Investigators detail massive money-laundering scheme, bureaucratic buck-passing behind Hong Kong fire tragedy, why civil cases can take 20 years to settle, and kerfuffle over Thailand’s holy herb.
Authorities in Thailand are seizing or freezing assets worth 35.8 billion Thai baht, the proceeds of one of the biggest money-laundering schemes in Southeast Asian history.
The money came from Cambodian cyber-scam operations which lured victims into fake investment schemes.
At the centre of the money-laundering operation was a South African businessman known both as Benjamin Mauerberger and Ben Smith.
Authorities have obtained arrest warrants for Mauerberger, his Thai wife Cattaliya Beevor, Cambodian businessman Yim Leak and four others.
Investigators said the network moved the money through Cambodian banks and overseas investment funds, using them to acquire big stakes in companies listed on the Thai stock exchange, Bangkok Post reported. It said Mauerberger fled Thailand in September last year as police were building their case against him and Beevor. They were believed to be in Dubai.
The sum involved in the assets seizure, 35.8 billion THB, is a little over US$1 billion or A$1.5 billion.
The money laundering was exposed in a two-year investigation by a team reporting through a website called Whale Hunting. It said the money was laundered through a web of Singaporean fund managers, European holding companies, and Thai political fixers and then used to buy pieces of Thailand’s national infrastructure – a licensed brokerage, the advertising arm of Bangkok’s Skytrain system, and a stake in a major energy company.
Bangkok Post said in March Thai police had searched six locations for evidence against Mauerberger and Beevor after the Criminal Court had approved arrest warrants for the couple on counts of fraud and money laundering.
The paper said this week investigators had identified three phases of the alleged money-laundering. From 2019 to 2021, the network used personal accounts belonging to members and their relatives, as well as corporate accounts, to receive funds. In 2022 and 2023, money was moved from Cambodia into Thai accounts linked to the network and then transferred to Singapore-based investment funds. In 2024 and 2025, a Cambodian bank transferred tens of billions of baht to a Singapore-based licensed fund management firm, to buy stakes in Thai companies, Bangkok Post said.
It acknowledged Whale Hunting had documented details of the acquisitions.
Singapore’s The Straits Times said Yim Leak, the Cambodian businessman covered by this week’s arrest warrants, belonged to an elite political family. His brother was a senior police official.
The paper said Thailand’s Anti-Money Laundering Office would seize shares worth more than 14 billion baht (A$589 million) and real estate, cash and vehicles valued at 21 billion baht (A$883.7 million).
It quoted Kamonsit Wongbutnoi, deputy head of the office, as saying confiscated assets would go towards compensating victims of online scams.
Minister quits over Hong Kong housing inferno
The main culprits responsible for Hong Kong’s devastating public housing fire last year were unscrupulous contractors, consultants and private sector professionals, an independent committee investigating the tragedy has found. But it also said four government departments had to bear part of the blame for passing the ball when residents complained about fire safety issues.
The committee’s 1,154-page report, made public on Thursday, said safety complaints had fallen into a vacuum and residents were left in a helpless and desperate situation.
It said the Fire Services Department, the Independent Checking Unit of the Housing Bureau, the Labour Department and the Buildings Department had passed complaints from one department to another, ignoring residents’ real and legitimate concerns.
The handling of complaints about workers smoking at the site was a glaring example of buck-passing, it said.
The fire, which caused massive damage at Wang Fuk Court housing towers in Tai Po during renovations last November, claimed 168 lives and displaced as many as 5,000 households. It was Hong Kong’s worst fire in 70 years. The government set up the independent committee to investigate the inferno.
South China Morning Post said the committee made more than 100 recommendations, including criminalising collusive bid-rigging, strengthening supervision of repair work and stepping up fire safety.
The report found each regulator operated in its own lane, not sharing professional registers, prosecution logs, records of corrupt behaviour or of triad involvement in the industry, the paper said. A contractor could be repeatedly disciplined by one regulator while another continued to renew its licence.
“Had the various departments involved had a sense of crisis about the risks and possible consequences of building façade fires, plugged the loopholes in the regulatory regimes… there was a real possibility that the misconduct of the private sector and the fire hazards in Wang Fuk Court could have been rectified or removed before the fire,” the committee said.
The report criticised the four departments but only one minister accepted responsibility by resigning.
