Yemen to revamp visa procedures in wake of failed Christmas Day airliner bombing

Image by Anduze traveller via Flickr

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 21, 2010; A03

Yemen is changing its visa procedures as a result of the Dec. 25 airline bombing attempt in the United States and will require entry permits to be issued at its embassies abroad rather than granting them on arrival in Yemen, Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi said Wednesday.

His government has also asked all Arabic-language institutes in Yemen to provide information on foreign students, Qirbi said. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with attempting to detonate a bomb aboard the Amsterdam-Detroit flight last month, was a student at such a school in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, before he allegedly joined the al-Qaeda affiliate there last fall.

Image by Osama Al-Eryani via Flickr

In a wide-ranging interview at the end of a three-day visit here, Qirbi said that counterterrorism cooperation with the United States had improved under the Obama administration, but that U.S. intelligence was still not sharing enough of the kind of information that could prevent attacks like the Christmas Day attempt, which failed because the bomb malfunctioned.

Although Abdulmutallab's father had told the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that his son was associating with extremists in Yemen, that information was not transmitted to Yemeni security officials. Qirbi said his government had not yet received any information about up to four dozen Americans that a Senate report Wednesday said had converted to Islam and become radicalized before moving to Yemen.

The State Department's top counterterrorism official, Daniel Benjamin, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that the presence of such individuals in Yemen is "obviously a major concern for us," although "we can't stop people from going across the ocean."

Overall, both Qirbi and Benjamin -- who testified with Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs -- put a positive face on U.S.-Yemeni relations, saying that the countries are working closely together to combat al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and that U.S. military and development aid is rapidly increasing. Benjamin said Yemen would receive $63 million in aid this year, with additional military funding anticipated.

All three men, who met several times during Qirbi's visit, spoke of a "holistic" approach that would address the "root causes" of radicalization in Yemen, including poverty and unemployment.

But while Benjamin praised what he said was Yemen's recently arrived-at understanding of the threat posed by the al-Qaeda group, Qirbi said it was the United States that had recently awakened to the danger. "We felt that over the last 20 years, since Yemen started its fight against [al-Qaeda], that nobody paid much attention," he said.

In recent weeks, the United States has launched precision-guided missiles against al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, using Yemeni intelligence, according to U.S. military officials. Both countries have refused to comment publicly on the extent of U.S. intervention, with Yemen acknowledging only the assistance of U.S. "firepower."

Although administration officials have acknowledged a rapid increase in intelligence cooperation and military training in Yemen, they have said they are aware that too big an American footprint would exacerbate already strong resentment of a U.S. presence there.

On other matters, Qirbi said there had been little discussion during his visit of nearly 100 Yemeni detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. An administration review has cleared 45 of them for release, but President Obama suspended their repatriation after the Dec. 25 attack. Qirbi said his government thinks the Obama administration's plans for indefinite detention without trial for some Guantanamo detainees "plays into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Echoing statements by other Yemeni officials, Qirbi said the radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi had survived a recent Yemeni airstrike. "He's alive, in one of the remote areas" of the country, Qirbi said. The Obama administration has said that Aulaqi was instrumental in radicalizing Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

Qirbi said his government has asked Aulaqi's father, a former president of Sanaa University, to persuade his son to turn himself in to face "legal action" in Yemen.

Immigrants invest in U.S. businesses in exchange for visas

Image by yewenyi via Flickr

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 10, 2010; A06

The number of foreigners willing to invest $500,000 to $1 million in a U.S. business in exchange for a visa roughly tripled in the past fiscal year, as dozens of cash-strapped enterprises and local governments scrambled to attract wealthy foreign backers through a previously obscure provision of immigration law.

Under the EB-5 visa program, immigrants who can demonstrate that their investment created or preserved at least 10 U.S. jobs after two years are granted legal permanent residency along with their spouses and children.

Although immigrants are allowed to establish businesses under the program, most prefer to invest in "regional centers" -- public or private enterprises that are certified by the government to receive funds from EB-5 investors and that can count jobs indirectly created by the investment toward the 10 required.

