A spokesman for Mr. Angermayer, who has based his family office and other business ventures in Malta, did not respond to requests for comment.
In early 2021, Thiel Capital also became a shareholder in a Malta entity through a byzantine series of developments. The deal involved Coru, a Mexican online financial advice start-up, which has a parent company incorporated in London.
Entities controlled by Mr. Thiel and Mr. Danzeisen, his husband, were among Coru’s biggest owners, corporate filings show. The start-up needed additional funding in late 2020, but its investors could not reach an agreement to put more cash in, said two former investors. The company went into administration, the equivalent of bankruptcy.
Around that time, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Danzeisen and several other Coru investors established a company in Malta called EUM Holdings Melite Ltd., Maltese records show. That company bought Coru’s shares out of administration for about $100,000, according to British records. The records do not detail EUM’s business activities.
Now Coru is owned by EUM. Its shareholders include Mr. Thiel, Mr. Danzeisen, Richard Li — a son of Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing — and a group with a former Nicaraguan government official and a scion of the Spanish family that made a fortune selling Lladró porcelain figurines.
Mr. Thiel began exploring Maltese citizenship around that time, said people familiar with the process. By late 2021, documents show, he was far along in the application process and retained an agency that fielded questions from the Maltese government about his businesses and political activities.
The questions included Mr. Thiel’s role with Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company he founded that works with governments and corporations, and his political activity supporting Mr. Trump.
LONDON, Oct 5 (Reuters) – As President Vladimir Putin completed paperwork for the annexation of four regions of Ukraine on Wednesday, the Kremlin said there was no contradiction between Russian retreats and Putin’s vow that they would always be part of Russia.
In the biggest expansion of Russian territory in at least half a century, Putin signed laws admitting the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), Kherson region and Zaporizhzhia region into Russia.
The conclusion of the legalities of the annexation of up to 18% of Ukrainian territory came as Russian forces battled to halt Ukrainian counter-offensives within it, especially north of Kherson and west of Luhansk.
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Asked if there was a contradiction between Putin’s rhetoric and the reality of retreat on the ground, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “There is no contradiction whatsoever. They will be with Russia forever and they will be returned.”
The wording of the laws is unclear about what exact borders Russia is claiming for the annexed territories and Peskov declined to give clear guidance.
“Certain territories will still be returned and we will continue to consult with the population that expresses a desire to live with Russia,” Peskov said.
The contrast between a set of defeats on the battlefield and lofty language from the Kremlin about Russia’s might have raised concerns within the Russian elite about the conduct of the war.
Such is the depth of feeling over the retreats that two Putin allies publicly scolded the military top brass about the failings.
ANNEXATION
Russia declared the annexations after holding what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine. Western governments and Kyiv said the votes breached international law and were coercive and non-representative.
More than seven months into a war that has killed tens of thousands and triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, Russia’s most basic aims are still not achieved.
The areas that are being annexed are not all under control of Russian forces and Ukrainian forces have recently driven them back.
Together with Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, Putin’s total claim amounts to more than 22% of Ukrainian territory, though the exact borders of the four regions he is annexing are still yet to be finally clarified.
Moscow, which recognised Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, will never give the regions back, Putin said on Friday at a grand Kremlin treaty-signing ceremony which brought the partially controlled regions into Russia.
Russia’s parliament said people living in the annexed regions would be granted Russian passports, the Russian Central Bank would oversee financial stability and the Russian rouble would be the official currency.
In justifying the Feb. 24 invasion, Putin said that Russian speakers in Ukraine had been persecuted by Ukraine which, he said, the West was trying to use to undermine Russian security.
Ukraine and its Western backers say that Putin has no justification for what they say is an imperial-style land grab. Kyiv denies Russian speakers were persecuted.
Now Putin casts the war as a battle for Russia’s survival against the United States and its allies, which he says want to destroy Russia and grab its vast natural resources.
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Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Philippa Fletcher
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As a lifelong resident of Lafourche Parish in southern Louisiana, Jeanne Gouaux knew the storms that cut through the region demanded preparation. She had wind and hail insurance, a solid savings account. But it wasn’t until Hurricane Ida’s 150-mile-per-hour winds peeled back part of her roof last August that she experienced the fury — and its aftermath — up close.
“In a matter of one day, one storm came through and knocked out everything I worked so hard for all these years,” said Ms. Gouaux, a single mother of four and director of pharmacy for a surgery center near her home in Lockport, La.
With the cost and frequency of weather-driven disasters on the rise, girding your financial house for such a catastrophe — to the extent that you’re able — is increasingly crucial in parts of the country.
damage to residences, businesses and municipalities, according to an analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
too weak (or simply unenforced) to withstand damage.
