Thursday, July 23, 2009

This did not happen: President Hu Jintao's son linked to corruption

Good luck getting any search engines to return a search for "Hu Jintao son corruption." As far as I can tell, the article itself has been stripped from all non-censored websites, such as the Telegraph. That's why you'll get an extended excerpt this time, from Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Hu's connection to any public scandal, however remote, could prove embarrassing to the Communist Party and President Hu's administration, which has waged a high-profile campaign against corruption in China. During the Hu administration there has been a strenuous effort to keep leaders' family members out of the spotlight.

Namibian investigators say that after the Namibian government signed a $54 million deal with Nuctech to provide cargo scanners for Namibia's ports and airports and made a $12 million down payment, the Chinese firm paid $12 million to a local consultancy, Teko Trading.

"It goes to corruption if these people were given this money in order to influence the authorities to give a contract to this company," said Paulus Noa, director of the Anti-Corruption Commission.

Police have already arrested Teko's co-owners and the person identified as a Nuctech employee.

The three have each been charged with fraud, bribery and failing to report a corrupt transaction. They were expected to appear in court Wednesday. Their lawyers couldn't be reached to comment.

In a sign of the sensitivity of the case, Chinese-language versions of recent foreign news reports about Nuctech were removed from at least two Chinese Web sites. Efforts to search for "Hu Haifeng" or "Nuctech" on Baidu.com, China's most popular Internet search engine, returned a message saying: "The results of your search may not comply with relevant laws, regulations and policies."

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