The minimum outlay mandated is $1 million, but immigrants can reduce that to $500,000 by investing in a regional center or establishing businesses in areas designated as economically disadvantaged.

The program was established in 1990, but potential investors and businesses were often dissuaded by the U.S. government's slow and inconsistent administration of the complex rules. In the past year, however, a gradual streamlining of procedures coincided with the recession and credit crunch to dramatically boost interest in the program.

In a matter of months, more than 50 private and public enterprises were certified as regional centers, increasing the total from 23 to 74. Three are in the Washington area.

With so many more investment opportunities to choose from, the number of immigrants (including investors and their immediate family members) who obtained EB-5 visas jumped from 1,443 in fiscal 2008 to 4,218 in the 2009 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the State Department.

Most were granted to people from Asia, particularly China and South Korea. Several scholars said they expect the number to double again this year.

"What happens with programs like this is that sometimes, all of a sudden they get discovered, and then intermediaries begin to really promote them both here and internationally," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that recently released a report about the trend.

Statistics on the total invested through the EB-5 program are not available, but the capital infusion has been a boon to Washington area businesses. The Capitol Area Regional Center, a real estate investment fund based in the District, has been working to raise a projected $250 million from immigrant investors for use in Washington area construction projects.

Perhaps the greatest potential beneficiaries are nonprofit agencies such as the District's Anacostia Economic Development Corp., which was approved as a regional center in June. Over the next three years, the group hopes to raise $50 million from immigrant investors to develop real estate projects and small businesses in wards 7 and 8 -- a princely sum compared with the $2 million in private capital it raised for its last major building project in Anacostia.

"Normally, to get equity capital to these areas is almost impossible," said Michael Wallach, chief operating officer of the corporation. "These two wards have the highest unemployment rate in the city and the lowest incomes."

But because the primary motivation of the immigrant investors whom Wallach is wooing is to create enough jobs to meet the visa requirement rather than to maximize the return on their investment, they might prove less skittish.

'It was worth it to me'

Program participant Eric Canal-Forgues, a law professor and businessman from France, is a case in point. In 2007, he invested $500,000 in a regional center that funded construction of Comcast's headquarters in Philadelphia.

He said it is unlikely that he will get more than a 1 percent return by the five-year point at which he will be allowed to withdraw his money. That will barely cover the roughly $50,000 in administrative costs of his investment, let alone the loss of value because of inflation.

But Canal-Forgues, 47, who has moved with his wife and two children to Miami, said he has no regrets. "I knew the conditions going in, and it was worth it to me," he said. He said that Miami was attractive because of its financial opportunities and that he plans to open a franchise of children's clothing stores.

But more than anything else, he said, "we really wanted our children to be raised in a dual culture, French and American, especially because I think the educational system at the university level is much stronger here than in France."

Statistics suggest that many EB-5 applicants might also find the program appealing because it is considerably speedier than other options: Nearly 70 percent of immigrants granted investor visas in fiscal 2009 were from China or South Korea, countries whose nationals face decade-long waits for family-reunification visas because of quotas on the annual number allowed in from any one country.

Concerns about fraud

That immigrant investors are more focused on obtaining visas than maximizing profits -- combined with the government's limited capacity for oversight -- has caused even some avid proponents of the EB-5 program to worry that a profusion of fraudulent or ill-advised ventures might soon flourish alongside legitimate ones.

"The thing that concerns me most is that some fly-by-night [operation] will lose a large group of investors' money, and it will poison the well for the rest of us," said David Morris, founder of EB-5 America, a Washington regional center that invested $20 million to refurbish the Sugarbush ski resort in Vermont in past years and is now raising money for construction projects in the District.

Yet Morris also notes that some of the stricter rules of the EB-5 program -- including the rigid timeline by which the job creation requirement must be met -- do not always mesh with the realities of the business world, with consequences for both immigrant investors and potential business ventures.

