Tag: InternationalNews

{{Switzerland has granted former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky a one-year residence permit, a government spokeswoman said on Monday, three months after he was released from a Russian jail.}}

Once Russia’s richest man, the 50-year-old former oil tycoon has made Switzerland his base since he was freed by Russian President Vladimir Putin after serving 10 years in prison for fraud and tax evasion.

Switzerland said it had decided to grant him residency after an application by the Swiss canton, or region, of St Gallen, where his wife lives and where his children go to school. It said there were no political circumstances justifying a refusal of a permit and that it would review his case after one year.

The canton had based its request on important public interests and “significant fiscal interests for the canton”, the Swiss migration office said in a statement.

Khodorkovsky has ruled out trying to recover the fortune that made him Russia’s richest man, but two multi-billion-dollar law suits involving his defunct oil giant Yukos could be decided this year.

Khodorkovsky, whose oil company Yukos was broken up and sold off, mainly into state hands, has said he will not get involved in politics. He has spent much of the last few months travelling, appearing in the Ukrainian capital Kiev earlier this month with remarks fiercely critical of Putin.

“Before prison and in prison I realised that business was very important. It is what gives us food, clothes, conditions to live in. But there is something even more important. I am trying to find this ‘something’ in me,” he told a gathering at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute this month, according to a transcript on his web site.

“I think that people who went to the Maidan (protests in Kiev) and stood there under a rain of bullets had looked for it and found it.”

Switzerland, a popular destination for Russia’s wealthy elite, has so far declined to follow the United States and European Union in imposing travel bans and asset freezes on a group of Russian officials over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

reuters

{{In one week, 370 immigrant children, most of them from Central America, were found abandoned in Mexico, after traffickers promised to take them to the United States but left them to their own devices after being paid thousands of dollars, authorities said.}}

Almost half of them, 163 children under the age of 18, were found traveling alone, Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) said in a statement.

Each month, thousands of immigrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, attempt to emigrate to the United States, crossing several borders in the process, despite the threat from drug gangs that kidnap, murder and rape women.

The children told federal migration agents that their ‘guides’ abandoned them after accepting $3,000 to $5,000 in payments, INM said.

The children and young people, who came from three of the poorest countries in Central America, were found between March 17 and 24, in 14 different states in Mexico.

“The majority of the children showed signs of extreme fatigue, foot injuries, dehydration and disorientation whereby they didn’t know where they had been abandoned,” INM said.

Many immigrants are able to get to the U.S. and then entrust their children to the traffickers who pay large sums of money for them.

In the week the children were found, a total of 1,895 immigrants from various countries were detected in Mexico from countries as far away as Somalia, Japan and Syria, among others.

wirestory

{{Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who is at the centre of China’s biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said.}}

More than 300 of Zhou’s relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who have been briefed on the investigation, told media.

The sheer size of the asset seizures and the scale of the investigations into the people around Zhou – both unreported until now – make the corruption probe unprecedented in modern China and would appear to show that President Xi Jinping is tackling graft at the highest levels.

But it may also be driven partly by political payback after Zhou angered leaders such as Xi by opposing the ouster of former high-flying politician Bo Xilai, who was jailed for life in September for corruption and abuse of power.

Zhou, 71, has been under virtual house arrest since authorities began formally investigating him late last year. He is the most senior Chinese politician to be ensnared in a corruption investigation since the Communist Party swept to power in 1949.

“It’s the ugliest in the history of the New China,” said one of the sources, who has ties to the leadership, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for speaking to the foreign media about elite politics.

The government has yet to make any official statement about Zhou or the case against him and it has not been possible to contact Zhou, his family, associates or staff for comment. It is not clear if any of them have lawyers.

The party’s anti-corruption watchdog and the prosecutor’s office did not respond to requests for comment. In the secretive world of China’s Communist Party, targets of its investigations usually disappear, often for months or even years, until an official announcement is made.

Xi ordered a task force formed in late November or early December to look into accusations against Zhou, sources have previously told Reuters.

They have not said what the allegations were except that they were related to violating party discipline, official jargon for corruption.

A third source with ties to the leadership said Zhou had refused to cooperate with investigators, insisting he was the victim of a power struggle.

“Zhou Yongkang is tough and claims its political persecution,” the source said.

Zhou rose through the ranks of China’s oil and gas sector before joining the elite Politburo Standing Committee in 2007, where as domestic security chief his budget exceeded defense spending.

He retired in 2012 and was last seen at an alumni event at the China University of Petroleum on October 1.