China’s soft power as the world’s biggest property buyer is under severe strain due to a government crackdown on capital flight and the Qatar controversy, which is expected to drive a lot of Arab money into the property market in western countries.

Qatar citizens are desperately looking for alternative investment avenues as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recently cut off relations with their country, and issued orders making it difficult for them to hold property in different Arab countries, property sellers said.

“I think the key is uncertainty…So the entire Middle East has an unrest,” said Sajid Bashir, CEO of the London-based Copperstones International Properties. “Then unrest creates panic, then panic creates diversification because people become mindful to think, Oh, what if Qatar gets blocked again?”

Qatar has emerged as the single biggest foreign source of investment in London properties in recent years, with government agencies lapping up major buildings like Harrods, he said.

“I think because the government has been investing (abroad), they have been mindful of this problem. Now the people realize that ‘we cannot keep all the money in Qatar, and we cannot trust Dubai and Saudi, and we cannot obviously go to Iran because it is on the sanction list’. So that doesn’t leave you many choices,” Bashir said.

Investment bonuses

Though fund outflows have reduced, Chinese buyers are still finding ways to invest in foreign markets, some of whom offer long-term residency for property investments.

This was evident at a recent Luxury Property Show in Beijing when dozens of foreign companies exhibited investment opportunities with a wide range of lucrative offers, including long-term residency and quasi-citizenship.

Several European and other countries, including Greece, Malta, and Spain, have been offering “golden visas” linked to minimum property investments ranging between $350,000 and $700,000.

“If you buy any kind of property for 250,000 Euros, you will get the residence permit for you, your wife, you children, and your parents and parents of your wife,” Anna N.Druhakova, CEO of D&A Invest from Greece told VOA at the LPS in Beijing. The residence permit will continue as long as the owner holds the property, she explained.

Agents are also approaching Chinese investors with promises to help them meet the requirements of EB5 visas in the U.S. For long-term residency, investors in business or commercial property need to prove that their investments have helped generate direct or indirect employment for at least 10 persons.

Capital flight crackdown

Apart from business investments, Chinese buyers poured $33 billion on home and commercial properties overseas in 2016, a 53 percent jump over the earlier year. The “capital flight crackdown” by the Chinese government has seriously affected headline grabbing investments of landmark buildings across major western cities, including London, by major Chinese companies.

Thousands of Chinese are still buying homes and commercial property in foreign markets as a combination of savings and their quest for foreign residency. They are finding innovative ways to take money out of the country with the help of real estate agents and shadow banking channels, sources told VOA.

Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong said the government’s main focus has been to curb foreign currency outflows. It has achieved considerable success in stopping major foreign investments in commercial property and businesses like entertainment that the government does not want to encourage.

“It is not clear if they (government) have been effective for the small consumers who are doing small overseas investments. But the data is not clear,” he said.

Government controls on fund outflows may have played a role in pushing up property prices in the domestic Chinese market. What is significant, said Collier, is the government has a vested interest in keeping the price high.

“If property prices come down, people are going to be much more eager, they are going to be rushing for the exit to get their money overseas. So that is another reason why the government is eager to keep the property prices up,” Colliers added.
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Census workers going door to door in Egypt’s teeming neighborhoods and crowded towns are discovering a new country – of more than 20 million people born in the last decade alone.

Family planning efforts have lapsed over the past decade, particularly during the chaotic years following the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Today the government is mainly focused on combatting Islamic militancy and repairing the tattered economy.

But the staggering growth rate in the most populous Arab country, already home to more than 93 million people, could worsen both problems by giving rise to yet another bulging generation with few job prospects and widespread reliance on dwindling government assistance.

“In 10 years, we’ve made what can be considered an entirely new country,” said Hussein Sayed, the coordinator of the national census. The results will be finalized and released in August.

Census workers have been traveling the country for months, documenting not only population growth but also household wealth, data that might help the government to better target its costly subsidies for bread, fuel and other basic goods.

They have found that Egypt’s population is growing by around 2 million a year, which would strain resources even if the country were able to stand on its own feet. As it is, Egypt has received billions of dollars in aid from Gulf nations in recent years. When that began to dry up last year, Cairo secured a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to support a package of reforms.

