Cops break up illegal network helping foreigners stay in Thailand
Bangkok, May 31: Thai police have broken up a large network that illegally helped foreigners, mostly Russians, to stay in Thailand long-term through the use of company nominees or shell companies, officials said Friday.
Police said a 45-year-old Russian woman who came to Thailand in 2012 operated the scheme with a Thai woman who was listed as an executive or a shareholder of more than 270 companies in the southern province of Phuket.
Foreigners can operate a business in Thailand, but it must be a joint venture with a Thai partner except in specified cases, and they cannot own more than 49% to protect local competitiveness.
The defendants offered a service in which foreigners could be listed as a shareholder of a business with a Thai partner or be employed by a shell company owned by Thais in order to get a work permit, said Puttidej Bunkrapue, commander of the police Economic Crime Suppression Division.
A total of 98 foreigners, including 68 Russians, have been accused of operating businesses without a permit, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a million baht ($27,000) fine, police said. In addition, 37 Thais were accused of offenses related to the network.
Officials said the network is likely to have been in operation since 2016, but there had been a sharp increase in its customers since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At least 50 of the foreigners have been officially charged as of Friday, said chief investigator Krit Woratat.
Phuket is a major tourist destination and is particularly popular among Russians. (AP)
Toddler sets world record as youngest artist
Accra, May 31: Meet Ace-Liam Ankrah, a Ghana toddler who has set the record as the world’s youngest male artist.
His mother, Chantelle Kukua Eghan, says it all started by accident when her son, who at the time was 6 months old, discovered her acrylic paints.
Eghan, an artist and founder of Arts and Cocktails Studio, a bar that offers painting lessons in Ghana’s capital, Accra, said she was looking for a way to keep her boy busy while working on her own paintings.
“I spread out a canvas on the floor and added paint to it, and then in the process of crawling he ended up spreading all the colors on the canvas,” she said.
And that’s how his first artwork, “The Crawl,” was born, Eghan, 25, told The Associated Press. (AP)
95-year-old Holocaust denier to go on trial
Hamburg, May 31: An infamous 95-year-old Holocaust denier has been ordered to stand trial in Germany on charges of incitement, authorities announced on Friday.
Ursula Haverbeck was sentenced to 10 months in jail in November 2015 for denying that the Nazi German regime systematically murdered people at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
She has appealed that sentence and will go back to trial over the charges beginning next Friday in a district court in Hamburg.
Haverbeck made her comments during the 2015 trial of former Nazi SS member Oskar Groning, a guard and administrator at Auschwitz. Groning, who died in 2018, was convicted of accessory to murder in the deaths of 3,00,000 people.
She claimed in a television interview with regional public broadcaster NDR that the Nazis did not use Auschwitz as an extermination camp. She allegedly also claimed to journalists covering Groning’s trial that Auschwitz was only a labour camp.
At least 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex.
Haverbeck is popular with the far-right fringe in Germany. She has repeatedly faced court proceedings over her comments in Germany, where hate speech and Holocaust denial are prohibited under law.
She was criminally convicted and fined in 2004. She served two years in prison in western Germany for Holocaust denial.
In 2022, she was again sentenced to one year in prison without probation by a Berlin court for incitement to hatred, in a judgement that is now final. (IANS)