But climate shifts are “supercharging the increasing frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters,” said Adam Smith, the climate scientist who led the NOAA analysis, “most notably the vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the Western states and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the Eastern states.”
“It hints that the extremely high activity of recent years is becoming the new normal,” he added.
Ms. Gouaux, 45, had a bad feeling about Ida. In a prescient move, she packed up her family and, for the first time, left her home before the storm hit.
state program — while the home was gutted and repaired. Only in June, after 10 months, was the family able to partly move back in. With the house incomplete, meals are still cooked in the camper.
went bankrupt, causing the state guarantor to take over claims, gumming up an already slow process. It took nine months to collect her first insurance check.
Not all households have the wherewithal to prepare themselves for the worst. But there is some safeguarding that everyone can attempt. Here’s where to start:
tools can provide a starting point for assessing your home’s risk to earthly hazards.
Risk Factor has created a user-friendly tool that outlines flood, fire and extreme-heat risks (and soon other perils, including wind) for most homes across the country. Plug in an address, and it drills down to the property level, illustrating potential hazards. For example, it can show the probability that a property might flood, where the water is likely to pool, the damage it might cause and how much repairs might cost.
hazard maps for earthquakes, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Flood Insurance Program maintain flood maps (which also determine whether a home with a federally backed mortgage is required to have flood insurance). The flood program has recently overhauled its rating methodology, called Risk Rating 2.0, but you’ll have to contact a flood insurance agent who can share more about your property’s unique risk, said Jeremy Edwards, a FEMA spokesman.
You may be able to find more local hazard information, too. Californians, for example, can enter their address into the MyHazards website. And if you’re new to a community, talk to neighbors.
you can do to minimize damage if a flood or fire strike. The costs of mitigation will vary, but it may reduce your insurance premiums. Some insurers, for example, provide meaningful discounts in hurricane-prone regions after homeowners install roof braces or straps, said Alyssa Bourgeois, an insurance producer with MarshMcLennan in Metairie, La.
The Risk Factor website provides suggestions for hazards facing specific properties, and many regions have programs offering residents financial help to harden their homes against specific hazards, though funding is often limited.
Evaluate insurance needs. The insurance market varies greatly by locality and the hazards inherent to the area. Standard homeowners’ and renters’ insurance policies do not cover all hazards. Floods and earthquakes always require separate coverage. Wind and hail (hurricane) coverage may carry its own deductible as part of your homeowners’ insurance, or it may be a separate policy, at least in certain areas. Wildfires, meanwhile, are often incorporated into many policies, experts said.
Flood insurance (see Ann Carrns’s guide here) is generally available through the National Flood Insurance Program, which FEMA manages. Most Californians buy earthquake coverage through the California Earthquake Authority, a nonprofit entity created through state law to provide policies through its member insurers.
enough coverage to replace your property — that is, to rebuild it, not what you’d pay to buy it again, said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a consumer advocacy group.
But many households in the highest-risk areas, including hurricane-prone states like Louisiana and Florida, are having trouble finding affordable coverage as insurers exit the market in droves.
Jude Boudreaux, a financial planner in New Orleans, said he receives calls weekly from clients questioning whether they should continue living there given the increased insurance costs. “A lot of carriers are leaving Louisiana, so people with policies are getting nonrenewal notices, and there are fewer choices out there,” he said.
Until rates stabilize, many people are resorting to the usual strategies to keep costs manageable, like increasing deductibles and reducing some coverage, including on “other structures” such as garages and personal property.
cars and other vehicles. Comprehensive auto coverage, required by auto lenders, generally provides protection against natural disasters. But older, low-value cars may not have comprehensive (and it may not be worth the cost anyway). “In those cases, we’d recommend setting aside the amount of the premium you’d pay each year into a savings account instead of giving it to the insurer,” Mr. Heller said.
home inventory spreadsheet, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners has a related app, and there are other inventory apps as well.
The least time-consuming method might be to walk through each room of your home with your mobile phone’s video camera, narrating the contents along the way. Don’t forget to open up closets, cabinets and drawers, as well as storage spaces and the garage. Then email the file to yourself, or store it securely online (and perhaps on an external hard drive).
There’s real money at stake: Ms. Gouaux was able to recover only roughly $14,000 of the $53,000 in contents coverage on her wind and hail policy.
“The night we left, someone posted: Make sure you take photos of all the rooms,” she said. “We didn’t do a good job. By the time we got back, everything was all over the place, and it was very hot.”
fireproof and waterproof box. Consider storing electronic copies on an external hard drive (using password protection) or in the cloud.