For instance one of Morris's clients, Rodrigo Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Arlington County, was initially keen to invest in a project to renovate the historic O Street Market at Seventh and O streets NW. "The fact that you are helping to have a positive effect on the community that you're joining, I really liked that idea," said Martinez, 27.

But fearing that construction delays would prevent that project from creating sufficient jobs in time, Martinez, who attended law school in the United States and now works as a business consultant, switched his money last year to the Sugarbush resort instead.

Supporters of the EB-5 program also complain that the government's review process for approving potential regional centers is still too slow, especially at a time when a similar Canadian visa program is attracting three times as many immigrant investors.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell University's law school and executive director of a trade association of regional centers, said the number of EB-5 visas being granted falls well short of the maximum 10,000 allowed each year.

"There's a lot more that we could be doing to promote the EB-5 program so that it can achieve its true potential in this economic recession," he said.

Bipartisan support

Powerful members of Congress on both sides of the aisle agree. In a rare bipartisan convergence on an immigration issue, Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member, recently joined forces in an effort to make the regional centers permanent. (The centers were established under a pilot program that has been extended several times since the 1990s).

Leahy said he was impressed by the millions of dollars that EB-5 visa holders have invested in ski resorts such as Jay Peak and other projects in the distressed northeastern region of Vermont.

Because of legislative wrangling unrelated to the EB-5 program, Leahy had to settle for a three-year extension in the fiscal 2010 Homeland Security Appropriations bill adopted in the fall.

Still, Leahy predicted that not only will all aspects of the program soon be made permanent but also that the annual number of visas might be increased.

"Once it's permanent, I think we're really going to see the true value of this," he said. "At a time when we're seeing so many of our jobs exported out of the country, this creates jobs in the United States."

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Taint of Corruption Is No Barrier to U.S. Visa - NYTimes.com

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By IAN URBINA

Several times a year, Teodoro Nguema Obiang arrives at the doorstep of the United States from his home in Equatorial Guinea, on his way to his $35 million estate in Malibu, Calif., his fleet of luxury cars, his speedboats and private jet. And he is always let into the country.

The nation’s doors are open to Mr. Obiang, the forest and agriculture minister of Equatorial Guinea and the son of its president, even though federal law enforcement officials believe that “most if not all” of his wealth comes from corruption related to the extensive oil and gas reserves discovered more than a decade and a half ago off the coast of his tiny West African country, according to internal Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents.

And they are open despite a federal law and a presidential proclamation that prohibit corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving American visas. The measures require only credible evidence of corruption, not a conviction of it.

Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the State Department, said she was prohibited from discussing specific visa decisions. But other former and current State Department officials said Equatorial Guinea’s close ties to the American oil industry were the reason for the lax enforcement of the law. Production of the country’s nearly 400,000 barrels of oil a day is dominated by American companies like ExxonMobil, Hess and Marathon.

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.

“Both countries are severely repressive,” said Mr. Bennett, who is now a senior foreign affairs officer for the State Department in Baghdad. “But if Zimbabwe had Equatorial Guinea’s oil, Zimbabwean officials wouldn’t still be blocked from the U.S.”

Shown the Justice Department documents that detail the accusations of corruption against Mr. Obiang, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who wrote the law restricting visas, expressed frustration and anger with the State Department, which is responsible for issuing visas.

“The fact that someone like Mr. Obiang continues to travel freely here suggests strongly that the State Department is not yet applying the law as vigorously as Congress intended,” Mr. Leahy said. The law was partly inspired by the accusations of corruption surrounding Mr. Obiang’s family and the Equatorial Guinean government, Mr. Leahy’s staff said.

“There are many instances of corrupt foreign officials plundering the natural resources of their countries for their own use while their people starve,” Mr. Leahy said. “The law states clearly that if you do that, you are no longer welcome in the United States.”

Daniel Whitman, who retired in September as the deputy director of the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department, agreed that the law should be used more forcefully. “We just seem to lack the backbone to use this prohibition,” Mr. Whitman said. “In the rare cases it is used, no one at State was willing to talk about it.”

