Day: June 27, 2023

The Chinese government has denied compensation for residents, including Tibetan nomads, affected by the construction of the world’s largest hydro-solar plant, residents living near the plant told Radio Free Asia.

Chinese state media reported Monday that the Kela mega hydro-photovoltaic complementary power station began full operation Sunday. The sprawling solar plant, which covers 16 million square meters, or more than 2,000 soccer fields, has a hydropower component that helps stabilize energy supply due to shifting weather conditions.

It is capable of generating 2 billion kilowatt-hours each year, and can fully charge 15,000 electric vehicles with a range of 550 kilometers (340 miles) in just one hour.

But nomadic Tibetans who once grazed their cattle in the area now covered by a sea of solar panels were forced away and offered nothing in return, a Tibetan resident living near Kela told RFA’s Tibetan Service.

“The Chinese government has begun operating the largest solar power station along with the hydropower dams in Nyakchu county in Kardze [in Chinese, Ganzi] beginning June 24,” the resident said, referring to a separate hydropower project.

“In order to build and facilitate these power plants, the Chinese government has displaced the local Tibetans in these regions in a land-grab and has not given any compensation yet.”

The resident said that the displaced Tibetans were never informed before the project started.

“Instead, police were stationed near these power plants and locals were not permitted near them,” the person said. “Though the authorities told the local Tibetans that these power plants would be beneficial to livestock and their pastures, but now the Tibetan nomads are being displaced and pushed away to other places.”

The nomads had filed complaints with the Chinese government to no avail, another Tibetan resident said.

“In April this year, the local Tibetans pleaded with the Chinese authorities to stop these projects,” the second person said. “However it is very clear that no opposition to displacement and resettlement is possible and that local Tibetans have no choice but to comply with the government’s orders.” 

The power plants pose a serious threat to Tibet’s fragile environment, Lobsang Yangtso, an environmental researcher at the San Francisco-based Tibet International Network.

“China’s policies and the expansion of infrastructure in Tibet are the cause of earthquakes, floods and various types of irreversible damage to the ecosystem,” she said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday ordered 500 troops and 200 anti-aircraft weapons systems to four northeastern provinces to hunt down drones that allegedly violated the country’s airspace.

He said aircraft are believed to be operated by “ethnic insurgents” in Vietnam, but Vietnamese authorities have denied that the drones were theirs.

“We urge those countries that allow drones to use their countries to violate Cambodia to immediately halt their actions,” he said. “It is an act of terrorism against Cambodia.”

Hun Sen urged calm in a pre-recorded address released via ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, mouthpiece FreshNews. The residents of Kratie, Mondulkiri, Ratanakiri and Tboung Khmum provinces have no reason to fear an impending conflict, he said.

“Don’t worry about war in Cambodia – our troops … are intervention troops to help local authorities due to repeated violations by drones we don’t know the source of yet,” he said.

The prime minister said that the military assets being sent to the four provinces will be there “not only to destroy drones, but also to search for those who fled from Vietnam to hide in Cambodia,” without providing further details.

On June 11, attacks on two commune offices in central Vietnam’s Dak Lak province – across the border from eastern Cambodia – left nine people dead. Last week, Vietnamese authorities said they will prosecute 84 people accused of being involved in the attacks. No one has claimed responsibility for them, and the motivation remains unclear.

Rallying voters

Members of Cambodia’s opposition said they believe Hun Sen – who has been in power since 1985 – is using the development to scare voters into throwing their support behind the ruling CPP ahead of a general election on July 23. He has used similar tactics in the past.

“Before the 2011 elections, there were skirmishes between Cambodia and Thailand, and in 2016 there was a border dispute with Laos, and [the government] deployed troops as the elections approached,” said Morn Phally, an activist with the Cambodia National Rescue Party living in exile in Malaysia.

Hun Sen has frequently invoked the specter of threats to national security during speeches in the lead up to ballots, and framed the vote as a referendum on which party can best maintain Cambodia’s sovereignty.

Speaking to RFA on Tuesday, Finland-based political analyst Kim Sok questioned why Hun Sen was deploying troops to the border when Vietnam has denied involvement in the drone incursions.

“Hun Sen is using this strategy to intimidate people and control power,” he said.

Tuesday’s troop deployment follows the unanimous approval by Cambodia’s National Assembly of an amendment to the election law that prohibits those who don’t vote in next month’s elections from running for office in future elections.

