• Chinese president meets Chinese, Nigerian businessmen

invested over $8 billion in Sudan, including the 1,500 km pipeline to transport oil to the Marsa al-Bashair harbour terminal near the Port of Sudan on the Red Sea. By 2005, China was purchasing between 50 and 60 per cent of Sudan crude production and Sudan alone accounts for 7 to 9 per cent of Chinese oil imports.
China is also active in Africa's smaller oil exporting countries as well. In 2003, China imported one million tons of crude oil from Congo-Brazzaville, accounting for 1.5 per cent of Chinese oil imports. China is the third largest importer of oil from Equatorial Guinea after the US and Spain. Total-Gabon and Sinopec signed an agreement in 2004 to supply China with one million tons of crude oil a year, making China the third largest consumer of Gabonese crude after the US and France. The Chinese petroleum company Zhongyuan Exploration Bureau is even drilling on behalf of Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned oil company, in the Gambella Basin in Western Ethiopia.
Non-oil resource extraction is also attracting Chinese investment in Africa as well. Over 60 per cent of Gabon's, and a large part of Equatorial Guinea's, timber production is purchased by China. China is the world's largest consumer of copper and has invested $170 million in the Zambian copper mining sector. The Chambezi copper mine, which was purchased in 1999, is now its largest Chinese mining operation in Africa. Moreover, China is increasingly involved the Democratic Republic of Congo, investing in cobalt and copper mines as well.
Although resource extraction is the center-piece of China's new Africa push, non-resource based investments have not been ignored. In Ghana, Sino Hydro signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ghanaian Government to construct the Bui Dam. The $500 million project is expected to augment Ghanaian power supply from the Akosombo Dam and the Aboadze Thermal Plant.
In Zimbabwe, a number of farms seized from white farmers by the government have been leased to the China State Farms and Agribusiness Corporation, which will revive and enhance production on the Fenemere and Dalkeith farms near the Mazvikadai Dam and the Clydedale and Liverdale farms near the Biri Dam. Chinese companies have also leased agricultural land in Zambia and Tanzania.
Even in post-war Sierra Leone, Chinese investors see possibilities. Henon Guoji, a Chinese company, is starting construction of the $200 million Lumley Beach Hotel, which will include a conference centre, a sports facility, casino and night club. The Chinese state-owned company, Beijing Urban Construction Group, has purchased and restored The Bintumani, Sierra Leone's largest hotel, at a cost of $10 million and it is already up and running. Chinese companies in Sierra Leone have also invested in a sugar plant and a tractor factory, and the Chinese government has built a new office block, parliament buildings and a new military headquarters for the government of Sierra Leone.
The list continues: the China Road and Bridge Corporation built the Tambach-Kabarnet road in Western Kenya and refurbished part of the Nairobi-Mombasa road. The Bata-Mongono road in Gabon was built with financial and technical assistance from China, while the Zhengxing Telecom is refurbishing Djibouti's telecom network.
China is constructing one of Africa's largest dams in Ethiopia and is assisting in the construction and launch of a Nigerian communications satellite in 2007. Chinese firms have also entered into fish processing joint ventures in Gabon and Namibia and the Qingdao Municipal Government has invested in a textile factory in the new Mulungashi Industrial Estates near Kabwe in Zambia. China has also constructed a new Foreign Affairs Ministry building in Uganda and Djibouti and built a new stadium in Mali.
Although France, the UK and the US still account for 70 per cent of Foreign Direct Investment inflows to Africa, all that will change with the emergence of China's Africa focus. So maybe Westerners should start to be more honest with themselves and Africans and stop all this useless armchair pitying.
Mark J. Sorbara is a freelance writer and researcher on African issues.
Document AFNWS00020060413e24d003ju

