Drug dealer recruited to smear Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi

The fresh accusations were dismissed by her lawyer who has accused the junta of ‘illegal mudslinging’ against his client.

Protesters carry a wounded comrade shot with live rounds by security forces in Yangon on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

A Yangon real estate tycoon who served prison time for drug trafficking and had close ties to the former military junta has confessed on Myanmar state television to paying bribes to ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi totalling $700,000 in charges dismissed by her lawyer as “groundless and illogical”.

The military broadcaster aired the confession on Wednesday night to support claims that Ms Suu Kyi violated anti-corruption laws, an offence that carries a maximum 15-year jail term, on top of charges of illegally importing walkie talkies, breaching COVID-19 protocols, creating public unrest and one under the telecommunications law.

The fresh accusations were dismissed by her lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, who has accused the junta of “illegal mudslinging” against his client. “Aung San Suu Kyi may have her defects... but bribery and corruption are not her traits,” he said, adding that most people in Myanmar would not believe the allegations.

It is the second corruption allegation against the Nobel peace prize laureate after the junta charged her earlier this month with receiving $766,000 in cash and 10kg of gold from former Yangon chief minister Phyo Min Thein. The junta claimed he, too, confessed, though it offered no evidence of that.

In Wednesday night’s televised statement, Maung Weik, the 48-year-old chairman of Sai Paing Constructions, said he had personally handed Ms Suu Kyi four donations to the Daw Khin Kyi charity she founded in honour of her mother, widow of Myanmar independence hero Aung San, who died in 1988.

“I gave a black envelope which included $US100,000 to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation in front of (two families in 2018),” he said, adding he made three more payments that were not witnessed in 2019, February and April of 2020.

Maung Weik said he had donated money to senior government figures for the good of his business. The real estate mogul was known to have been a generous donor to the former junta, but in 2008 was sentenced to 15 years’ jail for selling drugs to stars, social­ites and sons of senior generals, according to news reports from that time. He was released in 2014 and quickly began winning lucrative government contracts.

In 2016, less than a year into the first term of Ms Suu Kyi’s Nat­ional League for Democracy government, Maung Weik was alleged to have bribed Phyo Min Thein with a $US100,000 Patek Philippe watch in exchange for a major South Yangon development contract.

The chief minister, a veteran pro-democracy activist and former political prisoner, sued the newspaper and the editor eventually went to jail, sparking the first in what became a chorus of complaints that the NLD government was hampering press freedom.

Maung Weik was among scores of business leaders rounded up last month for interrogation by the Office of the Chief of Security Affairs, the most feared branch of Myanmar’s military intelligence agency, although he was suspected to have been released early.

A Yangon-based real estate businessman, who asked not to be named, told The Australian that the junta’s use of a “convicted drug dealer to smear Suu Kyi was a bad joke”, and that the developer had little credibility.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the February 1 coup, which generals have justified by claiming electoral fraud in last November’s elections that returned Ms Suu Kyi’s NLD government with an overwhelming majority.

An escalation in the use of lethal violence by security forces in the past two weeks to try to quell continuing popular resistance to the coup has not only brought international condemnation but criticism from the country’s most powerful Buddhist organisation, which leaked a draft statement on Wednesday urging the junta to end the arrest torture and killing of unarmed civilians.

Myanmar’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a group which has been monitoring the violence, reported on Thursday that at least 217 people had been killed and 2191 arrested and detained since the coup.

A UN-backed team of investigators has urged Myanmarese to come forward with evidence that can be used to prosecute junta leaders, appealing to lower order soldiers and police who may have received orders to commit acts against international law.

“The persons most responsible for the most serious international crimes are usually those in high leadership positions,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, said. The independent team was “collecting evidence regarding arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances and the use of force, including lethal force, against those peacefully opposing the coup”, he added.