A new investigative report from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has exposed details of a Chinese Communist Party and Triad push for political influence in Palau.
It said, the small nation is a key hotspot in the growing rivalry between China and the West.
And the report said that organized criminals with links to the Chinese Communist Party are trying to find a way in.
The project’s lead editor for the Pacific Aubrey Belford explained, to Pacific Waves, that this is a report they have been working on for most of the year involving himself, the Pacific team and Palau-based journalist, Bernadette Carreon.
He revealed that this influence is not restricted to Palau or even the Pacific.
“It’s actually a pattern repeated across a lot of the region and also in Australia, New Zealand, South-east Asia,” he said.
“Basically, as China is becoming more assertive geopolitically, sometimes they’ve had their interests presented essentially by proxy, by business people and sometimes organized criminals. We focused in on Palau because it is a country where there has been a really interesting case of this happening.”
“Palau is a very small country, just 18,000 people. And what we have found is that there has been an interlinked series of Chinese business people involved in quite audacious business plans for the country.”
Belford said, “What we found is that there were links between these businesses and Chinese organized crime —the Triads— and also to the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. We also found that when we looked into how these businesses got set up in the country they had made a lot of links with members of the local elite including two former presidents.”
Source: Radio New Zealand