FEMA’s financial emergency kit has an exhaustive check list of what to gather and protect, along with a 41-page emergency financial first-aid kit that can be filled out online and stored in a secure place. The American Red Cross has a version of its own.
If you have to leave your home, experts suggest taking key documents with you in case you need to file a claim with your insurer or apply for FEMA assistance.
Keep emergency funds. Having access to money for any basic needs is also something to consider. If there’s no electricity and A.T.M.s aren’t working, you’ll probably need cash. Stash some in a safe place.
And if you receive any federal benefits through paper checks, now is the time to switch to automatic electronic deposits. Ditto for any other payments you may receive by mail.
take. Mr. Boudreaux, who has lived with the threat of hurricanes for most of his life, said to walk through your home and think about what’s irreplaceable — it probably fits into a plastic box.
“Define what those things are, or create a list so if someone knocked on your door and said, ‘The fire is coming in 30 minutes’ — what would you take?” he said. “It’s also good life perspective exercise.”
Kosovar police officers securing a bridge in Mitrovica, Kosovo, on Sunday, after protests along border with Serbia.Credit…Festim Beqiri/Picture-Alliance/DPA, via Associated Press
A dispute over license plates between the Balkan nations of Kosovo and Serbia, from whom Kosovo split 14 years ago, yielded protests and gunfire Sunday night, prompting fears that the violence could escalate as Western countries are focused on the war in Ukraine.
Amid demonstrators who built barricades, unknown gunmen fired on Kosovo police officers along the restive northern border with Serbia on the eve of a new law requiring ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to switch from Serbian license plates to Kosovar ones in the next two months. Many Serbs in Kosovo still use Serbian-issued plates, which the government considers illegal.
Kosovo’s government had also said that beginning Monday, all Serbian ID and passports holders must obtain an extra document to enter Kosovo, just as Kosovars must do to enter to Serbia.
No one was injured by the gunfire, but in response to the violence, the Kosovo police closed two northern border crossings.
“The following hours, days and weeks may be challenging and problematic,” Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, said in a video released on his social media channels.
Similar protests over license plates flared a year ago, but observers say that tensions are higher this time because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which consumes the focus of Kosovo’s most important ally, the United States, as well as that of the European Union.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nine years after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign pushed out Serb forces from the former province. Serbia — as well as its key allies, Russia and China — still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, and insists on protecting its ethnic Serb kin, who make up about 5 percent of Kosovo’s population of 1.8 million people.
A little less than half of Kosovo’s Serb population lives in four northern municipalities bordering Serbia and many have been reluctant to recognize the authorities in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, preferring to live as though they were still part of Serbia.
The European Union has mediated negotiations between both governments since 2011 and slowly, the police, courts and municipalities have come under Pristina’s control. But, encouraged by the political leadership in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, Serbian nationalists protest each additional attempt at integration.
“We will pray for peace and seek peace, but there will be no surrender and Serbia will win,” President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia said on Sunday at a news conference. “If they dare to persecute and mistreat and kill Serbs, Serbia will win,” he continued, adding later, “We’ve never been in a more difficult, complicated situation than today.”
Mr. Vucic, who convened a high-level meeting of security and military officials on Sunday night, said that the Kosovar government was trying to cast him in the same light as President Vladimir V. Putin by blaming the unrest on Serbia’s close relationship with Russia, a fellow Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation.
Kosovo’s leader, Mr. Vucic said during Sunday’s news conference, was trying to take advantage of the global mood by projecting that “big Putin gave orders to little Putin, so the new Zelensky, in the form of Albin Kurti, will be a savior and fight against the great Serbian hegemony.”
Vladimir Djukanovic, a Serbian member of Parliament from Mr. Vucic’s ruling party, also linked the border spat to the war in Ukraine, tweeting, “Seems to me that Serbia will be forced to begin the denazification of the Balkans,” an ominous reference to Russia’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
Serbia, a candidate to join the European Union, has maintained close ties with Moscow and has not joined Western sanctions on Russia, though it did vote in favor of a United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Belgrade and Moscow share animosity for the NATO military alliance because of its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, when Mr. Vucic was a spokesman for the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
NATO still maintains a peacekeeping presence in Kosovo, with a force of approximately 3,700 troops. In a news release, NATO said its force on the ground was “ready to intervene if stability is jeopardized.”
After a meeting with the U.S. ambassador on Sunday night, Kosovo’s government announced it would delay the implementation of both the license plate and identification decisions by one month.
