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Philippines President Duterte Orders Luxury Vehicles Worth $5.5 Million Crushed

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dicey eye

Philippines President Duterte Orders Luxury Vehicles Worth $5.5 Million Crushed

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Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte oversaw the destruction of 68 smuggled

 

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte oversaw the destruction of 68 smuggled luxury vehicles and motorcycles on Monday in a province on Luzon Island.

Duterte ordered the demolishment as part of his government’s anti-smuggling and corruption campaign, according to a press release from the Cagayan Provincial Information Office.

Government videos of the operation were posted to Facebook. The clips show a large bulldozer driving overtop of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and Harley Davidson motorcycles, crushing them under its tracks.

The vehicles had been smuggled into the country from the U.S. Their combined value, CNN reported, was $5.5 million.

“Breaking up the contraband vehicles is the proof that these operations will not be allowed here in Cagayan,” Duterte said in a speech before the bulldozer started crushing the vehicles.

According to CNN, a similar operation took place in February in which 30 luxury vehicles were destroyed. At the time, Duterte reportedly said it was better to crush the cars than auction them off and risk crime syndicates buying them under false identities.

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Blackeye

Seems like they could sell them and charge the import duty as part of the price. I guess the PH government has plenty of money to burn though.

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John_Galt

Complete waste of the cars. 

It is giving him a lot of PR though. Gathers his supporters closer together while creating a bad guy. 

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Parrothead
44 minutes ago, Blackeye said:

Seems like they could sell them and charge the import duty as part of the price. I guess the PH government has plenty of money to burn though.

 

100% import duty doesn't leave a lot of (legitimate, law abiding) people in the Philippines, who could afford them.

 

24 minutes ago, John_Galt said:

Complete waste of the cars. 

It is giving him a lot of PR though. Gathers his supporters closer together while creating a bad guy. 

 

He isn't making a lot of friends over things like this, though. Honestly, I am surprised no one has attempted to kill him, since he was voted into office.

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Oz Jon

A ridiculous, childish stunt!

 

They should have been seized, exported and sold.

 

That $5.5M  (and the previous 30 vehicle waste of money) could have done a lot good for some of the Phil's poor.

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Parrothead
5 minutes ago, Oz Jon said:

could have done a lot good for some of the Phil's poor.

 

True. But, no Filipino politician, including President Duterte, gives two sh*ts about the poor, save one - Manny Pacquiao. 

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syzmic

Or, since most of those vehicles are likely stolen, they could have been returned to their rightful owners.

 

Nah, that wouldn't be any fun...  :wacko:
,

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dicey eye

President Duterte is a propaganda whiz. How to create a muscle-flexing, macho, populist image in one deft gesture. 

And furthermore no spouse with a shoe fetish to undermine that hard-boiled style.

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andy
2 hours ago, dicey eye said:

President Duterte is a propaganda whiz. How to create a muscle-flexing, macho, populist image in one deft gesture. 

And furthermore no spouse with a shoe fetish to undermine that hard-boiled style.

 

Would you call him a hard cookie. What about his war on drugs. Then not too long ago the problem with the Islamic extreme. Would you say he is feared, and also loved by the people?

One thing, just recently he will not accept offers from the Chinese.

This following post may not belong on this thread. But it maybe just continuing in a similar running of country's.

 

 Is Hun Sen's dynasty built to last?

 

No guarantees Cambodia's next generation will embrace heir apparent Hun Manet.

TOKYO -- As Cambodia comes to terms with many more years under the leadership of Hun Sen, the focus is now on his son Hun Manet, who is widely expected to succeed him.

Without any real opposition, Prime Minister Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party won all but two seats in the country's general election on July 29. Its only real threat, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was forced to disband in November after its leader Kem Sokha was arrested for allegedly plotting a U.S.-backed revolution.

After 33 years in power, 67-year-old Hun Sen said he would only stay on as prime minister for another two terms, or 10 years. Many believe he would want his 40-year-old eldest son, Hun Manet, to inherit his "dynasty.

"Hun Sen was a senior military officer in the brutal Pol Pot regime that murdered around 2 million Cambodians. The prime minister has always denied complicity with the regime and had fled to Vietnam in June 1977 to join troops opposed to Pol Pot. Four months later, Hun Manet was born. Hun Sen returned to Cambodia in 1978 after the Vietnamese invaded.

Hun Sen took office as prime minister in 1985, and has since tightened his grip on power. He sent Hun Manet to the U.S., where he graduated from the elite U.S. Military Academy. After that, he went on to New York University to study business administration and even had a stint at the World Bank.

 

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Hun-Sen-s-Cambodia/Is-Hun-Sen-s-dynasty-built-to-last

 

 

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mollydooker
Almost two years after China pledged $24 billion in investment to the Philippines, barely any projects have materialized, prompting deepening concerns that President Rodrigo Duterte has undermined the country’s sovereignty with little to show in return.
 

Of the 27 deals signed between China and the Philippines during Duterte’s visit to Beijing in October 2016, China originally agreed to provide $9 billion in soft loans, including a $3 billion credit line with the Bank of China, with a further $15 billion worth of direct investments from Chinese firms in railway, port, energy and mining projects. It didn’t specify a timeline.