The fear is that if runaway population growth continues, the aid will be spread too thin. The economic reforms, including a float of the local currency and the slashing of fuel subsidies, have caused the price of many local goods to soar in recent months. The further erosion of subsidies could heighten the risk of social unrest.

The challenge was laid bare in a recent visit by census workers to Giza, a packed Cairo district that sprawls from the west bank of the Nile to the Pyramids.

There they went alley by alley through one of Cairo’s many informal neighborhoods, unplanned communities where most of the city’s some 20 million residents live, and where distrust of authorities runs deep.

“We say to every family, workshop, business, or factory owner, please cooperate with us by giving correct information, so we can make decisions that are in their best interest,” said Yasser Hussein, the coordinator for the census in Giza.

The census workers don’t ask about income, instead using other tactics to determine a family’s economic status. At one home, a census taker asked whether the family owned an air conditioner, a microwave, or a car. They had none of these, only a ceiling fan.

There was no detective work needed to discern a population boom.

Egyptians are known for having large families, a legacy of the country’s not so distant agrarian past. Especially in rural areas, children are seen as providing vital labor and an insurance policy for old age. Couples with daughters will often continue trying for a boy, due to a cultural preference for sons and their greater earning potential.

Egypt’s population has tripled since 1960, with the annual growth rate peaking in 1987 at nearly 2.8 percent, creating a youth bulge that the country has struggled to come to terms with. Family planning efforts under Mubarak brought the growth rate down to less than 2 percent, according to World Bank figures, but it has since rebounded to 2.5.

Sayed says the government succeeded in lowering the average birth rate from seven children per woman in the 1960s to three in the 1990s. But as of 2005, the number began to climb, according to Sayed, who blames the backsliding on a general “deterioration” in national family planning services.

One family in the Cairo neighborhood of Madinat al-Salaam more than doubled in size overnight.

Sarah Hassan and her husband Youssef Shaaban had their first child, a girl, not long after they were married.

Shaaban, a construction day laborer, said they started trying for a boy two years later. To the disbelief of a string of doctors, Hassan, who did not receive fertility treatment, became pregnant with quintuplets.

Now, they are a family of eight, with three girls and three boys, of whom five are under the age of five. 

“The most difficult thing is to buy just food. How can I get enough food for eight people?” Shaaban said. “Not to mention clothes, or a doctor’s fee if someone gets sick.”
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Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme – including the “grill,” in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Senior American defense officials acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses.  Interrogating detainees who have been abused could violate international law, which prohibits complicity in torture.

The AP documented at least 18 clandestine lockups across southern Yemen run by the United Arab Emirates or by Yemeni forces created and trained by the Gulf nation, drawing on accounts from former detainees, families of prisoners, civil rights lawyers and Yemeni military officials. All are either hidden or off limits to Yemen’s government, which has been getting Emirati help in its civil war with rebels over the last two years.

The secret prisons are inside military bases, ports, an airport, private villas and even a nightclub. Some detainees have been flown to an Emirati base across the Red Sea in Eritrea, according to Yemen Interior Minister Hussein Arab and others.

Several U.S. defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the topic, told AP that American forces do participate in interrogations of detainees at locations in Yemen, provide questions for others to ask, and receive transcripts of interrogations from Emirati allies. They said U.S. senior military leaders were aware of allegations of torture at the prisons in Yemen, looked into them, but were satisfied that there had not been any abuse when U.S. forces were present.

“We always adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct,” said chief Defense Department spokeswoman Dana White when presented with AP’s findings. “We would not turn a blind eye, because we are obligated to report any violations of human rights.”

In a statement to the AP, the UAE’s government denied the allegations.

“There are no secret detention centers and no torture of prisoners is done during interrogations.”

Inside war-torn Yemen, however, lawyers and families say nearly 2,000 men have disappeared into the clandestine prisons, a number so high that it has triggered near-weekly protests among families seeking information about missing sons, brothers and fathers.