Russia quickly weighed in on Sunday, calling the license plate and identification laws “another step to oust the Serbian population from Kosovo,” Russia’s news agency, TASS, reported.
“We call on Pristina and the United States and the European Union backing it to stop provocation and observe the Serbs’ rights in Kosovo,” said Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Kosovo’s northern border with Serbia has been a hub of violence in the past. In 2011, when the Kosovo police sought to take full control of area, one Kosovo police officer was killed and 25 more were injured.
Olena Zelenska addressed a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill about Russia destroying the Ukrainian people.
“Russia is destroying our people. These are Russia’s hunger games, hunting for peaceful people in peaceful cities in Ukraine,” said Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady.
The provocative words come as the civilian death toll from Russia’s invasion continues to grow in her absence.
Olena Zelenska made an emotional appeal to the U.S. Congress, punctuated by pictures of children killed or maimed by Russian attacks.
She asked for more military support for Ukraine and to someday make possible what now is not.
“We want everybody and every mother to be able to tell their child, ‘go to sleep peacefully, there will be no more air strikes, no more missile strikes.’ Is this so much to wish for?,” Zelenska said.
Her message comes as the situation in Ukraine grows more dire by the day.
Nearly two million Ukrainian refugees have been sent to Russia, according to a tally by officials from both countries.
An Associated Press investigation found many of those refugees are given a “poisoned choice:” live in Russia, or die in Ukraine.
Russia calls these transfers “humanitarian evacuations” of war victims.
Ukraine sees them as forced moves to enemy territory — a war crime.
Viktoria Kovalevska is a Ukrainian refugee.
“There were people with weapons. Five of them surrounded me and said: ‘you don’t get to choose; you’ll go where you are loaded.'” Kovalevska said.
The U.S. State Department is calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to put a stop to these so-called “filtration” operations.
The agency’s appeal describes children separated from their parents, passports confiscated and civilians forced to undergo invasive searches and interrogations.
Marina Nosylenko is another Ukrainian refugee.
“We try to keep everything positive, to not discuss all of this, to not talk about it. As if everything is fine, as if we just changed our place of residence,” Nosylenko said.
And U.S. officials believe this is just the beginning.
“We’re seeing ample evidence and intelligence and in the public domain that Russia intends to try to annex additional Ukrainian territory. Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an annexation playbook,” said John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council.
A bus carrying Ukrainians evacuated in May from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol arriving at in the village of Bezimenne, nearer to the Russian border, in May.Credit…Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
Russian authorities have“interrogated,detained, and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes into Russian territory, often to isolated regions in the Far East, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons,” Mr. Blinken said, “is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime.”
Mr. Blinken noted that he was releasing the statement on the eve of the Ukraine Accountability Conference, which is being held on Thursday in The Hague. The conference’s website says that its purpose is “to ensure that war crimes committed during the war in Ukraine will not go unpunished.”Its hosts are the Dutch government, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and the European Commission.
Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia, but asserted that they were evacuated for their own safety.
Ukrainian officials have long sounded the alarm on Russia’s deportations, with President Volodymyr Zelensky last month describing them as “one of Russia’s most heinous war crimes.” Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, the deportations have included more than 200,000 children.
Testimonies given to The New York Times and other news outlets by deportees who escaped Russia have included descriptions of filtration sites and accounts of interrogations, of beatings and torture of those deemed to have ties to Ukraine’s armed forces, and of disappearances.
European officials have described the filtration sites as being set up in as schools, sports centers and cultural institutions in parts of Ukraine recently seized by Russian forces.
From those sites, many Ukrainians have been transported to destinations across Russia — often to regions far from Ukraine, near China or Japan, according to the testimonies.
Some U.S. officials have previously raised concerns about deportations, but only gave vague assessments of the scale.
Michael Carpenter, the United States ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said during a speech in Vienna in May that many witnesses had given detailed accounts of Russia’s “brutal interrogations”infiltration camps that at least several thousand Ukrainians had been forced into, and deportations on the order of at least tens of thousands.
Mr. Blinken’s statement on Wednesday also noted reports that indicated Russian forces were “deliberately” separating Ukrainian children from their parents and abducting others from orphanages. Witnesses and survivors, the statement said, described “frequent threats, harassment, and incidents of torture by Russian security forces.”
In some instances, the statement said, Ukrainians’ passports were confiscated, and they were issued with Russian passports instead, “in an apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine.”
There was also mounting evidence, the statement said, that Russian authorities were “detaining or disappearing thousands of Ukrainian civilians” who did not pass through the filtration process, including those affiliated with the Ukrainian Army, territorial defense forces, media, government and civil society groups.
