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Antiguan ex-president of UN general assembly faces $1m corruption charges

A former president of the United Nations general assembly turned the world body into a “platform for profit” by accepting over $1m in bribes and a trip to New Orleans from a billionaire Chinese real estate mogul and other businesspeople to pave the way for lucrative investments, a prosecutor charged on Tuesday

John Ashe, a former UN ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda who served in the largely ceremonial post from September 2013 to September 2014, faces conspiracy- and bribery-related charges along with five others, including Francis Lorenzo, a deputy UN ambassador from the Dominican Republic who lives in the Bronx.

For the starting price of just $200,000 you can buy citizenship in the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

Antigua launched its "citizenship by investment program" in 2013, and it has proved so popular that it now accounts for about 25% of government revenue. Some 500 people have already bought their way into the country of just 90,000, according to local media reports.

Antigua says it is using its windfall to help revive the nation's flagging tourism industry, and to invest in health care and education.

On September 21, the House of Representatives approved passage H.R. 5708, the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA) of 2017 that, if it becomes law, will prohibit loans by international financial institutions (“IFIs”) to the government of Nicaragua unless Nicaragua takes steps to ensure free, fair, and transparent elections as well as strengthen the rule of law.

The left-wing Sandinista government is economic and political disaster. Nicaraguan autocrat, Daniel Ortega, and his power-obsessed wife Rosario Murillo, are running for president and vice president in the upcoming November elections. Unless the opposition unites, quickly, the power hungry Ortegas may pull it off. The road to this point is paved with enough human rights abuses and corruption to keep tribunals and courts busy for years.

The Nicaraguan people seem to be reaching their limit. When Ortegas sacked the opposition party leadership a few months ago in the mostly puppet Congress, it seems to have lit a spark within the opposition as well as within his own Sandinista party.

After years of economic expansion, the South American nation has begun to sputter. Inflation has become a major concern. Brazil’s stock market index has declined about 23 percent this year, the most of any large country. This month, Standard & Poor’s cut its outlook on Brazil’s credit rating to negative, citing slowing growth and weakening finances.

Mr. Batista’s conglomerate, as an emblem of the nation’s industrial mettle, ranked among the government priorities now being questioned, receiving more than $4 billion in loans and investments from the national development bank.

authorities channeled huge resources of the state to projects controlled by tycoons.

Construction of Nicaragua Canal Threatens Indigenous Lives and Livelihoods

In June 2013, Nicaraguan officials approved a $50 billion (US) deal with a Hong Kong firm to oversee the construction of a 278-kilometer long canal. The HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company’s proposed project would attempt to link the Pacific to the Caribbean, allowing the passage of container ships
too large for passage through the Panama Canal.

The construction of the canal promises environmental abuses and human rights violations as the proposed route cuts through the land of multiple Indigenous territories on Nicara- gua’s coasts and within its mainland. Thousands of people are expected to be impacted with many being forcibly displaced, primarily including the Kriol and Indigenous Rama people,
in a clear violation of Indigenous autonomy laws in Nicaragua and international human rights documents.

A new bill in the United States’ Congress aims to to sanction Daniel Ortega for his many crimes and recent dictatorial behavior.

She referred to the refusal of the Nicaraguan government to accept oversight by international and national observers.

The Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act she presented reportedly aims to adopt sanctions against the Nicaraguan government for its most recent behavior.

Courts are prone to corruption and manipulation by organised crime groups, drug cartels and a democratic socialist political party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which allegedly accepts bribes from drug traffickers for campaign financing in return for judicial favours (InSightCrime, July 2014).

Rampant corruption within Nicaragua's political circles impairs the functioning of state institutions and limits foreign investment. International companies report widespread favouritism and impunity among public officials.

Courts are prone to corruption and manipulation by organised crime groups, drug cartels and a democratic socialist political party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which allegedly accepts bribes from drug traffickers for campaign financing in return for judicial favours (InSightCrime, July 2014).

Ortega vs. the Contras: Nicaragua Endures an ’80s Revival

Tyson and his men are contras — yes, like the ones from the 1980s who received stealth funding during the Reagan administration to topple Mr. Ortega’s leftist Sandinista government.

That war ended more than 25 years ago, when Mr. Ortega lost at the polls. But since being re-elected in 2006, Mr. Ortega has come to rule over this Central American nation in sweeping fashion.

The fiasco that is the Nicaragua Canal, explained

The idea, at least, is that a bigger Nicaragua canal could accommodate the next generation of super-sized container ships that can’t squeeze through Panama’s locks. Nicaragua’s leaders have also promised the project could double GDP in one of Central America’s poorest countries.