CAN THE MAFIA EVER BE BROKEN?
by Simon Edge

1,666 words

13 April 2006

The Daily Express

THEEXP

28 29

English

(c) 2006 Express Newspapers
As Sicily's crime 'boss of bosses' is caught after 43 years on the run, we reveal how his arrest - as well as the emergence of brutal new rivals - may finally spell the end for the Cosa Nostra
THE MAN known as Uncle Bernie was said to have grasped a basic rule of the modern world: what does not exist in the media does not exist in reality.
Since becoming head of the most blood-spattered of all Mafia organisations, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, in 1995, his main aim was to stop making headlines.
His Family would carry out no more bloodbaths of rivals, or assassinations of state prosecutors (such as the car bomb attacks which blew up Italy's leading anti-Mafia investigators in 1992). Instead, it would quietly do what it was best at – taking huge rake-offs from the public sector cash pouring into Sicily from the European Union.
As a ploy, this has reaped enormous dividends. Uncle Bernie was prepared to share profits and was fond of using the saying "eat and let eat". By looking after Mafia members in prison, he had stemmed the tide of defectors turning themselves in to the authorities. With 96 per cent of government contracts in Sicily estimated to be rigged, whitecollar pickings were excellent.
His career came to a dramatic end this week amid the kind of headlines he had spent a decade trying to avoid. The country had just voted in a knife-edge general election and Silvio Berlusconi, the country's most controversial leader since Mussolini, who has long been accused of having Mafia connections, was refusing to concede defeat. But this political chaos was knocked into second place on the news by the capture of Italy's most wanted fugitive.
Bernardo Provenzano – nicknamed The Tractor after his habit of mowing down opponents with a machine gun in his early years – was last photographed in 1963 when he was 30. A household name in Italy, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment in his absence for a string of murders but people could only guess what he looked like. A fortnight ago his Romebased lawyer gave an interview in which he claimed his client was no longer alive. "Take it from me, he is dead, " he said.
BUT on Tuesday morning the police tracked Provenzano to an isolated farmhouse near his home town of Corleone – immortalised as the birthplace of the Marlon Brando character in the film The Godfather – and by the evening the grey-haired, bespectacled "boss of bosses" was in jail after 43 years on the run.
"It is an arrest of exceptional significance because the man who is the actual head of the Mafia has been arrested and will now face justice, " said a police statement. "His years of living on the run have come to an end." For Italians, struggling to escape from decades of Mafia extortion and political corruption, the key question is whether the arrest of Provenzano really is a massive blow to the Cosa Nostra, or whether, Hydra-like, it will grow another head to replace the one that has been cut off.
Yesterday, further details emerged of how the 73-year-old Mr Big – who is said to have killed at least 40 people as well as ordering the deaths of at least 120 others – was caught. Ironically, for a man also known as The Accountant for his money laundering skills which helped the Sicilian Mob recycle funds made through extortion, drug running and arms smuggling, he was brought down by his unwillingness to do his own laundry.
He had sent his dirty underpants and vests to his wife Saveria, who lives in Corleone with their daughter.
Despite being watched by the police for years, they have never been seen with Provenzano. The Mafia boss refused to use any kind of telephone, communicating orders via notes written on a portable typewriter but his fate was sealed when police intercepted a phone call from Saveria saying a "package" was ready.
They followed it as it went on a tortuous and complicated route through a dozen "postmen".
Officers watched as the package was handed over and then raided his hiding place.
A police spokesman in Sicilian capital Palermo says: "To think that after all these years his wife made a simple mistake by speaking on the telephone and that it led us to him is amazing. But it was the mistake that was our breakthrough. Using hidden cameras and undercover officers, we watched as the parcel was passed through a dozen 'postini' before ending up at the isolated farmhouse where he was hiding. It had practically gone all over Sicily before it ended up in Provenzano's hands.