The statement said that reports also indicated that Russian authorities had transported tens of thousands of people to detention facilities inside Russian-controlled Donetsk, where many were tortured. According to reports, it said, others had been “summarily executed, consistent with evidence of Russian atrocities committed in Bucha, Mariupol, and other locations in Ukraine.”
Mr. Blinken’s statement said that the United States was calling for an immediate halt to the deportations and for Russian authorities to release those detained and to allow them to return home. Independent outside observers, the statement said, should be permitted to access so-called filtration facilities, which serve as a way station for many deportations, as well as the places where Ukrainians have been deported to.
“President Putin and his government will not be able to engage in these systematic abuses with impunity,” the statement said. “Accountability is imperative.”
Supplies only to essentials from Tuesday untl July 10
Regulator hopes to keep power cuts at 3-4 hrs/daily for 2 months
COLOMBO, June 27 (Reuters) – Sri Lanka will shut schools and only allow fuel supplies to services deemed essential like health, trains and buses for two weeks starting Tuesday, a minister said, in a desperate attempt to deal with a severe shortage.
Sri Lanka is suffering its worst economic crisis, with foreign exchange reserves at a record low and the island of 22 million struggling to pay for essential imports of food, medicine and, most critically, fuel.
Industries like garments, a big dollar earner in the Indian Ocean nation, are left with fuel for only about a week to 10 days. Current stocks of the country will exhaust in just under a week based on regular demand, Reuters calculations show.
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Sri Lanka will issue fuel only to trains and buses, medical services and vehicles that transport food starting Tuesday until July 10, Bandula Gunewardena, the spokesman for the government cabinet, told reporters.
Schools in urban areas will be shut and everyone is urged to work from home, he said. Inter-provincial bus service will be limited.
“Sri Lanka has never faced such a severe economic crisis in its history,” Gunewardena said.
Autorickshaw driver W.D. Shelton, 67, said he had waited in line for four days for fuel.
“I haven’t slept or eaten properly during this time,” he said. “We can’t earn, we can’t feed our families.”
PEOPLE TRY TO FLEE
The government is talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a possible bailout, but many people can’t wait that long and demand for passports has surged. read more
The navy in the early hours of Monday arrested 54 people off the eastern coast as they tried to leave by boat, a spokesman said, on top of 35 “boat people” held last week.
Embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s elder brother resigned as prime minister last month after clashes between pro- and anti-government protesters spiralled into countrywide violence that left nine dead and about 300 people injured.
An escalation of the fuel shortage could lead to a fresh wave of demonstrations.
People wait in a queue after receiving tokens to buy petrol due to fuel shortage, amid the country’s economic crisis, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, June 27, 2022. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte
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Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa called for the government to step down.
“The country has collapsed completely due to the fuel shortage,” he said in a video statement. “The government has lied to the people repeatedly and has no plan on how to move forward.”
POWER CUTS
The government fuel stockpile stands at about 9,000 tonnes of diesel and 6,000 tonnes of petrol, the power minister said on Sunday, but no fresh shipments are due.
Lanka IOC (LIOC.CM), the local unit of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC.NS), told Reuters it had 22,000 tonnes of diesel and 7,500 tonnes of petrol, and was expecting another 30,000 tonnes shipment of petrol and diesel combined around July 13.
Sri Lanka consumes about 5,000 tonnes of diesel and 3,000 tonnes of petrol a day just to meet its transport requirements, Lanka IOC chief Manoj Gupta told Reuters.
Other big consumers are industries like apparel and textiles companies, whose exports jumped 30% to $482.7 million in May, according to data released on Monday.
“We have enough fuel for the next seven to ten days, so we are managing,” said Yohan Lawrence, secretary general of the Sri Lanka Joint Apparel Associations Forum.
“We are watching and waiting to see if fresh fuel stocks arrive and what will happen in the coming days.”
Sri Lanka’s power regulator said the country was using its last stocks of furnace oil to run multiple thermal power plants and keep power cuts to a minimum. Scheduled power cuts will rise to three hours from Monday from two and a half hours earlier.
“We are hoping to keep power cuts at three to four hours for the next two months,” said Janaka Ratnayake, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka. “But given the situation of the country this could change.”
An IMF team is visiting Sri Lanka for talks on a $3 billion bailout package. The country is hoping to reach a staff-level agreement before the visit ends on Thursday, that is unlikely to unlock any immediate funds. read more
It has received about $4 billion in financial assistance from India and the Sri Lankan government said on Monday the United States had agreed to provide technical assistance for its fiscal management.
