Sunday, August 07, 2016

Struggle over another round of Kenya Deportations + Links =UPDATED=

On a ride above Chiayi, running into a birthday celebration at the overlook. They insisted we have something to eat, of course. 

UPDATE: 5 suspects went out at midnight to China (DailyMail).

Taiwan and China are tussling over Taiwanese suspects in Kenya found not guilty in a recent trial (Taiwan News)
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said Saturday that it has conveyed Taiwan's position on the matter to Chinese authorities through various bilateral liaison channels.

The MAC said it has urged Beijing not to take the Taiwanese to China before the two sides can reach an agreement on how to handle cross-border fraud involving people from Taiwan and China.
Since misreporting by Taiwan-based commentators has been so common in these affairs, I always check the Kenyan papers. The Kenyan Daily Nation reported:
“I now conclude that after examining all the evidence on record, I find that the prosecution has totally failed to prove its case against the accused persons, the defence was credible and convincing and I now acquit all of them,” Magistrate Gandani said.

The 40 had been charged with running a telecommunication system without a license, conspiring to commit a felony and engaging in an organised criminal activity.

They had denied the charges when they were arraigned in court in December 2014 and were not released on bond.

They had been arrested after another group of 37 Chinese nationals were caught and charged with similar offenses.

A fire in a residential house in Nairobi’s Runda estate had led to their arrest as well as the death of one unidentified Chinese.
There are several differences between the current set of deportees and the previous. First, the Taiwan government had been slow in acting on the previous case. In the current one, the Taiwan rep is already negotiating with Kenya authorities. Second, in the previous case, though it was widely reported that the Taiwanese had been found innocent of all charges, that was false in two ways: they hadn't been charged with fraud (signaling to me that China and Kenya had made a deal), and 8 were indeed found guilty of having false documents and jailed for a year. In this case it looks as though the charges were different and at least included "organized crime", whatever that means

Interestingly, both this group and the previous group were busted in the same set of actions after a fire exposed the equipment (Jan 2015 report). It is hard for this writer to believe that the evidence wasn't up to snuff. From the BBC report of December 2014:
"Preliminary findings show the fire was caused by one of the servers they were illegally operating," the director of Kenya's Criminal Investigations Department, Ndegwa Muhoro, told the privately owned Standard newspaper.

Numerous telephone headsets, computers linked to high-speed internet and monitors were found.

.....

The charges against the 77 so far include "being in the country illegally and operating radio equipment" without the necessary permits, AFP quotes an unnamed source as saying.

The suspects had been living in "military-style dormitories", and Chinese officials were shocked by the revelations, the Standard reports.

The group had been preparing to "raid the country's communication systems" and had equipment capable of infiltrating bank accounts, Kenya's M-Pesa mobile banking system and ATM machines, according to Kenya's privately owned Daily Nation newspaper.
Once again, I am thinking that a deal is in place and they were found innocent so they could be sent on to China to be charged with fraud -- a charge notably absent from the list above -- and jailed there as a signal to the massive complex of telecom fraudsters across Asia and Africa that China will not tolerate this behavior.

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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

(Premier)"Lin said the government has the responsibility and obligation to demand repatriation of any of its nationals who commit a crime overseas.

According to Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺), any Republic of China (Taiwan) citizen who commits a crime overseas should be brought back for trial, since Taiwan has jurisdiction over its nationals."

Why does the government keep repeating this utter nonsense. There are many foreigners in jail in Taiwan for crimes committed in Taiwan. The government wouldn't dream of repatriating them to their home countries. Are they going to repatriate the East Europeans who recently got arrested for the ATM heist? I seriously doubt it.

Michael Turton said...

I know, it's ridiculous. Last time around the government admitted that China had jurisdiction.

TaiwanJunkie said...

Couple of questions:

#1. on the CNN piece. why is it that there's ZERO evidence of civil disobedience on the Taiwan Olympic team. for example holding the Chinese Taipei flag upside down, holding a green Taiwan flag, painting the ROC flag on their faces... the list goes on???

#2. interesting how the NYT piece fail to mention mass murder for CKS. All it said was he dominated and was authoritarian. well, authoritarianism doesn't quite equal mass murder...

Cary said...

Is it not lamentable that Taipei is too provincial to support extremely reasonably priced fine dining? It seems that Agilano went to great lengths to provide quality and value, but wasn't appreciated. I don't see how that is something to be mocked, but rather, regretted. Lacking the sophistication to really be a world city isn't something to be smug about, in my opinion.

Michael Turton said...

>shrug< It's just another case of westerners coming in saying "they don't do it our way, therefore they are wrong."

an angry taiwanese said...

For a high end restaurant, any kind, to be successful in Taiwan, its boss must demonstrate his/her ability of making relationships, esp with politicians. Rich people in Taiwan go to a high end restaurant to make political connections; dinning is only secondly.

Sean Lien even goes that far to marry the daughter of Red Bean Restaurant 紅豆食府, killing two birds with one marriage.
(Just a joke, no intention to mock any marriage.)

Guy said...

Angelo Agilano served some of the best food I have had in my life--anywhere. The notion that such cooking would be available in Taipei was inconceivable when I arrived in 2003. He resolutely was **not** some idiotic "westerner" coming in and trying to dump "western" ways onto the locals. He used local ingredients (fish, vegetables, pork) in ways that were absolutely stunning. And, btw, Michael Fei's point is that a meal at Angelo's restaurant, while by no means cheap, was actually not pricier than the massive wasteful buffets favoured by many locals. You could argue whether Fei is right but having eaten at enough buffets in Taiwan and also having sampled Angelo's food, I can't help but feel bad for this outcome. We lost one of the best.

Guy

Anonymous said...

Regarding Agilano's food offer: I as a Taiwanese cannot see how Italian or French food can get too popular in Taiwan. The Italian and the French use a lot of milk (by-)products as ingredients, such as butter, cheese and creams. Many Taiwanese are lactose-intolerent, a few bites of Italian/French food can easily get them (me included) feel saturated, as result of "stagnated (so it feels)" food in the stomach.

The German food uses less of milk products and my stomach accepts it wholeheartedly; sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, potato wedge fries, bratkartoffel, bratwurst, schnitzel, etc.; all see no "entry issue" with my stomach. Not so, with Italian and French food.

If there will be a second attempt, Agilano might want to devise a menu that utilizes less of milk by-products and a bit more of seafood. Out of the Italian food that I've tried, seafood linguini and seafood lasagna are totally acceptable to my stomach. It would seem that the salty sense generated by the seafood salivates the digestive system enough to cover the saturating sense generated by the milk-products in the linguini and lasagna.

Anonymous said...

08/08/2016 China urges concrete Taiwan efforts to resume communication
Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency) BEIJING, Aug. 8 (Xinhua) - A Chinese mainland spokesperson said on Monday that Taiwan should make concrete efforts for the resumption of cross-Strait communication.
Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), was responding to a question about protests from Taiwan's mainland affairs authority against five Taiwanese fraud suspects being brought back in police custody from Kenya to the Chinese mainland on Monday along with 35 suspects from the Chinese mainland.
Another 36 suspects in another group were brought back in police custody in April and have been formally arrested. They allegedly swindled more than 26 million yuan from mainland residents.
With all victims and main body of evidence in the mainland, the case is best dealt with on the mainland, Ma said.
Due to Taiwan authorities' failure to endorse the 1992 Consensus embodying the one-China principle, the cross-Strait communication and negotiation mechanism has come to a standstill.

Oh, the machanism just stopped. Those Communists are immune to irony.