We watched the farmhouse and when we were satisfied he was on his own, we raided it. When the parcel was opened up it contained Provenzano's cleaned and ironed laundry: his underpants, vests, shirts and socks all neatly folded." Police discovered five Bibles at the farm as well as several pictures of Padre Pio, a mystic monk made a saint by Pope John Paul II, and a book by the police captain who caught one of Provenzano's predecessors, Salvatore Riina, in 1993.
Also recovered was a Brother AX410 typewriter on which he had started a letter to his wife which began "My dearest darling love". His next words to the woman whose carelessness led to his capture may not be so fond.
ALTHOUGH Bernie The Tractor was said to be a master of disguise – he once attended a Mafia summit in bishop's robes – his years on the run did not always involve hiding.
A mixture of fear and bribery made sure the search never got too serious or, when it did, that he was tipped off.
As John Dickie, the leading expert on the Sicilian Mafia, says in his book Cosa Nostra: "He has almost certainly spent most of that time in western Sicily. There is no clearer example of what Mafia territorial control means in practice than Provenzano's continuing ability to evade capture." Speculation will now mount as to who precisely was protecting the fugitive killer throughout four decades. Monitoring of Provenzano's telephone has revealed that one of his bodyguards was in contact with someone at the Ministry Of The Interior in Rome.
There is also puzzlement in Italy at the timing of the raid which, had it come 24 hours earlier, might have helped secure Berlusconi's re-election.
"It would have been good news for Berlusconi if it had come just before the country voted, although some of his close friends in Sicily would have been very angry, " says James Walston, professor of political science at the American University of Rome. "But in my experience, cock-up theories are usually more convincing than conspiracy ones. It's highly unlikely that anyone was piloting the timing of this. He had political protection and so dirt will come out. However, the protection he had dates back 40 years, and many skeletons will be dead by now, as it were." Provenzano is said to have joined the Mafia in his late teens after the war. With his friend Riina, nicknamed Shorty, he was the muscle for an ambitious mafioso called Luciano Leggio, who once said that Bernie The Tractor had "the brains of a chicken but shoots like an angel". In 1958 Provenzano is said to have helped Leggio to murder the Corleone clan's head and become head of the Family.
LEGGIO was jailed in 1974, leaving Shorty Riina in charge – and Provenzano as his right-hand man. After Riina's capture, his brother-in-law Leoluca Bagarella took over a section of the Family but was arrested two years later and Provenzano took full charge. The worry is that he in turn will simply be replaced.
As Antonio Ingroia, a leading anti-Mafia magistrate in Sicily, said yesterday: "We should not make the mistake of thinking the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano will mean the beginning of the end of the Mafia." There are at least two people qualified to take his place, Salvatore Lo Piccolo and Matteo Messina Denaro, who have been on the run since 1983 and 1993, respectively.
So will this week's capture do any good at all?
"It is not the body blow which the official government statement claimed but neither is it insignificant, " says Professor Walston. He quotes relatives of the murdered anti-Mafia investigators who said that the capture was a battle won, not the end of the war.
Surprisingly, he says, the factor that may make the biggest difference to the hold of the Mafia on Italian national life is the changing nature of the country.
"There were virtually no immigrants in Italy until the Eighties but now we've got the Serbs, the Chinese and the Russians and, to some extent, the Nigerians, who are putting the squeeze on the local gangsters, " he points out.
In other words, other criminals are muscling in on traditional Mafia territory. On one level this is a depressing picture and bolsters the argument that villains will always fill a vacuum and that the forces of law and order can never triumph.
But that does not take account of the overwhelming degree of control the Mafia has exerted over Italian politicians at all levels – up to and including the disgraced seventimes prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Loosening this control is the major objective for the country's anti-Mafia crusaders.
"In the past 15 years the Mafia has moved far more into the margins, " says Walston. "It is not quite true to say that if you arrest or kill one, immediately others take their place. They have to reorganise.
"The best thing to be done is to marginalise them and make the Mafia into an organisation that is about crime. That is better than them being about crime, politics and business."
Document THEEXP0020060413e24d0001x

