Seven Chinese nationals in Zimbabwe court over rhino horn stash

The Independent

They are facing charges of breaching the country’s wildlife laws.

Zeng Dengui, 35; Peicon Jang, 35; Chen Zhiangfu, 30; Qui Jinchang, 29; Yu Xian, 25; Yong Zhu, 25 and Liu Cheng, 23 were arrested two days before Christmas after police raided their home following a tip-off.

Police detectives found pieces of rhino horn stashed in a mattress, plastic bags and in boxes at a house in one of the town’s suburbs.

The seven who are all unemployed, appeared in the dock wearing khaki prison garb at the court in the resort town of Victoria Falls.

Their trial which had been scheduled to start Thursday was delayed to January 9 after prosecutors said they were not yet ready.

Prosecutor Bheki Tshabalala said police indicated they want further charges of money laundering from the case and also mentioned of a charge of theft of a motor vehicle.

Under Zimbabwe’s parks and wildlife laws it is illegal to keep, possess, sell or dispose of any protected animal’s products or trophies.

The rhino horn pieces weighed 20.98 kilogrammes and were valued at $938,700 (823,500 euros), according to the prosecution.

Rhino horns are highly coveted in some Asian countries such as China and Vietnam, where they have fetched up to $60,000 per kilogramme, for their supposed medicinal qualities.

The demand has fuelled a boom in poaching and trafficking in Africa, especially in Zimbabwe’s neighbour, South Africa.

South Africa, which is home to about 80 percent of the world rhino population, has lost more than 7,100 animals over the past decade.

In 2016, wildlife authorities in Zimbabwe said that they had begun dehorning the country’s 700 adult rhinos to curb rampant poaching.

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Shocking report details massive illegal turtle trade network

A series of recent sting operations has led to dozens of arrests, thousands of reptiles seized

 

By Dina Fine Maron

In a posh hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, a 35-year-old man wearing a dark button-down shirt smiled. He had two suitcases crammed with 55 live turtles, and he was hoping to make a sale.

He watched as his customer, a man wearing shorts and sneakers, carefully examined the reptiles crawling across the hotel rug.

Bakrudin Ali Ahamed Habeeb, had posted on Facebook some seven months earlier that he had reptiles to sell, triggering a flurry of text messages and price negotiations. Now, Habeeb just needed to prove that his animals were in good health so he could pass them off into the exotic pet trade.

It was May 2017, and he was anticipating a big payday.

When his visitor left the room, ostensibly to get a colleague, Habeeb didn’t even look up. But minutes later, agents from Malaysia’s department of wildlife and parks flooded his room. The would-be buyer, as it turned out, was an undercover agent with the Wildlife Justice Commission, a Hague-based nonprofit that works to expose the criminal networks behind the illegal wildlife trade. Local law enforcement officers had been waiting in the next room to nab Habeeb as he made an illegal sale of black spotted turtles, which are found in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and are barred from international trade because of the species’ protected designation under international law.

Based on the evidence provided by the Wildlife Justice Commission and described in a report published December 6, Habeeb—an Indian national who had long been smuggling reptiles from India to Malaysia—was sentenced to 24 months in prison. He was one of 30 individuals arrested during a two-year investigation by the commission into reptile smuggling.

The investigation led to the seizure of more than 6,000 turtles and tortoises—many of them endangered species. Thirty people were arrested for smuggling these reptiles through Malaysia, India, or Bangladesh. Five of those individuals, all in Malaysia, have already been convicted and are serving prison sentences.

In the most extreme case, “over a thousand Indian star tortoises were seized in one sting operation in Kuala Lumpur, and two people were arrested,” says Sarah Stoner, senior investigations manager at the Wildlife Justice Commission and lead author of the report. One of those men is now serving 24 months in prison. The other failed to show up in court, and there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

The commission’s investigations focused primarily on Southeast Asia, the pet trade destination for many of these turtles and tortoises, but it also encompassed areas as far-flung as Cameroon and the Netherlands. Collectively, according to the commission, the turtles offered to the agents were worth $3 million wholesale and much more on the retail market.

Dozens of investigators, analysts, and undercover workers found that in most cases the turtles and tortoises were being smuggled from India, Pakistan, and Madagascar to buyers in mainland China and Hong Kong. Top species offered included ones that are considered vulnerable because of their dwindling numbers, such as the Indian star tortoise and the black spotted turtle. Investigators were also offered more than 1,500 radiated tortoises—a species native to Madagascar that’s considered critically endangered and is prohibited from any commercial trade under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the agreement that regulates the wildlife trade. (Read about the 10,000 radiated tortoises found in a house in Madagascar in April.)

The report also revealed details about the scale and coordination of the corruption that greases these trades. Airports the animals were most often trafficked through were pinpointed, as were local sources of some of the reptiles. To do that work, the group used the plans smugglers shared with the commission’s “buyers”—describing how products would be moved from one area to another—and compared them against intelligence on meager arrest records at those transit points, essentially corroborating that someone was likely being paid to look the other way.