Analysts say the change appears to be aimed at preventing a large-scale boycott of the July 23 vote by supporters of the main opposition Candlelight Party.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

For a full year, Singkarn Ruenhom is working with 14 others to document the potential destruction that a huge dam could wreak on the residents and rural farmland along the Yuam River.

They are conducting a “people’s environmental impact assessment” to counter the findings of a 2021 study by Thailand’s Royal Irrigation Department and Naresuan University that reported only four houses in the river village of Mae Ngao, where 170 people live, will be affected by new infrastructure alone..

Local residents say the destruction from the dam – officially called the Yuam River Diversion Project – will be far greater, clearing a minimum of 600 hectares of land and affecting the livelihoods of an estimated 40,000 people in 46 villages.

“I think about life in the water, the plants and the animals. They will go extinct.” If the project goes through, Singkarn said after hooking a fish in the river, taking a photo and documenting his catch in Thai and Karen. “That’s something we can’t bring back.”

In the past, such grassroots research efforts have warranted some big wins for communities in both Thailand and Myanmar over major construction projects that were scratched. In those cases, too, environmental impact assessments were either bypassed altogether or not made public.

In 2019, villagers in northeast Thailand staged forums and protests alongside their environmental study, which successfully blocked the company from moving mining equipment to a new potash drilling site despite obstruction lawsuits hedged from the company. 

The Hatgyi Dam, a project which was slated for construction in a conflict zone in Karen State, was delayed due to both ongoing conflict and grassroots impact reporting. After the coup in 2021, it also faced attempted revival under military administration. 

Saw Tha Poe, who works at Karen Rivers Watch, says the cross-border community has needed to join forces to demonstrate the impact to areas downstream and track fish species.

“Many Karen people along the river in both the Thai and Burma side have a good relationship and collaborate together, doing the research, doing the surveys, for example, about the fish species,” he said, adding that the community has found some to be endangered. 

Grassroots research

With a group of volunteers, Thai professors Malee Sitthikriengkrai and Chayan Vaddhanaphuti teach research methods they can use alongside their daily routines to document how the soon-to-be dammed river would affect not only livelihoods but the local environment overall. 

Chayan has been fine-tuning this research since the 1990s, and it’s since become popular around Southeast Asia. For the Karen, Chayan says, this research is particularly useful in giving indigenous people a voice. 

Roughly 80 percent of Mae Ngao residents are Karen, many of whose families have resided in Thailand for over 60 years. A few have more recently come across the border from Myanmar, where their ethnic group has been engaged in a war with the military for decades.

Despite residing in Thailand for decades, Singkarn says as many as half of the Karen residents in the village are still applying for Thai identification card – a process that can take as much as 20 years. 

And non-Thai citizens are not legally entitled to full compensation for their land or livelihood. Additionally, any land designated part of the newly finished Mae Ngao National Park under the National Park Act could mean a long legal battle, or no compensation at all.

“People who have the color card, they can’t travel out of the district. If their houses have been flooded, where are they going to live?” Singkarn asked. Color cards referr to pink or white cards that allow migrants to work in Thailand or show they’re in the process of proving their citizenship.

“Where are they going to work to make money, because they have been locked in this district? They [will] have no other place to go because of the water.”

But when inspectors came to measure the impact of the dam on the surrounding area, they minimized the damage, said Jor Da, one of Mae Ngao’s Thai-Karen residents.

“If it happens, it will be challenging for the families here,” he said. “During the meeting (with residents) they only showed as little damage as possible. We live here inter-depending with trees and forests.”

Upon the publication of the 2021 environmental impact study, Malee said the original report’s thousands of pages about impacted areas were almost entirely inaccessible to villagers. 

After being charged over 20,500 Thai baht (US$600) for printing the report, they received a copy that was heavily redacted and grossly underestimated the harmful effects of the project.

Neither Naresuan University nor the Royal Irrigation Department responded to RFA’s request for comment.

“It’s very difficult for the community to raise their voice,” said Sor Rattanamanee, whose Community Resource Centre Foundation is providing legal counsel to Mae Ngao and helped them obtain the original impact assessment. 

“Some of them may not have the identity card, that’s why it’s very difficult for them to complain because the officers will use this opportunity to put pressure on them and [put] them at risk.”

Layers of impact

While Mae Ngao’s full report won’t be published until later this year, graduate student Manapee Khongrakchang says findings already point to major disruptions for the border community. 

