Excerpts from an article:
The Nation (US) October 20, 1997.
By Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean
Business is business
WALL Street Journal editors, in the 1997 Index of Economic Freedom,
rated Singapore as the most business-friendly country in the world.
Unfortunately, that friendliness has been extended to Lo Hsing Han,
Steven Law and the narco-dictatorship of Burma.
As Tay Thiam Peng, director of foreign operations at
Singapore's Trade Development Board, bluntly put it in 1996, when
it comes to business, morality takes a back seat to profits. "While
the other countries are ignoring Myanmar (Burma), it's a good time
for us to go in," Tay stated. "You get better deals, and you're
more appreciated... Singapore's position is not to judge them and
take a judgmental moral high ground." As Burma's number-one
business partner, Singapore now has 53 projects in Burma, which as
of January totaled nearly $1.2 billion.
"Since 1988...over half of [the investments from] Singapore have
been tied to the family of narco-trafficker Lo Hsing Han,'' says
Robert Gelbard, former US Assistant Secretary of State for the
Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Most
of these investments are in joint projects with Lo's
family-controlled Asia World Company. Asia World includes a host of
subsidiaries and three overseas branches in Singapore. US narcotics
officials say that these "overseas branches" are part of the
ongoing money-laundering investigation.
