No covering up of the news in HK

28 February 2004

Thanks to the South China Morning Post who highlighted the latest offering from Richard Li's beleaguered NOW television network; At only five minutes a day the poor girl will have to undress in a hurry.

But this can go further - weather girls who start out dressed for sun, cold or rain; sports reporters getting their kit off (Sorry !!).

GBP10m boost for Reuters boss

I usually do not write much about my ex employer. However, for the record, it would not have hurt someone at a senior level to have said a simple thank you for 16 years of my working life. I learned a great deal at Reuters but at some personal cost as well.

So I pass the following commentary on without judgment - other than to mention that the share price is still less than 50% of the price that it was when the new CEO took over the company.

Share price rollercoaster lifts chief executive's options

Nils Pratley
Monday February 23, 2004
The Guardian

Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer has seen his share option and incentive package rise in value by about £10m in the last 12 months as the group's share price has staged a strong recovery.

The figure is based on the projected values of the share-based incentives granted to him since August 2002. It includes a tranche of 1.3m share options at 135p received in February last year, when Reuters' shares were close to their 20-year low. The price is now 410p.

There is no suggestion that Mr Glocer or the company has unfairly manipulated the scheme because Reuters makes share option grants at standard six-month intervals. But the collapse - and now semi-recovery - in the share price means that options granted towards the bottom of the rollercoaster ride are now potentially hugely lucrative.

This is despite the fact that the share price is still less than half the 862p seen on the day Mr Glocer became chief executive in June 2001.

Using a Black-Scholes model - a standard method for valuing options - Mr Glocer's February 2003 options at 135p now have a projected value of over £4m. The value of his August 2003 options - about 650,000 at 270p - has also been transformed; they are now worth about £1.3m.

In August 2002, he also received options over 915,000 shares at 266p. Their projected value, calculated on a Black-Scholes model, is now about £1.8m.

Mr Glocer cannot yet exercise any of these options: the earliest he could do so is three years after grant. However, he can be confident that the performance conditions for the 2003 options will be met. The baseline for measurement is 2002, when Reuters produced the worst performance in its 150-year history.

The options will vest if normalised earnings per share beat inflation by 9% in the three-year period after the grant.

Last week Reuters reported 63% growth in such earnings for 2003; City analysts forecast even steeper growth in 2004.

Mr Glocer also receives shares every February under a Long Term Incentive Plan (L-Tip): last year he was allocated 1.7m. It is harder to place a fair value on these, partly because they cannot vest until 2008 and partly because the perfor mance conditions - comparing total shareholder returns against other FTSE 100 companies - are more complicated.

However, Reuters itself said a "hypothetical" value for Mr Glocer's 2003 L-Tip shares would be £2.77m at the current share price. The calculation assumes that only 40% of the shares vest eventually.

In practice, Mr Glocer's 2004 L-Tip, due to be awarded within days, is likely to be the more valuable. For these shares, the baseline for three-year comparisons will be average share prices during 2003.

At Reuters, which sank as low as 97p during the spring, the average was 206p. The current price is twice that level, giving Mr Glocer a flying start to his latest measurement period.

Reuters has been sensitive about executive compensation issues since almost a quarter of shareholder votes were cast against last year's remuneration report.

That was seen as a protest against the payment of bonuses to executives in a year of record losses and thousands of redundancies.

Mr Glocer received a bonus of £612,000 on top of his basic salary of £816,000; the company also paid the £230,000-a-year rent on his period home in Kensington.

A spokesman said the group's compensation structure was agreed after exhaustive consultation with leading investors. "We believe it is a model in terms of aligning remuneration with long-term shareholder interests," he said.

When friends fall out it is often from being told what you don't want to hear !

28 February 2004

It has actually been a good week for news stories in Bangkok.

There is nothing wrong with preaching the expansion of democracy and the extension of human rights around the world. The US is one of the world's great benefactors with billions spent on foreign air each year. It is not unreasonable for the US to carry out its own assessment of human rights developments internationally.

You can see an introduction and summary of the 2003 report here. It also explains why this report exists and how it is prepared. There is a link to the 2003 Thailand report. This report has upset the government with Prime Minister Thaksin branding the US as a "useless friend."  He added "It's unacceptable to me the way the US came out with the report by citing media reports. What kind of friend are they?"

The US State Department yesterday released its annual country-by-country review of human rights. Thailand's record "worsened" last year as a result of the extra-judicial killings and arbitrary arrests during the first round of the war on drugs, from February to April, the report said.