Dow Jones Asia-Pacific Top Stories Sked For April 12
2,510 words

12 April 2006

05:05 AM

Dow Jones International News

DJI

English

(c) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Following are the top Asia-Pacific stories featured on Dow Jones Newswires as of 0900 GMT, along with items expected later in the day. Please direct any questions or comments to [e-mail] or by phone on 65-6415-4020.
MACRO/FOREX/FIXED INCOME
TOKYO: Japan's current account surplus rose less than expected in February but exports remain strong and the income surplus was at a record high, data released Wednesday show, suggesting the country's balance of payments remains healthy. ("=DATA VIEW: Japan Curr Acct Shows Strong Exports, Income," published at 0315 GMT)
TOKYO: Bank of Japan Governor Toshihiko Fukui said Wednesday that the nation's long-term interest rates are largely being affected by U.S. and European long-term rates and said he would closely watch the Japanese government bond market. ("Fukui: Japan L/T Rates Strongly Affected By US, EU Rates," published at 0150 GMT; see also "Tanigaki: Speculative Interest Rate Rises Undesirable," at 0827 GMT)
TOKYO: Lending by Japanese banks excluding Shinkin banks rose 0.3% in March from a year earlier for a second straight month of gains, the Bank of Japan said Wednesday, signaling a continued recovery in corporate fund demand. ("Japan Mar Bank Lending (Excluding Shinkin) Up 0.3% On Yr," published at 0003 GMT)
BEIJING: China's foreign exchange regulator reiterated Wednesday its aim of gradually pursuing capital account convertibility while strengthening control over short-term capital flows. ("China Govt: To Gradually Promote Cap Acct Convertibility," published at 0237 GMT)
NEW DELHI: India's industrial output accelerated to 8.8% in February from a 5.9% rise in the same month of the previous year, led by gains in manufacturing and electricity, government data issued Wednesday showed. ("DATA SNAP: India Feb Indus Output +8.8% Vs +5.9% Year Ago," published at 0651 GMT)
SEOUL: Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Wednesday that there is a significant amount of liquidity worldwide at this stage, but the situation isn't permanent. ("Greenspan: Significant Amount Of Liquidity Globally," published at 0140 GMT)
SEOUL: The South Korean government will work to build the country into a financial hub specializing in asset management, Vice Minister of Finance and Economy Kwon Tae-Shin said Wednesday. ("S Korea Aims To Become Fincl Hub, Focus On Asset Mgmt," published at 0800 GMT)
SEOUL: The South Korean government expects the country's gross domestic product to have grown around 6% in first quarter of this year, Minister of Finance and Economy Han Duck-Soo said Wednesday. ("S Korea Fin Min: First Quarter GDP To Grow Around 6%," published at 0131 GMT)
BANGKOK: Bank of Thailand Governor Pridiyathorn Devakula said Wednesday that recent capital inflows, the key driver of strength in the Thai baht, were to buy stocks rather than for speculation. ("Thai Ctrl Bk Gov: FX Inflows To Buy Stks,Not Speculation," published at 0802 GMT)
MANILA: Philippines' central bank isn't ready to stop increasing interest rates even though inflation has started to show an encouraging moderation in the first quarter of the year amid a stronger peso, a central bank official said. ("=INTERVIEW: Philippines Doesn't Rule Out Rate Hike In 06," published at 0201 GMT; see also "Philippine Feb Workers' Remittances $866M, Up 11.6% On Yr," published at 0642 GMT)
SYDNEY: Prime Minister John Howard said Wednesday he will be the third senior Australian minister to appear before a wheat corruption inquiry examining how US$221.7 million in kickbacks was paid to Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. ("=UPDATE: Australia PM To Face Iraq Wheat Corruption Probe," published at 0724 GMT)
=AUSTRALIA WATCH: Only a month ago, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his team were reveling in the celebratory atmosphere of a historic decade in office. The rosy glow has dimmed in the harsh glare of the daily AWB confessional, but it is the growing risk of a rate hike that poses the biggest threat to the Liberal-National Party coalition. ("=AUSTRALIA WATCH: Rate Hike Fears Eclipse AWB Inquiry," published at 0446 GMT)
