Xi Jinping

Editor in Asia Leaves Bloomberg News Citing Censorship

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Last November, I highlighted how Bloomberg News seemed to be censoring stories about corruption in China in order to preserve sales of its extremely expensive Bloomberg LP terminals in the region. The article was titled: How Bloomberg “News” Censors the News.

It appears the drama has continued into 2014, with the New York Times reporting that Ben Richardson, an editor in Asia at Bloomberg News, announced that he had resigned in protest. From the NY Times:

Ben Richardson, an editor at large in Asia at Bloomberg News, announced his resignation on Monday, citing the company’s handling of an investigative report in China late last year.

He is the third reporter or editor to leave the organization since several news organizations reported last November that Bloomberg had declined to publish an investigative article that explored financial ties between one of the wealthiest men in China and the families of top Chinese leaders.

“I left Bloomberg because of the way the story was mishandled, and because of how the company made misleading statements in the global press” afterward, he said in an email to the media news site Romenesko. He also wrote that Bloomberg employees faced legal action if they spoke out publicly.

That’s some “free press” we’ve got going here.

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Corrupt Chinese Politicians are Buying Billions in U.S. Real Estate

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Many of us spent much of 2012 confused about how the U.S. real estate market was improving within the context of a broke and unemployed citizenry.  Well as time has passed the answers to our questions have been revealed.  The criminals are piling in.  I first explained a couple of weeks ago how the financial oligarchs in the United States are currently in a bidding war to become America’s slumlords in my post:  America Meet Your New Slumlord: Wall Street.

Now we also discover that part of the bid to U.S. real estate has come from another criminal class. In this case, we are talking about corrupt Chinese officials who are pulling their ill gotten gains from their homeland and desperately placing it in real estate all over the globe.  From The Telegraph:

As China’s new leaders intensify a campaign to root out corruption, thousands of Communist party officials have been panicked into a fire sale of their illicit properties while billions of pounds have been smuggled overseas.

It said the volume of deals had intensified by “a hundred times” after Xi Jinping, the incoming Chinese president, warned that corruption could kill the Party and put one of the country’s most vigorous and resolute politicians, Wang Qishan, in charge of stamping out graft.

It also claimed that an astonishing $1 trillion (£630 billion), equivalent to 40 per cent of Britain’s annual GDP, had been smuggled out of China illegally in 2012.

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