” …… the biggest winners at the games will not be standing on numbered podiums with medals hanging around their necks. Instead, they will be sitting high above the athletes in plush VIP sections reserved for officials.” From US News and World Report:
An opulent villa stands on a plot of farmland just north of the Chinese capital, close to where the Beijing Olympics will be held next August. The villa’s architecture mixes classical Chinese features with modern steel and glass elements. But the real surprise is inside. The bedrooms are decorated in warm, soft tones that appeal to the residents”a group of young, attractive women chosen by the vice mayor of Beijing. They are his personal concubines, paid for by building contractors.
Before he was fired last year and subsequently imprisoned, Vice Mayor Liu Zhihua was directly responsible for the construction of the city’s Olympic venues. He oversaw projects worth $35 billion, more money than was spent on all previous games together going back to the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Using the power of his office, Liu collected kickbacks that he used to set himself up in regal splendor. “Liu had more than one mistress,” wrote the Wen Hui Bao newspaper in Shanghai. “He had a secret pleasure palace for himself to have fun.” His fall was triggered not by Chinese associates aware of his lavish lifestyle but rather by a foreign businessman who reportedly found Liu’s payoff demands for a real estate deal so outrageously steep that he complained to the authorities.
Liu’s case draws attention to the Achilles’s heel of China’s economic boom: corruption. Last year alone, some 100,000 members of the Communist Party were censured for graft, a number that still understates the extent of the problem. Almost no major business transaction gets done in China without a cash payment under the table, long-term observers say. Liu’s only mistake was that he became too greedy and his behavior was too conspicuous. Other officials continue to collect bribes. [Full Text]
[Image source: LANDMARK. Raising the Olympic Rings. Getty Images]