None of the dozens of people interviewed by AP contended that American interrogators were involved in the actual abuses. Nevertheless, obtaining intelligence that may have been extracted by torture inflicted by another party would violate the International Convention Against Torture and could qualify as war crimes, said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who served as special counsel to the Defense Department until last year

At one main detention complex at Riyan airport in the southern city of Mukalla, former inmates described being crammed into shipping containers smeared with feces and blindfolded for weeks on end. They said they were beaten, trussed up on the “grill,” and sexually assaulted. According to a member of the Hadramawt Elite, a Yemeni security force set up by the UAE, American forces were at times only yards away. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

“We could hear the screams,” said a former detainee held for six months at Riyan airport. “The entire place is gripped by fear. Almost everyone is sick, the rest are near death. Anyone who complains heads directly to the torture chamber.” He was flogged with wires, part of the frequent beatings inflicted by guards against all the detainees. He also said he was inside a metal shipping container when the guards lit a fire underneath to fill it with smoke.

Like other ex-detainees, he spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being arrested again. The AP interviewed him in person in Yemen after his release from detention.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has praised the UAE as “Little Sparta” for its outsized role in fighting against al-Qaida.

U.S. forces send questions to the Emirati forces holding the detainees, which then send files and videos with answers, said Yemeni Brig. Gen. Farag Salem al-Bahsani, commander of the Mukalla-based 2nd Military District, which American officials confirmed to the AP. He also said the United States handed authorities a list of most wanted men, including many who were later arrested.

Al-Bahsani denied detainees were handed over to the Americans and said reports of torture are “exaggerated.”

The network of prisons echoes the secret detention facilities set up by the CIA to interrogate terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In 2009, then-President Barack Obama disbanded the so-called “black sites.” The UAE network in war-torn Yemen was set up during the Obama administration and continues operating to this day.

“The UAE was one of the countries involved in the CIA’s torture and rendition program,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at NYU, who served as special counsel to the Defense Department until last year. “These reports are hauntingly familiar and potentially devastating in their legal and policy implications.”

The UAE is part of a Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition meant to help Yemen’s government fight Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who overran the north of the country. At the same time, the coalition is helping the U.S. target al-Qaida’s local branch, one of the most dangerous in the world, as well as Islamic State militants.

That is not what the families and lawyers in Yemen say. More than 400 men have vanished after being arrested in Mukalla. In Aden, an estimated 1,500 have been detained, according to rights lawyers, who believe most are still in custody.

The AP interviewed 10 former prisoners, as well as a dozen officials in the Yemeni government, military and security services and nearly 20 relatives of detainees. The chief of Riyan prison, who is well known among families and lawyers as Emirati, did not reply to requests for comment.

A small contingent of American forces routinely moves in and out of Yemen, the Pentagon says, operating largely along the southern coast. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has escalated drone strikes in the country to more than 80 so far this year, up from around 21 in 2016, the U.S. military said. At least two commando raids were ordered against al-Qaida, including one in which a Navy SEAL was killed along with at least 25 civilians.

A U.S. role in questioning detainees in Yemen has not been previously acknowledged.

A Yemeni officer who said he was deployed for a time on a ship off the coast said he saw at least two detainees brought to the vessel for questioning. The detainees were taken below deck, where he was told American “polygraph experts” and “psychological experts” conducted interrogations. He did not have access to the lower decks. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation for discussing the operations.

Senior U.S. defense officials flatly denied the military conducts any interrogations of Yemenis on any ships.

“We have no comment on these specific claims,” said Jonathan Liu, a CIA spokesman, adding that any allegations of abuse are taken seriously.

The Yemeni officer did not specify if the ‘Americans on ships’ were U.S. military or intelligence personnel, private contractors, or some other group.

Two senior Yemen officials, one in Hadi’s Interior Ministry and another in the 1st Military District, based in Hadramawt province where Mukalla is located, also said Americans were conducting interrogations at sea, as did a former senior security official in Hadramawt. The three spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the U.S. role.

Former detainees and one Yemen official provided the AP with the names of five suspects held at black sites who were interrogated by Americans.

One detainee, who was not questioned by U.S. personnel, said he was subject to constant beatings by his Yemeni handlers but was interrogated only once.

“I would die and go to hell rather than go back to this prison,” he said.  “They wouldn’t treat animals this way. If it was bin Laden, they wouldn’t do this.”
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