When asked how many times the laws have been used to bar corrupt foreign officials from entering the country, State Department officials declined to answer, citing privacy reasons, though Ms. Pittman said thousands of visas had been denied to corrupt officials using other legal means. A 2007 State Department report said the presidential proclamation, signed by President George W. Bush in 2004, had been used “dozens” of times.

A State Department official who handles corruption investigations said that while the measures were important tools, the department as a matter of policy did not want to reveal the number of times they had been used because it would show that the number was actually quite small. The official asked not to be identified because of departmental rules barring public comment.

The Justice Department memorandum, dated Sept. 4, 2007, and obtained by The New York Times, said the government believed Mr. Obiang’s assets were derived “from extortion, theft of public funds or other corrupt conduct.” From April 2005 to April 2006, the memorandum said, Mr. Obiang funneled at least $73 million into the United States, using shell corporations and offshore bank accounts to launder the money and ultimately buy his Malibu estate and a luxury jet.

The document identified several wire transfers by Mr. Obiang from 2005 and 2006, beginning with a bank in Equatorial Guinea, then going to the central Banque de France and landing in American accounts at Wachovia, Bank of America and UBS. In one six-week period in 2006, Mr. Obiang transferred $33,799,799.99 to the United States, it said, which was used to buy a Gulfstream V jet.

Part of his wealth, the document said, comes from a “revolutionary tax” that Mr. Obiang placed on timber. Instead of sending the payments to the treasury of Equatorial Guinea, Mr. Obiang, who is considered likely to be a successor to his father, has “insisted that the payments be made directly to him,” it said.

In addition, the memorandum said, the Justice Department believes that Mr. Obiang “may be receiving bribes or extortion payments” from the oil companies as a percentage of their contracts.

Spokesmen for ExxonMobil and Marathon said the companies followed all relevant laws. A request for comment from Hess was not answered. The Justice Department declined to comment on the memo.

Another document, prepared by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department, said Mr. Obiang “routinely travels to the United States with over $1 million in cash” that he fails to declare, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Mr. Obiang regularly visits the country using a diplomatic passport, though he rarely does diplomatic business here, said the I.C.E. document. The document said the immigration agency’s goal was to deny a safe haven to Mr. Obiang and to “identify, trace, freeze and recover assets within the United States illicitly acquired through kleptocracy by Teodoro Obiang and his associates.”

The documents were originally obtained by Global Witness, a British human rights group that monitors corruption in natural resources industries, after they were released in response to a legal complaint filed in France against several African dictators, including Mr. Obiang’s father, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. The Justice Department and I.C.E. would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the documents.

Through a spokesman at Qorvis Communications, a public relations firm working for the Equatorial Guinean Embassy in Washington, Teodoro Nguema Obiang declined to be interviewed. But his brother denied the charges of corruption.

“This is the problem when a country becomes very successful,” said Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, the vice minister of mines, energy and industry and another of the president’s sons. “Everyone assumes us guilty until proven innocent.”

The vice minister said his government had made great strides in dealing with corruption. He cited as an example his country’s participation in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, an international coalition of governments, civil society groups and companies that sets global standards for transparency in oil, gas and mining.

But a 2009 internal document from the initiative says the organization is “particularly concerned about the pace of progress” in Equatorial Guinea. The country has failed to produce a required report regarding its revenue, even though it joined the organization more than three years ago, the report says.

In 2004, President Bush signed a proclamation barring entry to the United States for any foreign officials and their family members “whose misappropriation of public funds” has had serious adverse effects on American businesses or national security interests. Congress followed up in 2007 with a law containing even stronger language, barring entry to anyone “involved in corruption relating to the extraction of natural resources in their countries.”

Otto Reich, who served until 2004 as the United States’ special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, said there was resistance to applying these sorts of prohibitions even before the presidential proclamation was drafted.

“Senior State Department people especially from Africa kept saying that if something like this is used they wouldn’t have anyone to talk to in their home countries,” Mr. Reich said. “It’s politically simply something they do not want to take on.”

The Obiang family and Equatorial Guinea have been the focus of corruption accusations for years. In 2004, a Senate panel accused Riggs Bank in Washington of having “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption” in accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from Equatorial Guinea.