The paper said housing secretary Winnie Ho Wing-yin handed in her resignation to Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu on Wednesday, before the report was made public. “I’m willing to take political responsibility for the fire at Wang Fuk Court,” Ho said.
The Housing Bureau covers the Independent Checking Unit, which the report said should bear the greatest responsibility for its lack of oversight.
Lee said Ho had to bear political accountability for the fire but the report had found no personal wrongdoing.
Lee also said Ho’s resignation was his personal political decision in establishing accountability.
SCMP said a three-member team would investigate up to 50 civil servants.
Lee said he had decided to stay on to spearhead the reform process.
Beijing-Pyongyang-Moscow links changing strategic climate
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited China last weekend, crossing a newly opened three-kilometre bridge spanning the Yalu River, on the day before the 76th anniversary of China’s entry into the Korean War.
But the visit should not be dismissed as just another diplomatic ceremony, said a commentary in The Korea Times. “It was a carefully staged demonstration of strengthening relations between Beijing and Pyongyang,” wrote Chun In-bum, a former chief of the South Korean army’s Special Warfare Command.
“More importantly, it should serve as a warning to the United States, South Korea and Japan that the strategic environment in North-East Asia is changing.”
The new bridge, opened on 15 October, connects the Chinese city of Dandong with North Korea’s Sinuiju. It was finished in 2014 but North Korea did not build necessary connecting roads and customs facilities.
A story in The Diplomat, the Asian online newsmagazine, said Pyongyang took a long and cautious approach to how much economic contact it would allow and how it would be managed.
Kim’s China visit was his first since September 2025, when he attended a massive military parade in Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
On this month’s trip, Kim met Wang Huning, described by Global Times, an official newspaper, as China’s top political adviser. Wang said the visit deepened political trust between Beijing and Pyongyang.
Chun wrote in his Korea Times analysis that Wang ranked fourth in the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy and had advised three successive leaders: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.
His involvement underscored the importance China attached to its relationship with North Korea.
Chun said the new bridge (over what he called the Amnok River, as the Yalu is known in North Korea) was more than concrete and steel. “It is a political statement,” he said. “China and North Korea are signalling their intention to expand economic engagement.”
North Korea, he said, was strengthening its links with both China and Russia.
“These relationships are not identical,” he said. “China provides North Korea with its principal economic lifeline, while Russia has become an increasingly important military partner.
“Together, these relationships give Pyongyang greater strategic flexibility and reduce its incentive to negotiate seriously over its nuclear weapons.
“This is a serious development for the United States and its allies.”
The role of rule-by-law-enforcement
The rule of law is precious, an invaluable part of the attributes that combine to make a state civilised.
But can a legal system be regarded as functional when a case filed in 1947 is settled out of court in 2026 – after almost eight decades in litigation?
This is an example taken from the Bombay High Court (which has not changed its name to ‘Mumbai’). It is an extreme case. But Abhinav Chandrachud, a Harvard-educated lawyer and writer, says many legal practitioners in Mumbai estimate that a suit filed at the Bombay High Court usually takes more than 20 years to decide.
“It takes an enormous amount of time for a civil dispute to be decided in India,” Chandrachud says. “There are many reasons for our slow-paced judicial system but too much work for too few judges seems to be a big factor.”
The state of Maharashtra has 15 judges for every million people and the Bombay High Court has 1.9 judges per million people, he says in an opinion piece in The Indian Express. By contrast, New York state has more than 150 judges for every million people.
Official figures show more than 648,000 cases are pending before the Bombay High Court, of which 9,454 are civil suits. “It is almost impossible for the handful of judges who are assigned the roster of deciding individual cases to tackle this backlog,” says Chandrachud, who is an advocate at the court.
As a result of the delays, he says, India has developed a parallel system: instead of the rule of law, many litigants use rule by law enforcement.
Rich and well-connected litigants who are owed money, he says, often go to the police and try to criminalise their disputes by alleging their opponent has committed a criminal offence, like ‘cheating’ or ‘breach of trust’.
A person who merely breaches a contract to pay money commits neither of these offences. But the litigant offers police officers a cut if they can get the opponent to settle the case.
“In fact, it is rumoured that a branch of the police asks for bribes on a ‘commission basis’ to take on such cases,” he writes. “Once the police get involved in a civil case, the process is devastatingly fast.