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Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; Additional reporting by Waruna Karunatilake; Writing by Uditha Jayasinghe and Krishna N. Das; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Nick Macfie and Deepa Babington
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Ryanair says move to curb entry of fraudulent passport holders
Afrikaans spoken by only 12% of South Africans
South African government clamping down on fake documents
DUBLIN/JOHANNESBURG, June 6 (Reuters) – Ryanair (RYA.I) is requiring South African passengers to prove their nationality before travelling by completing a test in Afrikaans, a language used by just 12% of the population that has long been identified with apartheid and the white minority.
Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, which does not operate flights to and from South Africa, said it required any UK-bound passengers from the country to fill in the “simple questionnaire” due to what it described as a high prevalence of fraudulent South African passports.
“If they are unable to complete this questionnaire, they will be refused travel and issued with a full refund,” a spokesman for the Irish airline said.
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South Africa’s Home Affairs department, which has warned of syndicates selling fake passports, said it would issue a statement on the Ryanair test.
The UK High Commission in South Africa said on Twitter that the Ryanair test was not a British government requirement to enter the United Kingdom. The Irish High Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The low cost carrier said the test would apply to any South African passport holder flying to Britain from another part of Europe on the carrier. The airline did not immediately respond to a query about why it would apply to those routes, given Britain says it is not a requirement.
Zinhle Novazi, a South African attorney, faced the test when travelling by Ryanair from Ibiza, Spain, to London on May 29.
A Ryanair aircraft lands on the southern runway at Gatwick Airport in Crawley, Britain, August 25, 2021. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo
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Some of the questions include naming the highest mountain in South Africa, its largest city and one national holiday.
“I was able to answer the questions,” said Novazi, who learnt Afrikaans in school but is not a native speaker of the language. She was then allowed to board the plane.
Novazi wrote to South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation on June 1 but has not received a response.
The department did not respond to a request for comment.
The test triggered a backlash from South Africans in Johannesburg.
“It’s very discriminatory to a whole host of South Africans who don’t speak Afrikaans,” Siphiwe Gwala told Reuters.
“They’re using this (test) in a manner that is utterly absurd,” Conrad Steenkamp, the chief executive officer of the Afrikaans Language Council, said.
Afrikaans is the third most spoken of 11 official languages in South Africa, used by 12% of the 58 million people in the country. It has long been identified with the ideology of apartheid andwas considered the official language until the end of apartheid in 1994.
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Reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Promit Mukherjee and Nqobile Dludla in Johannesburg; Editing by Alison Williams and James Macharia Chege
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
With evidence mounting of atrocities in the Kyiv suburbs, and Russian forces preparing for a new offensive farther east, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivered a scathing speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, accusing Russia of a litany of horrors and questioning whether a world body that takes no action to stop a war serves any purpose.
Speaking via video link to the U.N. Security Council, he compared Russian forces to the Islamic State, called for a Nuremberg-like war crimes tribunal and vented his bitter frustration, knowing that the council — where Russia is one of five permanent members with veto power — would do nothing but talk.
“Where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?” Mr. Zelensky said, raising the question of whether Russia deserved to keep its seat on the council. “Are you ready to close the U.N.? Do you think that the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately.”
The chamber fell silent as a short video provided by Mr. Zelensky’s government played, showing some of the hundreds of corpses found strewn around the city of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, after Russian forces retreated last week — bloated, charred bodies of civilians, including children. Some victims, their hands bound, had been shot in the head.
Mr. Zelensky said that in Bucha, “they killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies.” Civilians “were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road,” he added, asserting that “women were raped and killed in front of their children; their tongues were pulled out.”
China refrained from criticizing Russia in Tuesday’s session, saying that the Security Council should wait until investigations establish the facts in Ukraine. A rising global power, China has drawn closer to Russia in recent years, united by a shared antipathy to the United States. The divisions on the war appeared essentially unchanged since Feb. 26, when 11 of 15 Security Council members voted for a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion, Russia vetoed the measure, and three others abstained — China, India and the United Arab Emirates.
Residents look at the body of a civilian in Bucha, Ukraine, on Monday.Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, reiterated his government’s claims — rebutted by ample evidence — that atrocities in Bucha had been faked, or had not occurred when Russians held the city. He made a number of other unsupported claims, including stating falsely that in Ukraine — where the freely elected president is a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust — Nazis are “running the show.”
After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched the war on Ukraine on Feb. 24, his military became bogged down on several fronts in the face of logistical failures and unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance. Russian forces spent weeks shelling and occupying cities and towns in northern Ukraine, where they took heavy losses as they failed to capture Kyiv, the capital. Last week they pulled back from that part of the country, preparing for what Russian officials and foreign analysts said would be a shift in focus toward eastern Ukraine.