The consortium in charge — the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Group (HKND), led by Beijing-based telecom billionaire Wang Jing — has little experience with these sorts of projects and was awarded the contract in a secret deal with Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

the big news out of Cartagena -- outside of the Secret Service wing of the Hotel Caribe, that is -- was the united front that Latin American countries put up against the United States on several big issues.

whether Cuba should be admitted to the next summit, in 2015, which the United States and Canada opposed and all 30 Latin American countries, both left-wing bastions like Ecuador and traditional U.S. allies like Colombia, favored, thus bringing the meeting to an end without a planned joint declaration

The idea of an "American camp" in Latin America has been an anachronism for some while, but this became glaringly clear in Cartagena. "We need them more than they need us," as Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society, puts it. The United States remains the region's largest trading partner, the source of 40 percent of its foreign investment and 90 percent of its remittances. U.S. foreign aid still props up shaky countries like Colombia and Guatemala. But trade with both China and Europe has grown sharply over the last decade. And both big economies like Brazil and Argentina, and smaller ones like Chile and Peru, have experienced solid growth at a time when the United States has faltered. "Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant to their needs,"

the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru met with little fanfare in Cartagena last week to seal an economic pact launched in 2012. They call their project the Pacific Alliance, and it will soon include Costa Rica

The four founding members are the most successful economies in Latin America; they boast the region's highest economic-growth rates and lowest inflation rates. Together, they represent 36 percent of the region's economy, 50 percent of its international trade, and 41 percent of all incoming foreign investment. If the Alliance were a country, it would be the world's eighth-largest economy and seventh-largest exporter. Its members lead the lists of the most competitive economies in Latin America and those where it’s easiest to do business.

the Pacific Alliance has already yielded more results in its 20 months of existence than similar initiatives that have been around for decades. The four countries have eliminated 92 percent of all import tariffs among them. Chile, Colombia, and Peru have linked their stock markets so that a company listed in one of the exchanges can be traded in the other two. Mexico is expected to follow suit this year, meaning this integrated stock market will rival that of Brazil as the largest in Latin America. The four countries have eliminated the need for business and tourist visas for visiting nationals of bloc members. In a break with tradition, the joint communiqués of Alliance presidents tend to be brief and concrete in terms of goals, timelines, and roadmaps.

it is already cheaper than China for many industries serving the American market.

while Mexico’s economy is far from trouble free, its growth easily outpaced the giants of the hemisphere — the United States, Canada and Brazil — in 2011 and 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data, making the country more attractive to fortune seekers worldwide.

residency requests had grown by 10 percent since November, when a new law meant to streamline the process took effect. And they are coming from nearly everywhere.

things have gotten worse for Batista. Hit by mounting debt, a series of project delays and a crisis of confidence, his six publicly listed companies have suffered one of the most spectacular corporate meltdowns in recent history.

He pumped billions into the group's companies even as share prices plunged by as much as 90 percent.

His own fortune - the world's seventh-biggest last year, according to Forbes - has declined by more than $25 billion over the past 18 months.

If the biggest economic story this century was China’s rise, Brazil was uniquely poised to benefit from it. Rich in iron ore, soybeans and beef, not to mention oil, Brazil was positioned as a supplier of many things China needed. Its annual trade with China, only around $2 billion in 2000, soared to $83 billion in 2013. China supplanted the U.S. as Brazil’s largest trading partner.

Brazil fell under what some economists call the “resource curse,” a theory describing how countries with abundant natural resources sometimes do worse than countries without them. The idea is that the money from commodity sales can lead to overvalued currencies and shortsighted policy-making, leaving such countries badly exposed when the resource boom finally ends.

“Unfortunately, the history is that commodity-dependent economies do not catch up with the U.S.,” said Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. “Not just oil producers. More countries end up being poorer, compared with the U.S., after they find a commodity than catch up.” Using data going back to 1800, he said commodity-dependent economies typically grow for a decade, then spend as long as two decades wallowing or slipping back.

these days Chavez’s influence is waning across the region as Venezuela’s oil-powered economy has gone bust and concerns have been raised about his governing style, which includes the jailing of opponents.

Ever so quietly, some of the Venezuelan populist’s biggest projects have been abandoned or mothballed, or have yet to take flight, including a pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina, a South American development bank, housing, highways and a continental investment fund.

Latinobarometro found in a February report that Latin Americans perceived Venezuela to be less democratic than other countries, assigning a 4.3 rating to Venezuela, with 10 being the most democratic.

n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.

South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).

None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.

A recent issue of the bimonthly Estudos Avançados, a journal associated with the University of São Paulo, sheds light upon the assumptions Brazil brings to the FTAA negotiating table and highlights the lively debate among Brazil's business community, government, and civil society over the merits of the regional trade pact.

the Catholic Church and organized labor groups in Brazil have been the most vocal in their opposition to the agreement; they cite loss of sovereignty and fear that Latin American countries will become subordinate to the interests of the United States. Moreover, some industries in Brazil -- such as the chemicals, electronics, and capital-goods sectors -- also worry that the FTAA could be a losing proposition.

most of the Brazilian business community prefers to forge ahead with the agreement rather than risk losing out on increased commerce in the Americas. Oliveira warns that if Brazil backs out of the negotiations, the United States will simply negotiate bilateral treaties throughout the region, which could pare Brazilian exports and divert foreign investment to other markets. While the far-left wing of the Lula government continues to fight the treaty, Oliveira believes that Lula and the moderates in his party understand that Brazil would pay a high price for isolation.