The government made a big fuss of hauling the US Ambassador to Thailand to the Foreign Ministry to receive an official complaint stating that the report contained "serious inaccuracies".

According to National Police figures released in December, only nine cases out of 1,176 drug-related deaths have been prosecuted.  The Thai government had "failed to investigate and prosecute vigorously those who committed such abuses, contributing to a climate of impunity," the US report said.

The trouble with all of this is it is all so much posturing rather than dealing with the real issues. Making a show for the US Ambassador is just playing to the media and the public and saying there is nothing wrong and we wont be told what to do by an ugly foreigner. It is very nationalistic. But it is an ostrich with its head buried.

How about, "we acknowledge the detailed work undertaken by the US representatives (the report is 17 pages) and we are pleased that they acknowledge progress in the following areas. We take seriously the concerns raised over the drug related deaths last year. Investigations are continuing to ensure that no authority acted outside the law. It needs to be noted that the drugs industry has been dealt a major defeat and that in itself should be for the good of the country and internationally."

Worrying changes in Thailand's media

28 February 2004

There have been countless column inches written in the Thai newspapers this week after the Bangkok Post removed its editor into a backroom non news role and sent out a very clear message that the change was the result of a need to be seen to be less critical of the Prime Minister.

Mr Veera Pratheepchaikul, its editor, was moved last week to another job in Post Publishing, the owner of the English- language daily.

Mr Veera was removed in what critics and journalists described as a move by Prime Minister Thaksin to muzzle press criticisms of his government's handling of the bird flu outbreak and other issues.

Now it is absolutely true that there was no direct political interference; but where the newspapers start to hurt is when companies close to or controlled by members of the ruling party start to withhold advertising. The direct hit on the pockets of the media is what hurts the most.

With an election in Thailand due later in the year the expectation is that the climate of fear and self censorship in the media can only increase.

It is a sign of just how bad things are in the Thai media that the Singapore media (muzzled and government controlled in itself) carries the following reports showing the extent to which Thailand's media has lost its independence and the pressure that is applied to the media to toe the line.

THAILAND: Taking the bite out of the Thai press

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra complains bitterly that he often gets 'bitten' by the press

The Straits Times
Friday, February 27, 2004

By Lee Kim Chew

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra complains bitterly that he often gets 'bitten' by the press.

It's true his detractors at home are unsparing in their criticism of his governing style and populist policies.
 
But then Mr Thaksin rarely takes things lying down. Indeed, he bites back, and often just as hard.

This month, two offending newspaper editors bit the dust after they ran stories that were critical of him.

A billionaire businessman before he entered politics, Mr Thaksin likes things done his way. He uses the carrot and the stick, or else he buys what he wants to control.

Just before the 2001 general election, Shin Corp, a telecommunications conglomerate his family owns, bought a controlling interest in Thailand's only independent television station, iTV.

Then the new management fired 23 iTV journalists who had complained the station was slanting its election coverage in favour of Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai Party.

In the controversy, the Thai Broadcasting Journalists Association cited 14 incidents of editorial meddling in their radio and TV programmes.

One of the sacked journalists, Mr Thepchai Yong, writes: 'From an independent station famous for aggressive and in-depth reporting, iTV was turned overnight into an entertainment channel whose flimsy news coverage is unashamedly pro-Thaksin.'

The Thai Journalists Association said it deplored the 'sophisticated and subtle means' used to co-opt the media, because those outlets which reported favourably on the Thaksin government were given more advertising business from state enterprises.

To minimise government interference, the Thai media had resorted to self-censorship, said Mr Kavi Chongkittavorn, assistant group editor of The Nation newspaper.

'If this trend continues, the Thai media's role as watchdogs will disappear. The media will become just a cog of the government's huge spin machine, taking part in what Thaksin calls the 'nation-building process'.'

But Mr Thaksin, who controls an overwhelming majority in Parliament and vast financial resources, is unmoved by proponents of a free press. Columnist Tulsathit Taptim laments that Thai newspapers now choose not to publish stories that embarrass the prime minister.

'Since Thaksin came to power, influential media figures have been taken to the edge of the ethical line, and many have fallen over,' he says. Along with the sharp fall in advertising revenue for newspapers, another trend is discernable - politicians and other interest groups are buying up controlling stakes in the print media.

There was a lot of speculation when relatives of Thai Rak Thai secretary-general and Cabinet minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit bought shares which made them the third-largest shareholders of The Nation group.

