Thousand of people trying to enter Ba Chua Kho temple.

Every year, thousands of pilgrims flock to the Ba Chua Kho (Treasure Goddess) Temple in the northern province of Bac Ninh during the spring season in the belief that the deity will bless them with prosperity in the coming year.

But the popularity of the festival also attracts many vendors as well as thieves who, in an ironic twist, rob the pilgrims of their money and valuables right at the temple where they come to pray for more wealth.

A report in the Dan Tri news web site said that on Friday morning (February 3), tens of thousands of people flocked to the temple in Co Me village, Vu Ninh district to offer their Lunar New Year prayers.

The situation quickly turned chaotic, the paper reported, as people burned paper money and made other offerings, beggars disturbed the prayers and vendors at makeshift shops loudly proclaimed their wares.

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In debt to a deity

The situation was ripe for the picking, as far as thieves are concerned and they stole mobile phones and money from the pilgrims.

The web site cited local authorities as saying that just on the morning of February 3, at least 10 visitors had their money, mobile phones and even a motorbike stolen.

So many times when the big credit- rating companies have embarrassed themselves, the world has sighed and chalked it up to a business model that by design invites corruption and incompetence. Perhaps never before have the public’s expectations for the industry been lower.

The fundamental flaw is that the major rating companies, led by Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, typically are paid by the issuers of the securities they rate, or by other deeply interested parties, such as Wall Street underwriters. Too often the raters seem to be the last to know that a company they dubbed investment grade was going broke, or that a mortgage bond once deemed AAA was about to default. The public sees these things and naturally draws a link between what the raters say and how they are compensated.

Although the government can’t make the credit raters more capable, it can make them more transparent. Here’s a good place to begin: Start requiring disclosures of how much the raters’ clients pay them for their services.

Consider some of the boilerplate in Moody’s reports on MF Global Holdings Ltd., whose credit ratings were the subject of a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Moody’s Oct. 27 report — in which it downgraded MF Global to junk, only four days before the futures broker filed for bankruptcy — said most issuers of debt securities pay “fees ranging from $1,500 to approximately $2,500,000” for “appraisal and rating services.”

It’s anyone’s guess whether the fees MF Global paid to Moody’s fell within or outside this range. The companies know how much money changed hands. They’re just not telling us.

Useless disclosures

The disclosures in Standard & Poor’s reports are just as useless. The company’s Oct. 26 report on MF Global said “S&P may receive compensation for its ratings and certain credit- related analyses, normally from issuers or underwriters of securities or from obligors.” Coincidence or not, S&P maintained an investment-grade mark on MF Global until the day it failed.

There’s no such secrecy about the fees other types of opinion vendors charge their clients. For more than a decade, U.S. public companies have been required to disclose the annual fees they pay their outside auditors. Similarly, when companies hire stock promoters or other firms to publish research reports profiling their shares, federal securities laws require disclosures in the reports showing who paid for them, as well as the amount and form of compensation.

The auditor-fee disclosures have been useful. Fannie Mae’s proxy statement for 2003, for instance, showed the housing financier paid KPMG $2.7 million to audit its books that year. The fee was so tiny, for a company with $1 trillion of assets, that it served as a red flag for investors, signaling that KPMG’s audit quality couldn’t have been all that robust. The next year Fannie Mae had a huge accounting scandal.

At the other extreme, in its first annual report as a public company, Blackstone Group LP said it paid its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, total fees of $159.1 million for 2007, mostly for non-audit work. The fees were so huge — Blackstone’s total assets were $13.2 billion at the time — it would be reasonable for investors to wonder what influence they might have had on Deloitte’s judgment.

The parallels for credit-rating companies are obvious. Like auditors and stock promoters, they’re paid to express opinions to investors. Whatever their fees are, the public should be told. The credit raters would have us believe there’s nothing wrong with collecting cash from the same customers whose securities they grade, and that this doesn’t cloud their independence or objectivity. If that’s true, they should have no problem with us knowing the actual dollar amounts.