 
Since then, the Philippines has completed only one loan agreement with China worth $73 million to fund an irrigation project north of the capital, Manila, according to Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia. Two bridges in Manila to be funded with Chinese grants worth up to $75 million were inaugurated last week.
 
The process of securing loans from China “seems to be moving slower” compared to getting assistance from other countries such as Japan, Pernia said at a briefing earlier this month.
 
Duterte has repeatedly touted China’s financial help as a key reason for pivoting away from the U.S. and Europe, which he says haven’t produced material gains for the Philippines. Yet while Beijing remains the Philippines largest trading partner, when it comes to foreign direct investment, China is outranked by Japan, the U.S., the Netherlands, South Korea and Singapore.
Shared Interests

Net foreign direct investment flows to the Philippines

 

Source: Central Bank of the Philippines

 

As the Philippines’ only treaty ally, the U.S. also remains a key security partner, providing crucial assistance to the country’s armed forces last year as they struggled to defeat hundreds of Muslim militants who had laid siege to the city of Marawi.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs disputed the assertion that it had not followed through on its investment commitments in the Philippines, pointing to the bridge and irrigation projects.

 

“China-Philippines relations are continuously strengthening and deepening,” it said in an emailed statement. “China attaches great importance to friendly cooperation with the Philippines and enthusiastically supports President Duterte’s ’Major Construction, Strong Construction’ plan.”

 

Duterte’s visit to Beijing in 2016 served as a turning point for his administration, reinforcing his “separation” from the U.S. and cementing his shift toward China. His critics have accused him of failing to respond forcefully after Beijing landed bomber aircraft on territory claimed by the Philippines and asserted its presence at Sandy Cay in the Spratly Island chain.

 

“Under Duterte, the Philippines has forward deployed its geopolitical concessions,” Richard Heydarian, non-resident fellow at ADR-Stratbase Institute, a think-tank, said in an interview. “We have been used by China.”

Territorial Dispute

 

China’s popularity has suffered in the Philippines, with net trust in the country plummeting to its lowest since April 2016, the month before Duterte was elected president, according to a Social Weather Stations survey of 1,200 voters conducted over the last weekend in June. Almost nine in 10 said they wanted the Philippines to assert its claims against China in the South China Sea.

 

For Alvin A. Camba, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, timing isn’t the issue. The real measure is the annual foreign direct investment from China and Hong Kong, which has already reached $800 million, nearly two-thirds of what it was during the previous administration, Camba said.

 

“There shouldn’t be any expectations for these deal to be completed, or to be close to completion,” Camba, who has written extensively on Chinese investment in the Philippines, said in an email. "Opening the economy to Chinese FDI was the correct move.”

Still, many of the biggest deals don’t seem to be happening at all.

Greenergy Development Corp., which is based in Mindanao, signed an agreement to develop a $1 billion, 300-megawatt hydropower plant with Power China in October 2016.

When China Power asked for the initial project deadline to be extended several times through January last year, Cerael Donggay, chief executive of Greenergy, agreed.

 

“The last extension was in February 2017 and still nothing happened, so we terminated the agreement,” Donggay said in a phone interview, adding that his company was now in talks with a Hong Kong-based company to try to complete the project.

One of the Philippines largest nickel miners, Global Ferronickel, signed an agreement with Baiyin Nonferrous Group in October 2016 to explore the construction of a stainless steel plant in the Philippines for up to $700 million.

 

“It was put on hold,” Global Ferronickel president Dante Bravo said in an interview, because the government was yet to lift an executive order banning new mining projects. “It was exploratory. We have to convince them that it’s really viable,” Bravo said.

 

Another agreement signed in October 2016 was a $780 million proposal to raise three islands from a waterlogged area of Davao, Duterte’s hometown. That was canceled in July last year after the city’s mayor and presidential daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, said a review of the project found that it was not commercially viable.

 

“After the wave of euphoria which greeted those announcements in 2016, we realize now that those Chinese investment claims were hugely inflated,” said the ADR-Stratbase Institute’s Heydarian. “Looking forward, I expect Japan, the U.S. and other partners in Europe to remain the main suppliers of foreign investment to the Philippines.”

 

— With assistance by Andreo Calonzo, and Peter Martin
 
I tend to not read news that often. The media is a bit of a 3 ring circus at the best of times, but even if they are writing from a bipartisan perspective it's still rarely authorative. There's no time or space to have an intelligent discussion about a complex issue in 3 or 4 paragraphs. Journalists are not experts on any subject, and have no time to become informed on a topic before choosing what content to use. The conclusions are foredrawn.

The whole mood of the article was set with "prompting deepening concerns about", but no mention of who has those concerns ;-) the specifics of the contracts that were mentioned sound plausible and reasonable - the mining plant not going ahead due to a ban on new mining projects, and the island project cancelled at the request of du30s daughter due to being "not commercially viable". Some complaints from the PI about "why do we need to show things are viable before getting the money? We just want the money".

International trade is a tough arena. Investment is always self interested no matter who it comes from, and that includes "donations of aid". China is a tough trading partner. I don't doubt that the terms are very much in their favour, and that the usual backhanders and corruption will be the norm. China is a little less discrete about such matters, they've gotten in some shit in Australia for being a bit blatant about it. They don't stand for the tail wagging the dog though. I also imagine that many of these deals will not go through should China's economy not do so well.

 
 
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