The fishermen found that nearly all 53 species of fish documented in the river so far would be impacted by the project by changes in food chain and typology of the river. The village is also documenting their relationship to the river and history through art and storytelling, calculating total revenue from cash crops year-round, and documenting unique species found in the area. 

“We have one species that’s going to be extinct for the Yuam and the Ngao River that’s called pla sa nge [short-finned eel],” Manapee said. Villagers also raise concerns about a species of clam, which lives in the rocky bottom of the river and would be impacted when other types of sediment flood the region. Both are sources of food for the community.

“It’s questionable to me – is that fair for one species, that they can’t get back to the river that they live?” she said.

On a nearby hill, Daw Po lives in one of the only houses in Mae Ngao documented in the original environmental impact assessment.

Despite being one of the few certain of compensation and legally living in Thailand, she has little faith in this outcome. Her house sits next to the spot designated to be the site of six water-pumping stations to pump into an eight-meter pipe carrying water 600 meters below ground. 

“[Here], I will not brood over the house if I need to run. If I own something, I will be sorry to lose it. I am not sure whether I should go or stay,” Daw Po told RFA. While she and her elderly parents cannot attend meetings in the village anymore due to health issues, she’s concerned about maintaining access to natural foods from in and around the river. 

Despite past successes, Malee says it will take more than just research to stop the mega-projects from developing remote communities with little chance of fighting back. After the research is finished, they plan to hold meetings to share their findings with the public.

“The government is like a superpower compared with us. We are like ants and they are like elephants,” she said. “The government and the irrigation department thought, ‘Oh, for this village, no one will pay attention,’ or they can build up this project easily. But it won’t be that way.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster

Under a proposed law to boost patriotic education in China, schools would be required to have students study “Xi Jinping Thought,” the latest step by authorities to indoctrinate the country’s youth with propaganda about the Communist Party and its leader.

According to draft legislation before the National People’s Congress, schools and organizations involving children and young people have a duty to carry out ideological and political education, including the Communist Party’s official version of history, national symbols, “national unity” and “national security,” state media reported this week.

The law is part of an ongoing bid by the Chinese Communist Party to fine-tune control over people’s thoughts, words and deeds, according to political commentators.

“What this means is that anything they don’t like — any ideas or comments — will be criminalized as unpatriotic,” said U.S.-based commentator Hu Pinghe. “People will be characterized as traitors to the Chinese people.”

The move comes after photos and reports emerged on social media platforms showing a student holding a placard on the campus of Peking University calling for an end to “one-party authoritarian rule.”

“Embrace a multi-party system,” read the banner. Unconfirmed reports on social media said a person was led away from the scene of the June 22 lone protest, which recalled the banners hung by “Bridge Man” protester Peng Lifa from the Sitong traffic flyover in Beijing on the eve of the 20th party congress last October.

The protest took place during Dragon Boat Festival, when boats are raced and rice dumplings are made to honor Warring States-era poet Qu Yuan, who according to popular legend drowned himself in protest at official corruption.

Instead, the authorities have been at pains to bill Qu Yuan as “a patriot,” in a bid to stamp out any expression of public opposition to the current government, analysts said.

Targeting teenagers

The draft law will make “patriotic activities” legally mandated for many people in China, particularly children and young people, according to state media reports and commentators.

“The spirit of patriotism would be promoted through national merit and honor awards, activities during the country’s National Day, important anniversaries and major festivals, as well as through flag-raising ceremonies, the singing of the national anthem and pledges of allegiance to the Constitution,” state news agency Xinhua said in a report on the draft law.

According to the English-language China Daily newspaper, “the patriotic education of teenagers” is of particular concern, and includes measures to boost patriotic feeling in Hong Kong and Macau.

In 2012, the Hong Kong government temporarily shelved plans to introduce a Beijing-backed program of “patriotic education” into the city’s schools following mass protests by high school students, then withdrew the Liberal Studies critical thinking program from schools, replacing it with a more patriotic program focusing on “national security” and a Chinese identity.

Now it looks as if that program will spread outside the classroom, both in Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.

There are also signs it will be exported beyond China’s borders, with provisions in the draft law targeting “Chinese overseas” — including the 23 million residents of democratic Taiwan — and requiring internet platforms to provide patriotic education to users.

Internet service providers will be required to produce and spread patriotic content, using technologically innovative approaches, the China Daily said.