“It would be unfair to blame our understaffed and overworked courts for a system that requires structural and cultural reform. Criminalising civil cases is considered an ‘abuse of process’ that the Supreme Court has repeatedly deprecated and discouraged.
“The law in action is something else.”
US Congress relying on second-hand China information
A sorry, but no doubt inevitable, effect of the tensions between the US and China is a decline in direct engagement with China by the country’s political class – people responsible for shaping China policy.
Academic engagement is shrinking, as well.
These are the findings of two recent reports on US-China engagement, highlighted in a South China Morning Post story.
It said a report issued by Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies documented a sharp decline in congressional visits to China since 2010 and a big drop in the number of Americans studying in China.
A separate study by the Council on Foreign Relations lamented the erosion of programs designed to train future China specialists.
The CSIS study found that only 32 per cent of sitting US lawmakers had travelled to mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. And the number was expected to drop further, as veteran lawmakers left office and new ones arrived.
Isabella McCallum, a co-author of the congressional study, said: “With less direct experience of China, Congress will become more reliant on second-hand information for one of the country’s most consequential relationships.”
The report said fewer than 2,000 Americans were studying in China, compared with a peak of 11,000 in 2019.
SCMP said the number of Chinese students enrolled at US universities had fallen from a peak of 372,000 in 2019 to 266,000 in 2024.
The Council on Foreign Relations report highlighted the suspension of government-backed exchange programs, such as the Fulbright programme. “A United States that no longer trains people who can read Chinese primary sources, sit in Chinese classrooms, track policy implementation on the ground, is hardly more secure and is substantially less capable,” said political scientist Rush Doshi, the report’s author.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week the Pentagon had designated Chinese-funded cultural centres on American campuses, known as Confucius Institutes, as a threat to national security, Channel News Asia said.
Hegseth had alleged that disguised Confucius Institutes were operating at US universities. They used different names, he said, but they had the same mission: to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students.
Global Times said Hegseth’s statement drew a rebuke from China Military Bugle, which is affiliated with the country’s armed forces. “If learning Mandarin, kung fu, Chinese calligraphy and dance at Confucius Institutes poses threats to the US, then [for] how many years and how seriously has China been threatened by the US?” the Bugle asked. “[S]o many Chinese learn and speak English, watch Hollywood and Disney movies and drink Starbucks.”
Popular panic over big business plant rights
Phad kaphrao is a chilli-hot stir-fry regarded by Thais as their unofficial national dish, an inexpensive, everyday meal. This week the herb that gives the dish its peppery flavour – known as kaphrao, or holy basil – has been at the centre of a public and political row over what would normally be the esoteric issue of plant protection rights.
Heated debate began when a company called CPRAM, the biggest manufacturer and distributor of ready-to-eat meals in Thailand, registered four hybrid strains of holy basil for legal protection for 12 years.
The Thairath Online news site said some senators opposed the registration of the holy basil varieties, saying all Thai citizens should have the rights to the plant.
Bangkok Post said in an editorial that people had been in panic mode after social media posts said CPRAM, part of the agro-giant Charoen Pokphand Group, would monopolise kaphrao.
“The posts raised the spectre of growers, vendors and even a famous national recipe falling under the control of big business,” the editorial said.
The main ingredient of the stir-fry is minced or ground pork, chicken, beef or seafood.
It is cooked with garlic, chillies, and kaphrao leaves. The herb is known as holy basil because in Hindu tradition it is a sacred leaf.
The dish is usually topped with a fried egg.
The big-business scare led the Thai Agriculture Department to announce an inquiry into CPRAM’s holy basil patent, The Nation reported. It said the department also tried to reassure the public that native varieties remained protected.
Native varieties were protected by a national DNA database that prevented existing strains being registered by private entities.
CPRAM said the registration of its four strains was related to its use of the leaves in its ready-made foods, the Thai PBS World news site reported. More than 300 native strains remained available for growing and cooking.
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul also tried to reassure the public, Bangkok Post said. His advice was: “Go ahead and grow it.”
David Armstrong is the Editor-in-Chief of Pearls and Irritations. David is one of Australia’s best respected reporters, editors and media executives, with more than five decades of experience in Australia and Asia. A contributor for more than 10 years, David writes a regular column on Asian media.