CANBERRA: Treasurer Peter Costello Wednesday "absolutely" ruled out any increase in the current 10% rate for Australia's goods and services tax. ("Australia's Costello: Ruling Out Any Increase In GST," published at 0518 GMT)
BEIJING: China's government has decided to raise direct subsidies for grain farmers by CNY12.5 billion this year, to offset rising diesel and fertilizer costs, the Ministry of Finance said late Tuesday. ("China Hikes 06 Grain Farming Direct Subsidies By CNY12.5B," published at 0520 GMT)
TAIPEI: Taiwan's Cabinet approved a bill Wednesday to raise the ceiling on foreign investment by local insurers to the equivalent of half of their assets, from 35%. ("Taiwan Ups Insurers' Foreign Invest Cap To 50% Of Assets," published at 0717 GMT)
SHANGHAI: Chinese authorities should consider introducing a market-maker system for interest-rate swaps trading as well as other hedging products to spur development of the fledgling financial derivatives market, said an executive at the Standard Chartered Bank . ("=INTERVIEW:StanChart Wants To Be Market Maker For CNY IRS," published at 0825 GMT)
WELLINGTON: The New Zealand government's new investment tax rules have positive features, but they are too harsh on locals investing offshore, a senior partner of an international audit firm said. ("=INTERVIEW: NZ's New Intl Invest Tax Laws Too Harsh -PWC," published at 0249 GMT)
SINGAPORE: Fubon Bank Ltd. is now seeking to raise US$200 million in subordinated bonds at a spread of 80 basis points over swaps, a person familiar with the deal said Wednesday. ("Fubon HK Now Seeks $200M Bond At 80BPs+Swaps - Source," published at 0731 GMT)
SINGAPORE: Singapore's Suntec Real Estate Investment Trust is looking to sell S$200 million in three- to five-year bonds, a source close to the deal said Wednesday. ("Singapore's Suntec Mulls S$200 Mln 3-5 Year Bond - Source," published at 0250 GMT)
SINGAPORE: Singapore will start work on its first underground petroleum storage facility later this year, a government minister said Wednesday. ("=UPDATE:S'pore To Build 1st Underground Petroleum Storage," published at 0552 GMT)
EQUITIES
TOKYO: Japanese retail giant Seven & I Holdings Co. , which operates Seven-Eleven convenience stores in Japan, said Wednesday its group net profit for the fiscal year ended Feb. 28 came to Y87.93 billion. (UPDATE to be published shortly)
HONG KONG: Toolmaker Techtronic to release full-year results. (Story expected after 0900 GMT, to be followed by UPDATE)
HONG KONG: Titan Petrochemical to release full-year results. (Story expected after 0900 GMT; UPDATE to be published after 1100 GMT)
SHANGHAI: Boeing Co. is on its way to selling the same number of airplanes in China this year as it did in 2005, an executive said Wednesday. ("Boeing: China '06 Plane Sales On Way To '05 Number," published at 0318 GMT)
=IPO FOCUS: The initial public offering of India's Reliance Petroleum Ltd., which at above $2 billion will be India's largest IPO if it prices at the top of its range, is likely to attract record subscriptions, fueled by an attractive price band and prospects of strong post-listing gains. (IPO FOCUS to be published by around 1000 GMT)
MUMBAI: Cement major Associated Cement Cos posted a 41.6% on-year rise in net profit for the January-March quarter, helped by a merger of two companies and higher cement prices. (UPDATE to be published by 1200 GMT)
=ASIAN STOCK FOCUS: Hong Kong's rag trade king Lim Por-yen has been dead for more than a year but value-hunting investors are now breathing new life into his old empire. Companies in Lim's Lai Sun group have a rich legacy of property assets that may now be undervalued, making them attractive buys, some analysts say. ("=ASIAN STOCK FOCUS: Legacy Assets Unlock Value In Lai Sun," published at 0428 GMT)
=ASIAN STOCK FOCUS: Nippon Steel Corp. is trying to shield itself from any potential takeover attempt. But the company's defensive tactics could scare off smaller