A daily scrapbook of stories from major news media on corruption, bribery and financial crimes
LONDON - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian president, has dismissed allegations of corruption as rumours and innuendoes as she mounted a strong defence of her personal integrity, The Guardian reports. Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged that corruption had become "systemic and endemic" in Liberia after decades of conflict, but challenged anyone to find fault with her or her family.
JAKARTA - Indonesian graft suspect Neneng Sri Wahyuni faces a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment should she be proven guilty of joint corruption causing Rp 3.8 billion (US$395,118) of state loses, The Jakarta Post reports. Neneng is the wife of Muhammad Nazaruddin, the former treasurer of Indonesia's governing Democratic Party, who in April was convicted of corruption and sentenced to almost five years in prison.
XILINHOT, China - In a small town in northern China's Inner Mongolia where sheep and cattle easily outnumber humans, Fan Chen paid a Communist Party boss three times an average urban resident's annual salary to become a local police chief, The Associated Press reports. The scheme was exposed and fell apart, but it was hardly explosive news. It received just a one-line mention in state media. And a friend of Fan's defended him by saying that by current standards, his misdeeds were insignificant.
TAIPEI - The deputy director general of Taiwan's state Railway Administration and five employees were arrested on Thursday for allegedly taking bribes in connection with several procurement cases, a prosecutor said, according to Agence France Press. Chung Chao-hsiung and the others were suspected of taking unspecified amounts of kickbacks from at least two contractors in the projects, which had budgets totalling about Tw$300 million ($10 million), the prosecutor said.
SYDNEY - A corruption inquiry in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has kicked off what is expected to be its most sensational inquiry to date, starting with allegations Eric Roozendaal, the then NSW roads minister, received a new Honda car in 2007 in exchange for "favours" to former Labor party powerbroker Eddie Obeid, Australia’s Telegraph reports.
SHENZHEN, China - The billionaire chief of a Shenzhen-listed technology company has been detained on suspicion of bribery connected to the railways sector, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reports. Invengo Information Technology president Xu Yusho, who is also a member of the Shenzhen Municipal People's Congress, was taken into custody by Shenzhen authorities after a request from the Zhengzhou Railway Bureau in Henan province, prosecutors said late on Monday.
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