Seeking Mao-like scope

China already has a highly sophisticated set of blocks, controls, filters and online surveillance that strictly controls what its citizens are able to do or see online, known as the Great Firewall, as well as a nationwide “public opinion management” operation under the Central Propaganda Department.

People in China frequently challenge those in power, despite pervasive surveillance, a “grid” system of law enforcement at the neighborhood level and targeted “stability maintenance” system aimed at controlling critics of the government before they take action,

Hu, the commentator, said the current government has tried but failed to achieve the sheer reach of party propaganda seen in China under late supreme leader Mao Zedong.

“They are bringing in patriotism to supplement [communist ideology], hoping to strengthen their ideological control over young people,” he said.

Wu Chien-chung, secretary-general of Taiwan’s Strategy and Public Research Institute, said the law, if passed, will be a world first.

“This is the first patriotic education law in the world,” Wu told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview. “Clearly things have reached the point for the Chinese Communist Party where legislation is needed to maintain national unity.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

In Brief

Many nations and environmental groups have questioned Japan’s decision to discharge nuclear wastewater from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese government is among the plan’s most vocal critics, with China’s foreign ministry recently issuing statements questioning the plan’s safety and declaring that the Japanese government is imposing a “unilateral decision” without considering less harmful disposal methods.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) found these claims to be unfounded. Japan’s planned release of water meets current international safety standards regarding wastewater discharge recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well as China’s own domestic safety standards. 

The Chinese foreign ministry’s accusation that Japan is making a unilateral decision without sufficient evidence is also misleading. In the more than twelve years since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan has proposed a variety of disposal methods for consideration, with the IAEA and broader international community engaging in related research and evaluation several times.

In Depth

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant on Japan’s Hakura Beach, is scheduled to begin discharging almost 400,000 of treated wastewater from the plant into the sea later this summer. 

The impending deadline has brought international attention back to the more than 1.3 million cubic meters of wastewater currently stored in thousands of water storage tanks at the plant.

TEPCO maintains that the controlled discharge of the wastewater follows a rigorous nuclear purification process using a pumping and filtration system known as ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) that is based on and meets the IAEA’s safety standards.

A final IAEA assessment of the proposal is expected to be published at the end of June, with earlier IAEA reports indicating that the organization will likely support the plan. The reported decision has reopened domestic and international debate on the issue, and many groups have expressed their opposition, including the Japanese fishermen association, the international NGO Greenpeace and many in the marine ecology community.

What are China’s main criticisms about Japan’s efforts to dispose of the wastewater? 

China is one of the harshest critics of the plan. Chinese officials alleged that Japan’s plan lacks sufficient scientific evidence, that the ALPS treated water poses a “great harm” to the environment and that Japan has neither offered alternative plans nor consulted extensively with the international community – particularly neighboring countries who will be affected by the discharge. 

Such allegations have been reiterated by top Chinese officials over the last three months, including by the Chinese Ambassador to Japan Wu Jianghao, China’s permanent representative to the IAEA Li Song and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin.

Chinese netizens on video sharing platforms such as Douyin and TikTok have widely circulated these officials’ comments, with many echoing their government’s rhetoric about the “great harm” posed by the wastewater. 

“Fukushima’s nuclear wastewater contains more than 60 kinds of radioactive elements,” reads one comment. 

“The half-life [of the radioactive elements] is up to 5,000 years,” says another netizen.

Will the ALPS treated water be a  “great harm” to the environment?

No. 

Discharging water into the ocean is a disposal method used by nuclear power plants around the world, including many of the 55 such plants in China. Despite this, Chinese officials have repeatedly claimed without further explanation that wastewater treated by ALPS is different from water discharged at other nuclear plants. 

China’s assertions are incorrect, according to David Krofcheck, a professor of physics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He told AFCL that ALPS purified water is as safe as wastewater discharged from normal nuclear power plants, even going so far as to say he would eat fish caught in the discharged waters around Fukushima. 

What radioactive elements will ALPS remove from the wastewater?

ALPS will reduce 62 of the 63 radioactive substances currently in the wastewater to amounts that will have a negligible impact on the environment, according to the IAEA and Japanese officials. 

The one substance still remaining in significant amounts following purification and dilution is an isotope known as tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that exists in trace amounts in nature and which can combine with oxygen to form a radioactive water known as T2O or tritiated water . 

In light of international concerns and following suggestions by the IAEA, Japan has agreed to dilute the tritiated water one further time following its initial purification by ALPS before discharging it into the sea.

How much tritium in water is considered normal? 