Different path

Unfortunately this isn’t the path the government has chosen. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, included 19 pages of new provisions governing how credit-rating companies operate. Numerous federal banking and securities laws were amended to remove statutory references to credit ratings, for instance, so that regulators would reduce their reliance on them. Dodd-Frank didn’t mandate disclosure of the raters’ fees, however.

A rule proposed last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission would require companies such as Moody’s and S&P to disclose in a form accompanying each credit rating whether the grade was paid for by the issuer, underwriter or sponsor of the security being rated — or if it was purchased by someone else, such as an investor. The rating company would also have to disclose if the purchaser had paid it for any other services, such as consulting or advisory work. Most important, though, no dollar amounts would have to be divulged.

This is a mistake. A big reason that the public doesn’t trust credit ratings is because of the money that changes hands. What matters most, obviously, is how much. It makes little difference whether the amounts are disclosed by the rating company or by the issuer of the securities as part of its own disclosures, as long as it’s made public somewhere.

The most dubious penny-stock promoters have to disclose what they get paid for their opinions. Credit raters can at least be held to the same standards.

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Banks in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam are among the “most exposed” in the Asia-Pacific region to a sudden worsening of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, Moody’s Investors Service said.

The Australian, New Zealand and Korean banking systems’ dependence on foreign funding puts them at risk of increased costs in the event of wholesale market stress, Stephen Long, a managing director at Moody’s financial institutions group, said in a statement. Vietnam’s weak financial system and dependence on cheap dollar loans subjects its banks to tightening foreign- currency liquidity.

These banking systems are “more vulnerable to the first- round impact of a further worsening of the euro area crisis than other systems in Asia Pacific,” Long wrote after Moody’s released a report the topic. “Our base case is that the resilience of banks in Asia Pacific will generally persist. However, the risks to that scenario have increased, warranting a closer examination of how banks could be affected under more adverse scenarios.”

Australian and New Zealand lenders’ proportion of total external funding stands at 19 percent and 16 percent respectively, New York-based Moody’s said. Korea’s banking system has a foreign currency-to-deposit ratio of 328 percent and relies on external markets for 9 percent of its funding, the report said.

Vietnam ’s telecom giants Viettel and VNPT both have ambitious plans for 2012, targeting overseas expansion because the domestic market is no longer big enough, the Dau Tu (Investment) newspaper reported Wednesday.

Vietnam’s market is large, but it’s now like a shirt that is already too tight, said Nguyen Manh Hung, deputy CEO of the military-run Viettel.

The company needs a larger customer base so that it can invest more in new technologies and production, he told Dau Tu.

“Some say it’s necessary to have the technology, money and human resources, but for Viettel, a market is what’s needed first and foremost. Here we are talking about a market with six billion people, not just the Vietnamese market of 86 million,” Hung said.

The company, which has established a presence in Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, Mozambique and Peru, plans to expand to three or four new markets this year, aiming to double its phone subscribers overseas to 200 million. It is outlining a plan to invest US$270 million in Mali, a West African country, Dau Tu reported, citing an unidentified source.

Viettel is targeting a total customer base of 600 million by 2015, including 500 million subscribers in foreign markets.

It posted pre-tax profits of nearly $1 billion last year.

State-owned Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group, often known as VNPT, said it will also expand overseas but in a “cautious” manner.

Its overseas investment arm, VNPT Global, is now operating in the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Czech Republic. The unit is expected to be transferred to MobiFone, VNPT’s top earner.

MobiFone officials said that under the current economic conditions, it’s not easy to expand. However, future plans have to focus a lot on overseas markets, because they cannot stop with the domestic market, they said.