Mr Kavi writes: 'The new owners entering the Thai media world brought with them new editorial policies and a different, 'softer' approach to news coverage.'

All attempts to set up a commission to facilitate the transfer of ownership for broadcast frequencies to the private sector have stalled.

The Thaksin government now has virtually total control over public broadcasting. Which is why crusading journalists like Mr Kavi are fighting to preserve whatever space they still have in the print media.

They face an uphill battle.

THAILAND: Govt heat on Bangkok Post 'intense'

Government pressure on the Bangkok Post was intense before Mr Veera Pratheepchaikul, its editor, was moved last week to another job in Post Publishing, the owner of the English-language daily

The Straits Times
Friday, February 27, 2004
 
BANGKOK - Government pressure on the Bangkok Post was intense before Mr Veera Pratheepchaikul, its editor, was moved last week to another job in Post Publishing, the owner of the English- language daily.

And the heat will rise as the administration of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gears up for a general election, said Mr Pichai Chuensuksawadi, former editor of the newspaper who is now the editor-in-chief of Post Publishing.
 
Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand on Wednesday, he said that although the daily was subjected to government pressure in the past, the heat was greater now.

Mr Veera was removed in what critics and journalists described as a move by Mr Thaksin to muzzle press criticisms of his government's handling of the bird flu outbreak and other issues.

On Wednesday, the union representing the staff of the paper jumped into the fray with a statement pressing for editorial independence.

The union also met management groups to ask for the reason for Mr Veera's sudden removal as editor, The Nation reported yesterday.

The report quoted union members as questioning whether editorial independence would continue.

Management executives, insisting that independence was intact, cited an assurance given in a letter from Post Publishing's head of the board, Mr Chavalit Thanachanan.

After the meeting, some employees said they wanted a clear and acceptable explanation for Mr Veera's removal.

'If it was a promotion, why is he not getting more pay?' one employee asked.

'We want the management to respect the statement issued by Chavalit Thanachanan on Feb 23 in which he said that the editorial team would not be interfered with,' another employee said.

In his five-point statement, Mr Chavalit wrote: 'The board would like to confirm that editorial operations would remain the same. These follow the company's policy since its establishment. Report the facts in a straight way without distortion.'

The statement, however, did not contain Mr Chavalit's signature and the union and management officials agreed to meet again next Thursday.

Was it worth it? Ask those who know

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday February 24, 2004
The Guardian

I know it's true that, as an old friend in Australia pointed out to me in an email last week, "It doesn't really matter very much if you were wrong or I was wrong. One hundred years from now, some very clever historians with access to material we all know nothing about may prove the point conclusively, one way or another. What matters is what happens now."

Now, nearly a year after the beginning of the coalition invasion of Iraq, something is beginning to be created, and it doesn't look like anything that anybody quite anticipated. It is more complex, more difficult, more beset by difficulties and tragedies than anyone who supported the invasion ever allowed before the war.

Judging from those relatively few reports that do not deal with the security situation, it seems that parts of the national infrastructure of Iraq, such as electricity and water supply, have taken far longer to repair or construct than expected. Many hospitals still suffer terrible shortages. Unemployment is over 50%. Crime and fear of crime are very high in some places, with many abductions and murders. There is widespread disappointment at the gulf between the material promises and the reality of post-Saddam Iraq.

And, of course, there are the bombings and ambushes, aimed at the Iraqi police, NGO offices, CNN journalists, Shi'a clerics, communists and soon, doubtless, as those targets protect themselves, at buses and markets. The security failure above all has helped to create the other failures. Attempts by coalition forces to contain such attacks have had the inevitable effect of alienating sections of the population whose houses have been raided or who have been subject to rough treatment by occupying forces.

I bundle these negatives together because we are now four months away from the handover of power from the coalition authority to the new sovereign Iraqi entity; an entity whose shape and origin we are still not sure of. And because, between them, they constitute a major reason why the influential organisation, Human Rights Watch, made the judgment a few weeks ago that the invasion of Iraq could not be justified on humanitarian grounds, the grounds that people like me have specifically used to justify it. "The difficulty of establishing stable institutions in Iraq," wrote HRW, "is making the country an increasingly unlikely staging ground for promoting democracy in the Middle East."