“The next pivotal battle of the war” is likely to be for the eastern city of Sloviansk, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for the Study of War, based in Washington.
Revulsion over the apparent executions discovered in Bucha deepened Russia’s economic isolation, despite its denials of responsibility.
The United States has started blocking Russia from making debt payments using dollars held in American banks, a move designed to deplete its international currency reserves and potentially push Russia toward its first foreign currency debt default in a century.
And the European Union took a significant step toward overcoming resistance to curbing fuel imports from Russia, on which its member nations rely heavily. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, proposed cutting off imports of Russian coal — oil and natural gas remain hotly debated — and barring Russian vessels from E.U. ports as part of a new round of sanctions.
The measures, which require unanimous approval, are expected to go to a vote of E.U. ambassadors on Wednesday. Diplomats said the sanctions package would target, among others, two daughters of Mr. Putin. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the chief E.U. diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, announced plans to visit Kyiv this week and meet with Mr. Zelensky.
Lining up to receive food on Monday in the recently liberated village of Nova Basan, Ukraine. Russian forces controlled the town for nearly one month.Credit…Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said that it, along with the Kyiv police, had discovered what it called a Bucha “torture chamber,” where Russian forces had left behind the bodies of five men, their hands tied, who had been tortured and killed.
Mr. Zelensky reinforced a point that U.N. officials have made repeatedly: The true extent of Ukraine’s destruction and casualties is unknown but far greater than what has been documented, because outside observers have been unable to reach some of the most devastated areas. “Now the world can see what Russia did in Bucha, but the world has yet to see what it has done in other parts of our country,” Mr. Zelensky said.
New York Times journalists on Tuesday were able for the first time to reach the town of Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, battered by Russian rockets and airstrikes, where the mayor estimated 200 dead lay beneath the rubble. In the besieged port of Mariupol, local officials have put the death toll in the thousands.
Fierce fighting continues along Ukraine’s southern coast, where Mariupol, largely reduced to ruins by Russian bombardment, is “the center of hell,” said Martin Griffiths, the U.N. chief of humanitarian relief.
More than 250 miles west of Mariupol, explosions shuddered through the port of Mykolaiv, a day after the mayor said Russian strikes had killed 10 people and wounded 46. He said that Russians had hit residential buildings, schools, a hospital and an orphanage in his city since the war began, and had used cluster munitions. Soldiers defending the city said that increasingly, Russian forces were hitting civilian targets.
In Borodyanka, Ukraine, on Tuesday.Credit…Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
After four consecutive days of trying and failing to send an aid convoy into Mariupol, where people are desperately short of food, water, power, heat and medicines, the International Committee of the Red Cross decided against another attempt on Tuesday.
Ukrainian officials say the Russians have prevented crucial supplies from reaching the city. Mr. Nebenzya, the Russian U.N. ambassador, said the Ukrainians had blocked the convoy, and he claimed that Russian forces had evacuated 123,500 people from Mariupol.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that in fact, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, including from Mariupol, had been taken to “filtration camps” in Russia, where family members were separated and people were stripped of passports and cellphones. “I do not need to spell out what these so-called filtration camps are reminiscent of,” she said. “It’s chilling, and we cannot look away.”
Rosemary A. DiCarlo, a U.N. under secretary general, said there was credible evidence that Russia had used cluster munitions — shells that burst open to spew many smaller bomblets over a wide area — at least 24 times in populated areas of Ukraine. Most countries have signed a treaty banning cluster munitions as indiscriminate weapons with a high risk of civilian casualties, but Russia, like the United States, has not.
More than 11 million Ukrainians — about one in four — have fled their homes because of the war, including more than 4 million who have left the country, according to the United Nations, creating Europe’s largest and fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II.
A residential area in Kharkiv on Tuesday that has been under continued bombing.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Russian forces recently captured the eastern city of Izyum, and Western analysts say they are preparing for a drive to the south and southeast, to bolster efforts to seize more of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting for eight years. Many of Ukraine’s best-equipped and most experienced military units have been concentrated in that area, known as Donbas.
“Russian forces continue to make little to no progress in frontal assaults” on the portions of Donbas still held by Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War reported.
Whether the Russians aim simply to reinforce their units in Donbas, or are planning a more ambitious effort to encircle the Ukrainian forces, capturing Sloviansk is crucial, the institute said.
In the Luhansk region on Tuesday, an attack that Ukrainians blamed on Russian forces hit a storage tank containing nitric acid, releasing a toxic cloud and prompting the regional administrator to urge people to stay inside and close their windows.