Radioactivity is typically measured by the international unit becquerel. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) currently recommends that drinking water contain no more than 10,000 becquerels of tritium per liter, Krofcheck says.

The purified wastewater Japan plans to discharge contains 1,500 becquerels per liter, or about one-seventh of the WHO recommended amount, he says. 

In comparison, China’s government allows a nuclear power plant in the coastal town of Qinshan to discharge wastewater containing up to 3700 becquerels of radioactive elements per liter. 

In 2022 alone, the plant itself disclosed that it discharged 201 megabecquerels (201,000,000 becquerels) of liquid tritium, about one-fourth of its government stipulated annual cap of 800 megabecquerels. This figure is over nine times higher than Japan’s estimated 22 megabecquerels of annual tritium which will result from the Fukushima discharge. 

Has Japan provided alternative plans of disposal for consideration?

Yes. 

Japan proposed five different ways to dispose of ALPS treated water in 2016 before finally settling on discharging the water into the ocean as of April 2021.

Has Japan coordinated the discharge with the IAEA? 

Yes.

Since 2011, the Japanese government has regularly submitted progress reports to the IAEA concerning the response to the Fukushima accident. Japan has also asked the IAEA to participate in the creation and oversight of the entire discharge plan, with the UN nuclear agency forming a task force composed of scientists from 11 different countries, including China. 

The international task force created by the IAEA has spent the past two years surveying the situation in Fukushima, holding dozens of meetings and publishing six reports offering specific recommendations to improve Japan’s final discharge efforts.

The Task Force made its final trip to Fukushima at the end May 2023 and is currently preparing to publish its final report on the matter. 

Has Japan communicated with its neighbors and the broader international community in planning the wastewater discharge? 

Yes. 

The IAEA task force further worked with independent third-party laboratories in Austria, Switzerland, France, South Korea and the U.S. to confirm that Japan’s ALPS treated water can meet all international safety standards regarding radioactive harm to the environment and humans. 

In addition to the task force, the Embassy of Japan in China says that Japan sends monthly briefings on the discharge plan to all foreign embassies in Tokyo, including China’s mission. 

TEPCO has set up websites in Japanese and English to explain the progress of the process while also publishing web pages in Chinese and Korean that explain the ALPS treatment process. In addition, the company regularly publishes monitoring data on the Fukushima nuclear plant every month.

The IAEA has not responded to AFCL’s inquiries about the conclusions of the Task Force as of the time this report was published.

There’s no perfect plan, but experts think discharging the wastewater into the sea is “the least bad option.” According to Krofcheck, many of these criticisms are connected to TEPCO’s slow response to the initial crisis in 2011. 

Krofcheck notes that to just leave the more than 1,000 tanks of treated water in Fukushima – a region where another earthquake will likely occur within the next 30 to 40 years – potentially sets the stage for an even graver nuclear energy-related crisis down the line. 

Conclusion

China’s criticism and resistance towards Japanese plans is part of the larger international controversy surrounding how to best deal with the wastewater left over from the Fukushima nuclear accident. However, statements on Chinese social media about the treated water’s “great harm” are misinformed and the assertion by the Chinese foreign ministry that Japan is unilaterally deciding on a plan that lacks ample scientific evidence is simply untrue. 

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a new branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

The Russian private military company Wagner Group, which made headlines over the weekend by starting to march on Moscow amid an apparent dispute with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has longstanding ties to Hong Kong, records show.

Public domain information shows that its predecessor, the Slavonic Corps, was founded in the city by two employees of the Russian private security firm Moran Security.

And Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch-turned-military leader known as “Putin’s chef,” has raised funds for at least some of his ventures in the city, via a number of Hong Kong-registered companies held by several affiliated parent companies, according to a survey of public records carried out by RFA Cantonese.

The Wagner crisis comes amid growing concern over the use of Hong Kong as a domicile for a growing number of shell companies hiding illicit operations following the 2018 arrest in Canada of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou for alleged business dealings with sanctioned Iranian companies.

Hong Kong has also been used by the ruling Communist Party’s financial and political elite as both a haven and channel for its private wealth, with top Chinese leaders and their families owning luxury property in the city.

The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and other studies have detailed how the Corps’ first deployment – to Syria in 2013 – ended in disaster due to supply and logistical problems at Deir al-Zour, after which it was disbanded.

Along with the Russian opposition-backed Dossier Center, CSIS describes Wagner as an unofficial Russian army with operations in Ukraine, Syria and Africa in recent years.