Put in the bluntest terms, HRW argues that intervention in Iraq couldn't be justified because not enough people were being killed by the regime at the time of invasion. "Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes," it argues, but Saddam's worst excesses were in the past, when (as in the case of the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign of 1988) it might have been justified to take action against him. Instead, as HRW points out, "Washington deemed it more important to defeat Iran or avoid Iranian influence in a potentially destabilised Iraq than to discourage or prevent large-scale slaughter. We condemn such calculations."

But the organisation makes its own. "One is tempted to say that anything is better than living under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, but unfortunately, it is possible to imagine scenarios that are even worse. Vicious as his rule was, chaos or abusive civil war might well become even deadlier, and it is too early to say whether such violence might still emerge in Iraq."

I have put this case at length because this, and not the stuff that is flung around by the Galloways and the pop-star orators, is the most challenging and difficult of cases to answer. Saddam was bad, but in toppling him are we creating something better, or just ensuring that next time someone raises the humanitarian banner then, like Hilaire Belloc's Matilda, they will be ignored?

And here we come to it. Three weeks ago, a few days after the devastating bombs in the Kurdish city of Erbil, a representative of the Kurdish PUK, Barham Salih, addressed a meeting of the council of the Socialist International in Madrid. "Friends," he told them, "our nightmare of the Saddam Hussein fascist tyranny is over. The world should have acted sooner to end the killing fields and stop mass graves in Iraq. Good social democrats should be making the moral argument that the war of liberation in Iraq came too late for so many innocent victims of Saddam's fascist tyranny. And the lesson for the international community should be [that] it must be prepared to act in time and pre-empt terrible tragedies from happening again anywhere else in the world."

I respect HRW, but there is, in Salih's words, a reproach and a demand, neither of which can be ignored. "Most Iraqis," Salih went on, "see the moral and political imperative for the war of liberation as overwhelming." The Guardian's own Salam Pax put it in his different way, two weeks ago. "Saddam is gone, thanks to you. Was it worth it? Be assured it was. We all know that it got to a point where we would have never been rid of Saddam without foreign intervention; I just wish it would have been a bit better planned."

Meanwhile many good things have been happening. The Free Prisoners Association, for victims of the old regime, now has 17 offices throughout Iraq. There are 200 newspapers and Iraqis can debate and watch and listen freely. There is, for the first time in the country's history, a woman police officer, and women's organisations are active and demonstrating for equal rights. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) has recognised the Iraqi Federation of Trades Unions as "the legitimate and legal representatives of the labour movement in Iraq", despite an unexplained American raid on the IFTU's HQ in December. The UN is back in Iraq and helping to prepare the ground for elections in the next 18 months. The green shoots of civic society are pressing through what Salih has called the "broken clay" of the Iraqi state. This is despite the killing and bombing of organisations associated with this new Iraq.

I don't think, even knowing what I know now, that I could have resisted the entreaties of Salih on the HRW basis that too few Kurds were currently being killed by Saddam. The challenge is to find a way by which he - and others who could be helped - are not left so long next time.

In the meantime there is, as my friend said, the question of now. You could, as Tariq Ali and John Pilger have suggested, desire victory for the Iraqi "resistance" despite its massacres of the innocent, on the basis that, as Ali has put it, "Occupations are usually ugly. How, then, can resistance be pretty?" Or, in Pilger's words, "While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the 'Bush gang' will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang."

Or you could decide to heed Salih."I call upon you to help Iraqi democrats in this critical juncture of the history of the Middle East. To help us transform our country from the land of mass graves and aggression to the land of peace, justice and democracy. I can see an Iraq that is democratic, that is an anchor for peace in this troubled part of the world and a partner to civilised nations in pursuit of the universal values of human rights and justice. Thank you."

Was I wrong about Iraq?

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday February 17, 2004
The Guardian

A year ago last weekend up to a million anti-war marchers took to the streets of London, and I couldn't be one of them. With the exception of those who now offer their support to the murderous armed "resistant" in Iraq, the many thousands who protested against the war are - unlike me - uncontaminated by any responsibility for the bad things that have happened since. And right now, that is quite an enviable situation to be in. Kind colleagues, thoughtful colleagues smile gently at me and wonder aloud when I will say those three little words that they are so confident that they will never have to utter - "I was wrong."

Well, was I? Haven't the failure to uncover even a single anthrax shell, and the car bombs going off every few days around Baghdad combined to show that people like me got it wrong? Forget all the oil and imperialism stuff, weren't we mistaken on our own terms? Over the next two weeks I'll attempt to show where I have got to on all this, and to be as honest as I can. There are plenty of debating points that could be made but - for once - let's not make 'em.