The Russian units that withdrew from the region around Kyiv, having suffered heavy casualties, extensive equipment losses and poor morale, the institute said, “are highly unlikely to be effectively deployed elsewhere in Ukraine and are likely a spent force.”
An intelligence assessment released by the British defense ministry was less definitive, but said that any Russian forces redeploying from the north would first need considerable time to repair and replace equipment, and to make up for casualties.
A vigil in Lviv, Ukraine, on Tuesday for civilians killed in Bucha and in the surrounding areas when occupied by Russian forces.Credit…Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall in Borodyanka, Ukraine; Andrew E. Kramer in Kyiv, Ukraine; Rick Gladstone, Michael Schwirtz and Farnaz Fassihi in New York; Dan Bilefsky in Montreal; Steven Erlanger and Matina Stevis-Gridneff in Brussels; Megan Specia and Cora Engelbrecht in Krakow, Poland; Anton Troianovski in Istanbul; and Lara Jakes in Washington.
The HSBC bank logo is seen in the Canary Wharf financial district in London, Britain, March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause
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Summary
Companies
HSBC applying harsher scrutiny to Russia-related business
Managers told to refuse new loans, accounts -sources
Crackdown comes as U.S., European sanctions bite
HONG KONG/LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) – HSBC (HSBA.L) is shunning prospective Russian clients and declining credit to some existing ones, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, as the bank seeks to shield itself from Western sanctions against Moscow.
The measures affect HSBC’s individual and business customers globally and go further than the bank’s previously stated intentions to wind down its relations with lenders such as VTB (VTBR.MM), which were placed under Western restrictions after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. read more
The moves by Europe’s second biggest bank show how sanctions aimed at Russia’s financial system and its political and business elite are also ensnaring Russian nationals outside the country as lenders seek to avoid falling foul of the restrictions and potentially hefty fines.
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HSBC had said on March 14 it is “not accepting any new business in Russia,” without spelling out what that means for existing or prospective Russian customers in other markets.
The sources said the bank’s risk and compliance staff have told business managers to apply extra scrutiny to all prospective clients bearing Russian passports or furnishing Russian addresses, with the result that many more are turned away than would have been in the past.
The checks also extend to dual passport-holders as well as those with links to Belarus, seen as an ally of Moscow, as the bank’s staff scramble to ensure they do not inadvertently offer services to sanctioned individuals or businesses.
HSBC declined to comment.
Customers with business ties to Russia and receiving income in roubles, such as those deriving income from Russian employment, pensions, or investments, are also being impacted as those rouble cashflows are discounted to zero for credit purposes, one of the sources, who works at HSBC, told Reuters.
Business customers with Russian links, even those with no ties to sanctioned entities or individuals, face increased scrutiny on large deposits or withdrawals and are seeing new loan applications declined, the two sources said.
The invasion has triggered an exodus of foreign companies from Russia as Western authorities deploy sanctions at an unprecedented scale and pace to squeeze Moscow and prevent the global financial system from being a conduit for Russian money.
Reuters reported earlier this month that European Union regulators had told some banks to tighten control of all Russian and Belarusian clients, including EU residents, to ensure they are not used to circumvent sanctions. read more
Russia characterises its actions in Ukraine as a “special operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” the country.
BUSINESS FREEZE
Leading European banks such as Italy’s UniCredit (CRDI.MI) and France’s Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) said they could face a multi-billion dollar write-off of their businesses in Russia, but banks also face a wider chill on business as they grapple with sanctions. read more
HSBC does not operate a retail bank inside Russia but as of Feb. 22 it had around 200 staff there serving multinational corporations, its Chief Financial Officer Ewen Stevenson told Reuters at the time. The bank said on March 14 its business there “will continue to reduce.”
The latest HSBC measures go beyond the usual background checks, and show how banks’ policies are still evolving since the invasion as they try to implement multiple waves of sanctions without discriminating against legitimate customers.
They also show the tension between banks’ sanctions and compliance teams, who urge the strictest possible interpretation of new rules to satisfy regulators, and frontline staff tasked with growing the business and serving clients.
HSBC is under particular pressure to show regulators that it can identify illegal transactions. It had to tighten up its money laundering controls globally after a string of past scandals and, in 2012, agreed to pay $1.9 billion to U.S. authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder drug money flowing out of Mexico.
HSBC is reviewing all existing private and retail banking customers with Russian connections globally to see if they have ties to sanctioned entities or individuals, the sources said.
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Additional reporting by Vidya Ranganathan in Singapore. Editing by Jane Merriman and Carmel Crimmins
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