Stealing Paradise

How do you launder one-and-a-half billion dollars? If it is denominated in $100 bills, it would be the equivalent of 12 fully stacked palettes. Buying property, art and expensive watches does not cut it. So the Maldives president's closest ministers and aides came up with a plan.

Stealing Paradise, a documentary by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, has shown that the Maldives government "controls all the levers of state" and often uses them for nefarious purposes. This time, they thought they would pull those levers in the service of secretive Asian businessmen representing a boss referred to only as "Mr Hans".

The plan was remarkably simple. They would charter a plane to fly the money to the Maldives, accompanied by security guards. The guards would hand it over to local soldiers, who would supervise its transfer to a vault. There, it would be counted and verified by Maldives Monetary Authority (MMA) officials. The central bankers would then credit a private company account. Finally, the owners would gradually telegraph-transfer the money back out.

Shortly after broadcasting the investigation by Al Jazeera into government corruption by the Maldives president and his ruling party authorities stuck back when they raided a newspaper which assisted Al Jazeera in its investigation.

From the Guardian:

Authorities in the Maldives have raided the offices of a newspaper and a human rights NGO and cancelled the passports of fugitive opposition figures after an al-Jazeera documentary aired corruption allegations against the country’s president, Abdulla Yameen.

Local journalists involved with the documentary, broadcast by the Qatari news network on Wednesday evening, had already left the country in anticipation of a backlash, amid warnings by senior MPs that contributors risked jail under defamation laws.

Hours after the documentary was posted online on Wednesday, police raided a building in the capital, Malé, housing the Maldivian Independent, a newspaper accused of links to the former president Mohamed Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic party (MDP).

Nasheed was ousted in what supporters say was a coup in 2012 and is now living in exile in Britain, a 13-year jail sentence hanging over him at home.