it will set up a third-party committee to investigate the misreporting of the data and present the findings within a month.
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, total construction contracts in 2020 reached 79.598 trillion yen ($700 billion).
The scandal has led to some opposition lawmakers questioning the validity of the government's economic policy, as the rewritten data is used to estimate Japan's gross domestic product (GDP).
Economy Minister Daishiro Yamagiwa, however, downplayed the concerns, saying any impact on GDP data was likely to be small.
Then what was the point?
Doubts about government statistics were raised in Japan before, when a flaw was discovered in the health ministry’s wage data in 2018.
I don't suppose any other country would ever do such a thing?
French hackers create 54,000 fake vaccine passports – reports
16 Dec, 2021 20:58
Hackers reportedly obtained the personal details of a nurse in the French city of Nantes and used this data to create 54,000 working vaccine passes. Meanwhile, the French government says it’s detected 110,000 such fakes to date.
The nurse’s story was reported by Ouest-France on Thursday, with the news site claiming that all the fake passes are now in circulation.
France’s health pass system works similarly to vaccine pass setups in use throughout the EU. The system works by pairing a public key (contained in the QR code on a vaccinated person’s phone) with a private key (held by the hospital, pharmacy or healthcare provider that vaccinated them). Venues checking the validity of someone’s Covid pass scan the code and receive a green tick if it matches the private key and a red cross if it doesn’t.
One private key, such as the one held by the nurse in Nantes, can be used to generate an unlimited number of working vaccine passes, making this information highly valuable to hackers and scammers, some of whom then sell the fraudulent passes online.
Revoking the fake passes presents authorities with an additional problem. To cancel a fake vaccine pass, every pass generated from the same private key must be canceled, meaning new passes have to be created for those actually entitled to them.
The story from Nantes is the latest in a line of similar incidents in France. A pharmacist in nearby Angers said in September that his private key was hacked and used to create 2,700 false passes, which he discovered when he noticed an unusually high number of requests on the pharmacy computer to authenticate the new passes.
In the suburbs of Paris last month, a doctor was arrested after allegedly selling at least 220 fake passes for the princely sum of €1,000 ($1,132) each.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Thursday that the government has detected 110,000 fake vaccine passes in circulation, and has arrested more than 100 people in connection with the forgeries. Penalties for using a fake pass can stretch to five years in prison, but Darmanin said that authorities will give amnesty to anyone who “recognizes their mistake and gets vaccinated.”
Introduced during the summer, France’s ‘health pass’ system requires citizens to present proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test to access bars, restaurants, shopping malls or public transport, among other locations. The system has proven controversial, and thousands of protesters have flooded the streets of Paris and other major cities almost every weekend since its introduction. As of January, all adults in France will need a booster shot to keep their health pass valid.
In France, thousands of protesters flood the streets every weekend, it's just a matter of finding a cause.
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