Baabar: 'The Absurd History of Legislators'
This week popular historian and former politician B. Batbayar (a.k.a. Baabar) published a rather scathing editorial entitled "The Absurd History of Legislators" directed at "resource nationalists" and the self-destructive attempts by parliament to appease them with legislation aimed at foreign investors. It struck me as a very compelling counter-balance to the usual inclination of international observers to view public opinion in Mongolia as being fantastically homogeneous and fully aligned against foreign investment. Mr. Baabar's opinion is only one, but it is an opinion read by many. He has more than 34,000 followers on Twitter, and the editorial had more than 84,000 views as of the writing of this post! It is worth a read. Here are a few choice passages I have translated from the original (see the footnotes and here) to give a flavor of his argument.
The Bombshell that Fizzled
A week has passed since the revelations about Deputy Speaker S. Bayartsogt's offshore company and Swiss bank account were first reported by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). As mentioned in previous posts on this blog here and here, Mr. Bayartsogt neglected to claim the company and account on his official disclosure forms to the Independent Authority Against Corruption (IAAC) as required of all elected representatives and high-ranking officials in Mongolia. At this point he has only admitted to having violated those local regulations and codes of conduct. The more scandalous implication of the report is that it provides strong circumstantial evidence of a political leader abusing his official position for personal gain, and his public image as a proponent of the Oyu Tolgoi (OT) project also adds another layer of intrigue for conspiracy minded critics of the mine project. Given the popular perception that corruption is endemic among politicians and the accusations of wrongdoing routinely tossed around by critics of the OT project, this story had all the makings of a first rate political scandal. Yet, it appears to have fizzled for three reasons.
Continuing Analysis: S. Bayartsogt and the ICIJ Report
It has been more than 24 hours since the news first broke about Deputy Speaker S. Bayartsogt's undisclosed British Virgin Islands (BVI) company and Swiss bank account based on a report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) here. The ICIJ report covers much more than Mr. Bayartsogt's personal business dealings, and it exposes the names of several thousand people in various countries using elaborate schemes to hide wealth (see article here for more information). Examining the ICIJ methodology here, it seems that Mr. Bayartsogt may be just the tip of the iceberg for Mongolia, and in some sense he just got unlucky being exposed first. According to ICIJ, the information comes from a computer hard drive anonymously received in the mail and containing more than 260 gigabytes of data. ICIJ has painstakingly and only partially decrypted, sorted, and reconstructed the complex links between offshore companies, secret accounts, and individuals.
Instant Analysis: S. Bayartsogt and the Next Oyu Tolgoi Crisis in the Making
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a report today that may touch off another crisis surrounding the Oyu Tolgoi project. It has come to light that Deputy Speaker of Parliament S. Bayartsogt has maintained a secret Swiss account for an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands with as much USD 1 million (reports here and here). Mr. Bayartsogt was the Minister of Finance when the Oyu Tolgoi (OT) stability agreement was signed in October 2009, and in November of last year independent MP S. Ganbaatar challenged Mr. Bayartsogt to a nationally televised debate on the stability agreement and the OT project. These two men have become the public faces of the anti-OT and pro-OT crowds, respectively. This news about the account is a bombshell, and I presume PM Altankhuyag's government and Rio Tinto will in their own separate ways try to get ahead of this story and try to distance themselves from Mr. Bayartsogt as quickly as possible. Here are some contextual points to keep in mind as the story unfolds.
Divining Method in the Political Madness
One of the many explanations for the shape of Mongolia's mining policy is based on national security concerns. The argument goes that, as a sparsely populated and militarily defenseless country sandwiched between two giants, Mongolia must play a cunning and complicated game of geopolitics to protect sovereignty over its mineral wealth. On the face of it this seems like a fair explanation, and proponents can offer many examples of politically charged issues and legislation that spring from "obvious" concerns of foreign influence, most notably from China, in the mining sector. However, for me this explanation produces a gnawing sense of retroactively imposing rational or, at least, predictable decision-making lurking under the surface of actions that otherwise look detrimental to Mongolia. It's as if analysts are Lord Polonius watching Hamlet's erratic behavior and concluding "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."1
