🇲🇾 And Rosmah goes down

Hello friends!

I’ve been in Brisbane for the last few days. Much, MUCH bigger than I remember it being. And I’m loving spotting Queenslanders in beanies and puffer jackets as soon as the temperature drops to a frigid 17 degrees. They’d never survive Canberra!

While I’ve spent a lot of time walking up and down hills, I have been following on with a couple of key stories that I knew would be popping up over the end of last week and this weekend. So catch up on Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines with me. 

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Thanks!Erin Cook

🇲🇾 10 Years for Rosmah

Rosmah Mansor, former first lady of Malaysia and wife of Najib Razak, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for receiving bribes. She took RM187 million (US$41 million) in bribes from businessman Saidi Abang Samsudin for her help in greasing the wheels on an enormous project to get solar panels and diesel generators into rural schools in Sarawak. It doesn’t get much more revolting than stealing from children who hardly have enough opportunity as it is. 

She’s taken it about exactly as you’d expect. “I appeal to you to have some compassion, be human about it. I am a victim,” she said in court, adding that since Najib went to prison (like, a few days ago) she’s the ‘man of the house,’ as per VICE. “It can happen to me now, it can happen to your children and grandchildren.” I’d argue that it’s far more likely that your children or grandchildren had money stolen from them by these two than they’d go to prison, but Rosmah has always had a flair for drama. 

She’s also been hit with an RM970 million fine — which Malaysiakini describes as a record! — and the promise that she’ll go back to prison for another 30 years if she doesn’t pay up. 

🇲🇲 Locked Up in Myanmar

Vicky Bowman, Britain’s former ambassador to Myanmar turned advocate for businesses in Myanmar, was jailed Friday for a year alongside her Burmese husband Htein Lin. He is a famous artist in the country and a former political prisoner, so quite high profile in his own right. Junta authorities say she violated her visa arrangement by staying at a different location and Htein Lin had illegally assisted her in doing so. Britain's foreign service is keeping an understandable tight lip on this one, but there are some reports (or hopes, maybe?) that rather than spend 12 months in prison the family, including their teenage daughter, will be deported to the UK. 

The move is “ironic,” say some of the business community who spoke with Gwen Robinson and Thompson Chau at Nikkei Asia. Bowman has maintained that foreign business should stay in the country — one of the few voices still doing so. “More than anything, the fact that a business advocate who was actually trying to help the economy could be arrested like this has totally alarmed the business community. We will see many more departures from now on,” one businessperson said. 

Elsewhere but on the same day, Aung San Suu Kyi had an additional three years stuck on to her seemingly ever-climbing sentence. This one relates to election fraud and takes her up to 20 years and, as BBC notes, there are still more charges to come. All up she could be given 200 years. "The relentless legal assault on Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the better-known examples of how the military has weaponised the courts to bring politically motivated or farcical charges against opponents, critics and protesters," an Amnesty International spokesperson told BBC. 

🇵🇭 While Bongbong Help Mary Jane Home?

Philippine President Bongbong Marcos has hit the road for the first official visit. He’s heading to Indonesia and Singapore and if you’re quietly intrigued he looked regional rather than to Beijing or Washington, you’re not alone. During the campaign, Marcos said he would “stand firm in our independent foreign policy” and this may be what it looks like. I’m not going to get too excited but after six years of heightened rhetoric around the Philippines’ relationships with both China and the US, it’s a relief.

As always, meeting with Overseas Filipino Workers is high up on the agenda, but what I’m keeping a watch on is if we see any movement for Mary Jane Veloso. Veloso, you may remember, is a Filipina domestic worker sitting on death row for a complicated drug trafficking charge. She has long maintained she was tricked or coerced into smuggling 2.6 kilograms of heroin into Indonesia in 2010. She was set to be executed in 2015 but was given a stay (very rare under that period of President Joko Widodo) thanks to the intervention of Filipino authorities.

She’s remained in jail since and her case occasionally pops up in the relationship. But this is an unusual time. It’s Marcos Jr’s first state visit to meet with President Jokowi — who seems to have gotten over his initial bout of being heavily pro-execution. Maybe the dust has fallen enough, 12 years on? Let’s see what the DFA can do. 

“President Marcos Jr. should exhaust all means to urgently free Mary Jane Veloso, a fellow Filipina whom the Philippine government has repeatedly failed in many regards — from being unable to provide decent job opportunities here in the country which forced her into the diaspora, to failing to bring her home to her family after she was victimised by illegal recruiters,” Gabriela secretary general Clarice Palce said in a statement, as per CNN Philippines.

That’s a familiar story for Indonesia too. The more both countries work together to ensure migrant workers aren’t exploited, abused or mistreated the better for millions of Indonesians and Filipinos the world over.