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The scope of the issue and how can the international community act in support of the 2030 Agenda

By Radha Kulkarni. Project Advisor, Tax Inspectors Without Borders and Development Finance, Strategic Policy Unit, UNDP

Between 2008-10 Africa had lost US$63.4 bn to illicit financial flows, US$1.2 bn more than what it has received in aid and foreign direct investment. Photo: Stuart Price / UN IST

 

Domestic public resources are identified as fundamental for development financing. One of the ways in which countries can mobilize these resources is by increasing tax revenues, yet this remains a key challenge for some. According to the OECD, in 2015, African countries as a whole had a total tax revenue to GDP ratio of around 19%, with Latin America and Asia averaging at around 22% and 15% respectively, compared to around 34% for OECD member countries. A variety of factors affect countries’ ability to generate tax revenues, including the presence of large informal and subsistence sectors, narrow tax bases, and dependence on volatile export commodities. Domestic revenues are further undermined by tax evasion and tax avoidance. The term Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) is often used to describe such practices.

There is no universal definition of IFFs, however such flows are commonly understood to fall into three main categories: (i) the acts themselves are illegal (e.g. corruption, smuggling and trafficking in minerals, wildlife, drugs, and people, tax evasion); (ii) the funds that stem from these activities are also illegal; and, (iii) the funds are used for illegal purposes (e.g. organized crime). Global Financial Integrity, a Washington based think-tank working on transparency in the international financial system, estimates that in 2013 US$1.1 trillion left developing countries through IFFs. GFI regards this estimate as highly conservative, as it does not pick up movements of bulk cash, the mispricing of services, or many types of money laundering. The research suggests that about 45% of illicit flows end up in offshore financial centres, and 55% in developed countries.

According to the OECD, between 2008-10, Africa alone had lost US$63.4 billion through trade mispricing and other illicit outflows; more than what it had received in aid and foreign direct investment, which amounts to US$62.2 billion over the same period. Ms. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Nigeria and a global advocate for the fight against malpractices in taxation

: “One of the problems developing countries have is that large corporations or evaders of tax have a lot of expertise.” Beyond reducing much-needed resources for sustainable development, IFFs undermine governance, foster corruption and facilitate transnational organized crime. The issue is therefore rightly on the international policy agenda. As such one of SDG 16 targets (to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, and accountability) is to, "significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows, [and] strengthen the recovery and return of stolen assets and combat all forms of organized crime."

Other sources of revenue leakage include those generated by aggressive tax planning strategies, typically by multinational enterprises (MNEs). MNEs engage in highly complex strategies to shift profits from where they are earned to low or no tax jurisdictions; also known as the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS). The problem is exacerbated by knowledge asymmetry between developed and developing countries in terms of identifying, understanding and countering these strategies. According to UNCTAD, an estimated US$100 billion of annual tax revenue losses for developing countries can be attributed to multinationals’ offshore hubs. UNCTAD also notes that MNE contributions to government revenues are around 10 percent in developing countries. Appropriate MNE taxation is central to increasing the domestic resources of developing countries so that taxes are paid where economic activity occurs and value is created.

While working to increase confidence in national tax systems, the international community can help strengthen the tax capacities of developing countries. Photo: MaxPixel

What can be done?

Countries could commit to set nationally-defined revenue collection targets, work to increase domestic financial transparency, address excessive tax incentives, and build their revenue collection capabilities through modernized, progressive tax systems, improved tax policy, and more efficient tax collection. This would help to increase confidence in national tax systems.

The international community meanwhile can help strengthen the tax capacities of developing countries, including through Official Development Assistance (ODA). The Addis Ababa Action Agenda pledged the doubling of aid for taxation efforts from around $222 million in 2015 to almost $450 million by 2020. A recent Oxfam report, however, concludes that donors are not on track to fulfil this promise. There has been some progress at the international level on improving transparency. International initiatives include the UNDP-OECD joint-initiative Tax Inspectors Without Borders, and on automatic exchange of tax information through initiatives as the OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, the BEPS Action Plan and the G20 Development Working Group’s participation in the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) roadmap. More can be done to tackle anonymity and build the capacities of tax administrations in developing countries, yet to tackle the subject globally, international dialogues and policy-making processes on tax matters must be inclusive and include all countries.

In September 2018, the UN Secretary-General set out a strategy at the high-level meeting on financing the 2030 agenda, with actions that the United Nations will take to help accelerate and deepen the transformation of financial systems. This represents an opportunity for countries to work collaboratively in addressing weaknesses in legal and regulatory regimes, developing common goals of fairness and transparency, and continue building an international discourse on taxation issues to increase domestic revenues and finance development.

       

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