Committee investigators found dozens of irregular payments, multiple individual signatories to accounts and even deposits of millions of dollars in shrink-wrapped currency. Riggs Bank was fined more than $25 million for its handling of the Equatorial Guinean and other accounts, and several of the bank’s directors were criminally prosecuted.

But in more recent years millions of dollars of the country’s money has found its way to other American banks, including the ones named in the Justice Department memo. Wachovia and Bank of America, according to the memo, filed suspicious activity reports to the authorities, and ultimately closed all accounts associated with Mr. Obiang and his associates, but not before tens of millions of dollars had already entered the United States.

“These banks appear to have facilitated a grand corruption, and it may even have been done legally,” said Gavin Hayman, director of campaigns for Global Witness. “Those that filed suspicious activity reports may have been complying with their regulatory obligations under the law, but at the same time they went ahead and forwarded transfers of tens of millions of dollars about which they already had suspicions. Effectively, the regulations are allowing banks to earn money from corruption.”

All three banks declined to answer questions about the transactions. Although Wachovia said Mr. Obiang was not a client, the Justice Department documents described how he used third parties to open accounts at some banks.

Since oil was discovered there in 1996, Equatorial Guinea has become the third-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola, with estimated revenues of $4.8 billion in 2007. But although petroleum has made the ruling Obiang family and its associates vastly rich, the oil and gas wealth has not been spread beyond ruling elites.

In 2006, more than three-quarters of the population was living below the poverty line, according to a 2009 International Monetary Fund report.

By some measures, conditions in the country are getting worse. Though the nation’s gross domestic product grew more than tenfold from 1990 to 2007, infant mortality rose to 12 percent from 10 percent, according to a 2009 Unicef report.

Indonesian Government to Ease Visa Limits for East Timor Students, Give Civil Servants Pensions

Jakarta Globe

July 15, 2009

Government to Ease Visa Limits for East Timor Students, Give Civil Servants Pensions

by Putri Prameshwari

Indonesia plans to ease immigration rules for East Timorese students who want to remain in the country, a Justice and Human Rights Ministry official said on Tuesday.

As recommended by the now-disbanded Commission for Truth and Friendship, Indonesia would ease regulations for East Timorese students wanting to obtain visas, said Hafid Abbas, head of the research and development division at the ministry.

They have been dealing with a complicated bureaucracy," he said. "We want to simplify the process of getting a permit to stay, especially for refugees who still find it difficult to even get an identity card."

Hafid said there were more than 5,000 East Timorese students in Indonesia, with most studying at universities in Yogyakarta.

He said that under the proposed agreement East Timorese students would only be required to provide any document that proves they are a student. Thereafter, the local immigration office would coordinate with the Ministry of National Education to process the students' visas.

The new visas would also be extended from one year to two.

The new regulations are part of an agreement between Jakarta and Dili, the East Timor capital, that resulted from the Commission for Truth and Friendship's recommendations.

The agreement is expected to be endorsed during a meeting of representatives of the two governments in Dili on Sunday.

Hafid said the Indonesian government is also considering a visa-on-arrival policy for East Timorese. However, he said there were several points to discuss beforehand, including security issues, reciprocity and the benefits for both countries.

So far, we are thinking of giving visas on arrival only at several approved entry points," he said, adding that those entry points would be discussed at the meeting in Dili.

In addition to immigration matters, Indonesia is also prepared to pay pensions to more than 15,000 former civil servants, including military and police officers, who chose to become citizens of East Timor after independence.

Riskintono Rachman, operational director at state-owned PT Taspen, said the company would pay the pensions gradually, and would spend up to Rp 40 billion ($3.91 million) doing so.

On July 19, we will pay Rp 11.1 billion to 7,511 former civil servants," he said.

The Commission for Truth and Friendship was formed in 2004 to determine the facts of the violence and other events that occurred during and after East Timor's 1999 referendum on independence. The agreement to be endorsed was largely taken from its recommendations