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dam-l Los Angeles Times: Dam Project Drowning in Graft

Los Angeles Times   
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20000505/t000042348.html

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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