Corruption Charges Again Rock Dam Project
China: Problems have dogged Three Gorges facility, with costs put at as
much as $70 billion. Now, building official reportedly makes off with $120
million.
By HENRY
CHU, Times Staff Writer
BEIJING--The
world's largest public works effort, China's Three Gorges Dam, has been
hit by a fresh wave of corruption charges that further call into question
the wisdom of the controversial project.
During the last 18 months, allegations
of mismanagement and malfeasance have grown from a trickle into a steady
flow of tales of massive corruption.
The
latest allegations center on the head of a company involved in the
construction, the Three Gorges Economic Development Corp. Company boss Jin
Wenchao was reported by a Hong Kong newspaper this week to have
disappeared, along with more than $120 million, some of which was
transferred to overseas bank accounts, the South China Morning Post said.
Jin, a former soldier, allegedly got the
money by selling jobs in his company and taking out loans supposedly in
support of the $24-billion dam, which is under construction in central
China along the mighty Yangtze River, the world's third-longest waterway.
Jin's son and daughter also have been accused of acquiring loans to set up
fictitious businesses, reports said.
The
allegations could not be confirmed Thursday, the middle of a weeklong
holiday in China to mark International Labor Day on May 1. Chinese
officials are generally tight-lipped about scandals concerning the dam, a
hydroelectric project pushed by the Communist regime as a symbol of
national strength and know-how.
But
state media recently have begun publicizing accounts of corruption in
connection with the project, an indication of the alleged fraud's
seriousness and magnitude.
In January,
the People's Daily--the Communist Party mouthpiece--revealed that state
auditors had implicated at least 14 people in a $57-million embezzlement
ring to siphon funds earmarked for resettling residents displaced by the
dam. One of the suspects in the case has been sentenced to death.
That same month, a top executive with
the project's largest subcontractor was sacked for buying used,
substandard equipment, including trucks and bulldozers, in a suspected
$24-million kickback scheme.
And as far
back as January of last year, the Chinese press reported that more than
100 project officials had been arrested on suspicion of malfeasance.
"It's a cancer of corruption," said
Doris Shen of the Berkeley-based International Rivers Network, an
organization that is highly critical of the dam.
"There are scapegoats being executed and
sentenced to life" in prison, Shen said. "However, the people who have
promoted and pushed this project . . . are not suffering any consequences
whatsoever."
The dam project, which
began construction in 1994, is scheduled to be completed in 2009. It would
stand 600 feet tall and generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity. More
than 1 million people will have to be resettled.
Officials say the project is crucial to
control disastrous summer flooding. Critics contend that the dam will be a
financial, ecological and social nightmare.
Already, estimates of the real cost of
the project, which has spiraled as construction proceeds, reach as high as
$70 billion.
The dam's opponents also
say that the Three Gorges project will achieve little in the way of flood
control because of rapid sedimentation along the Yangtze and in the dam's
reservoir.
Just last month, a group of
hydrologists, engineers and scholars submitted a petition to the
government urging leaders not to fill the dam's reservoir to capacity when
it opens in order to give scientists time to monitor silting.
Reports of shoddy workmanship have
plagued the project. In December 1998, a project official admitted that
engineers had discovered defects such as weak concrete.
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