However, affiliated companies remained in existence in Hong Kong until 2020, when they were named and sanctioned by the United States. 

Research has shown that Wagner Group doesn’t actually exist as a legal corporate entity, yet until last weekend, it enjoyed the full support of the Kremlin, according to the CSIS.

Yet the group’s affiliates have longstanding ties to Hong Kong and mainland China.

Slavonic Corps

Customs records show that these companies have had frequent transactions with Russian companies over the past 10 years, and reveal a network of Russian financial dealings criss-crossing Hong Kong and mainland China. 

Wagner’s predecessor, the Slavonic Corps, is typically reported as having been founded in 2013, but a search of Hong Kong’s Companies Registry showed it was established in 2012, with the founder named on the record as “Vadim Gusev, deputy director of Moran.” 

Another board member is named as Sergei Kramskoi, another former Moran employee. 

In early 2013, the Slavonic Corps placed a recruitment ad on several Moscow military websites, successfully recruiting 267 people, some of whom were military veterans, including one Dmitry Utkin, a former high-ranking officer of the Russian intelligence special ops forces, Spetsnaz GRU.

Dmitry Utkin later used the call sign “Wagner,” sparking speculation that he founded the group from the ashes of the Slavonic Corps.

An investigation by RFA Cantonese found a copy of the advertisement, which shows a Hong Kong address for the company in an office building at 1 Duddell Street, Central. 

However, the company’s 2013 and 2014 annual reports show the company address as being in New Trade Plaza, Shatin. Few contact details are given other than an email address. 

At the end of the same year, the Slavonic Corps started operating under the name Wagner. It took part in the annexation of Crimea the following year, including attacks on Ukraine. 

The company registration in Hong Kong remained unaffected, and it wasn’t until 2021 that it was officially deleted and dissolved by the Hong Kong Government Companies Registry, because it was believed not to have been operating for several years.

U.S. sanctions

By July 2020, the US Department of Defense had accused the Russian government of running a huge mining operation in Tripoli through Wagner, bankrolling the now-fallen dictatorship in Sudan and exacerbating the Libyan conflict.

The resulting sanctions targeted Wagner and Prigozhin, along with various companies in Hong Kong and Thailand that U.S. officials said had helped Prigozhin conduct 100 transactions worth a total of U.S.$7.5 million between 2018 and 2019. 

According to the U.S. Treasury, the list of sanctioned companies included three Hong Kong-registered companies: Shen Yang Jing Cheng Machinery Imp & Exp Co. Ltd (formerly Anying Group Ltd); Shine Dragon Group Ltd and Zhe Jiang Jiayi Small Commodities Trade Co. Ltd, all of which were held and managed by Russian businessman Igor Valerievich Lavrenkov, acting as an intermediary. 

The address given in the Hong Kong Companies Registry for all three companies was “Chaoyang, China.”

In its July 15, 2020 statement announcing the sanctions, the Treasury described Prigozhin as the financier of Wagner, “a designated Russian Ministry of Defense proxy force.”

“Wagner’s activities in other countries, including Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, and Libya, have generated insecurity and incited violence against innocent civilians,” the Treasury said.

The three companies had “facilitated transactions … [that] supported [Prigozhin’s] activities in Sudan and maintenance of his private aircraft,” it said.

“Shine Dragon Group Limited, Shen Yang Jing Cheng Machinery Imp&Exp. Co., Zhe Jiang Jiayi Small Commodities Trade Company Limited, and Lavrenkov are being designated for having materially assisted Prigozhin,” the statement said.

All three companies were founded in 2009 and dissolved between 2021 and 2022, according to Hong Kong company records.

The U.S. customs trade data platform Import Genius shows that Shen Yang Jing Cheng mostly served Russian clients, exporting some 50 tons of oil-drilling and pipeline equipment on five occasions to several different Russian companies between 2014 and 2017.

Zhe Jiang Jiayi Small Commodities shipped more than 7,000 tons of plastic products and parts to at least 10 Russian companies over a 10-year period; the two companies report that most of their products are sourced from China. 

According to the U.S. Treasury, Lavrenkov set up another company in Hong Kong in 2012 called SD Airport Security Systems Ltd, using a different passport, but the registration was suddenly withdrawn in January 2017. 

According to “Import Genius”,  a company using the same name repeatedly shipped metal detectors, X-ray detectors and related parts to the same Russian company in May 2015. 

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.