From the outset of the Iraq debate I was a WMD agnostic. I knew that security sources, leaking regularly to sections of the press, argued that the regime had maintained biological and chemical weaponry since finally admitting - in 1995 - what it had for so long denied. But I wasn't convinced. I am a journalist, not a prime minister, and I don't have to base any part of my judgments on the tales of spooks. It seemed unlikely to me that Saddam Hussein would ever dare to openly use such weapons, if he had them, as he had earlier done against the Kurds and the Iranians.

Unlikely, but also not impossible. And Saddam's failure to comply with UN resolutions (and, my God, he certainly failed to comply, beginning with resolution 687 and ending with 1442) had also locked us into a cycle of sanctions and suffering that seemed unstoppable. This cycle was then, as much as events in Palestine, poisoning the air of the Middle East. Sanctions plus Saddam - in effect, western policy after 1991 - was a killer.

Even so, for most of 2002, as the war drums grew ever louder, I dithered about what was the best way out. In the early autumn I wrote, "I am with Al Gore in his attack on the astonishing way in which the hawks of the Bush administration, led by Dick Cheney, have squandered the goodwill of the post-September 11 world." I continued, "They have created the clear impression that they do not care whether the inspectors go back in, or even whether every dot and comma of every UN resolution is adhered to. Their objective is exemplary regime change, and that's that."

I too wanted Saddam gone, but I was looking for some nice, multilateral, centre-left way of accomplishing it. In that context I found little to help me in the famous September dossier, which I wrote about in the week of its publication. The 45 minute claim, now legendarily supposed to be the "central" justification for war, passed me by altogether. I argued that the proper response to what I called a "restrained" document, was a new UN resolution, "renewing and updating the tasks of the inspectors, and setting a deadline for Iraqi compliance". Such a resolution was passed. The inspectors went back in, Saddam still didn't fully comply. I began to hope that he wouldn't, and wondered whether some folk - including the French government - actually cared whether he did or not.

Last week my colleague, Jonathan Freedland, dealt with what he called the "comedy" of George Bush's search for why the quest for WMD has turned up nothing. "And to think," he wrote "[Bush] could have known all the facts without firing a single shot - if only he had let Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors finish their work." But I now realise that there would not have been such a moment. Blix would never have been sure, and the US and UK intelligence services, as Hutton showed, would always have believed - and told their political masters - that something remained. Saddam's history, and the world after September 11, together meant that such a comforting certainty couldn't be ours.

But, as Polly Toynbee recalled recently, I have to deal with what I said on this page as the heavy bit of the military campaign ended last April. The key sentence was, "If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing I am told by our government or that of the US, ever again. And more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere." According to that, my rattle should be well out of the pram by now.

I deserve to be reminded of such a bombastic bit of posing. Even so, the bit about "anyone else" is clearly true. The government has lost a great deal of trust precisely because the weapons haven't been found, and because the Gilliganesque charge that Number 10 somehow lied about their presence, has stuck. The trouble is that I find - partly as a result of the Hutton inquiry (the evidence, not the report) - that I don't believe the government did lie. As the MoD intelligence dissident, Brian Jones, wrote to the Independent last week, "I cast no doubt on Mr Blair's integrity. He evidently believed that Iraq possessed a significant stockpile of chemical or biological weapons and expected them to be recovered during or soon after the invasion... such a discovery would have enhanced, rather than undermined, 'the global fight against weapons proliferation'."

Perhaps I might allay disappointment by blaming Blair et al for being too credulous, or too willing to adopt the precautionary principle, in order perhaps to maintain solidarity with the Americans. But I invite open-minded readers to consider this. Had there been a dossier released detailing WMD proliferation in, say, Libya, and blaming rogue Islamicist scientists from, say, Pakistan, I would have been just as (or more) sceptical than I was over Iraq. Yet last week Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has admitted trading nuclear information and equipment with countries including Libya, was "the tip of an iceberg for us". What now seems extraordinary is that Iraq may not have been part of the submerged mass. Perhaps Butler will tell us why our government thought otherwise.

So much for WMD. For "liberal interventionists", however, the Iraq issue had another, more significant dimension. Wasn't war, in the end, the only way of bringing down the tyranny of Saddam, and wouldn't that war end in an Iraq - and a Middle East - that was safer and freer than before? On this, above all, was I wrong? If you care one way or another, I'll try to answer this next week.