Japanese conductor Tetsuji Honna and the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra perform at a concert in Hanoi last year

A dearth of good teachers and learning materials in the Vietnamese language are stumbling blocks in the development of classical music in the country, says Tetsuji Honna, the Japanese conductor of the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra, who has been honored by the governments of Japan and Vietnam for his contributions to cultural exchanges between the two countries. Honna has been working in Vietnam for the last 11 years.

Vietweek: What brought you to Vietnam?

Tetsuji Honna: I came to Vietnam under the Toyota classic concert program in the autumn of 2000. It is a big concert tour of eight Asian countries, including Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. In Hanoi, I had a big concert with Vietnamese soloist Ngo Hoang Quan (now director of the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra), and he requested my help. Then we started to work together.

You have been here for 11 years now. What are the differences you see in Vietnam compared to Japan and other countries?

A long time ago, life in Vietnam and some other countries in the world were similar. Mornings are now very noisy, but very alive, very active. I like the feel of Vietnam, still a lot of nature, even in the capital. In the streets, there are many motorbikes, but I like this. Everything is changing slowly, but it’s a better change. I hope Vietnam continues to keep this kind of feeling.

What has impressed you most in Vietnam?

Family and co-workers of slain journalist reject police conclusions, saying there are too many loose ends in the case

Nguyen Thi Kim Nga, 75, the mother of murdered journalist Le Hoang Hung, is afraid she might die before the case gets to trial with police apparently ignoring several leads and drawing conclusions not accepted by the family of the victim. Photo: Hien Dong.

When 75-year-old Nguyen Thi Kim Nga was asked to go to the local police station investigating her journalist son’s gruesome murder for the first time, nearly a year had passed.

“They called me and questioned me about whether and why I lodged a complaint to the central agencies, rather than focus on my son’s death,” she told Vietweek last Monday (January 30) at her house in Long An Province’s Thu Thua District.

Nga’s son Le Hoang Hung, a journalist with the Nguoi Lao Dong (Laborer) newspaper, was set on fire while he was sleeping in his bed on the night of January 19, 2011. He died 11 days later.

The investigation by the police into his death has been dogged by controversy from the very beginning, frustrating Hung’s family and prompting Nga to file complaints with the offices of President Truong Tan Sang, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and judiciary leaders.

“I lodged the complaint because there has been no trial so many months after my son’s death,” she said.

“Also, I think my daughter-in-law would never be able to kill my son [without help]. I want investigators to find her possible accomplice[s] who instigated the murder.”

In July 2011, police wrapped up their initial investigation, concluding that Hung’s 42-year-old wife, Tran Thuy Lieu was the only culprit in her husband’s murder. They said Hung had become aware of an extramarital affair taking place between his wife and Nguyen Van Tam, a former official at the Long An Market Management Agency – a governmental office in charge of detecting trade violations.

Nga spoke of her vexation at the sluggish progress in her son’s case and questioned the methods being employed by investigators.

When they called her to the police station, the investigators did not allow her son, Le Hoang Minh, or her licensed lawyer Nguyen Van Duc, to sit in, saying they only wanted to interview Nga.

In response to Nga’s formal complaint, the Long An People’s Court has ordered a fresh probe into the murder of the investigative journalist, which relatives and colleagues have always insisted could not have been perpetrated by Hung’s wife without significant help from other person[s].

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On Monday, Cao Minh Tri, a spokesman for Long An prosecutors’ office told Vietweek that the provincial people’s court had asked the police to conduct an additional probe into Hung’s case.

“The police had recorded Hung’s testimony when he was in the hospital but it was not included in the file,” he said.

“Police would also have to clarify calls and text messages between Lieu and Tam before and after Hung was set on fire.”

The court has requested Lieu’s confession to examine potential contradictions.

“Lieu confessed to the killing, saying she wanted to sell the family house but Hung refused,” Tri explained. He said arson was an odd choice, considering it “could have destroyed the house and she would not be able to sell the property then.”

Loose ends

On January 19, 2011, Hung was set on fire at around 1 a.m. while he was asleep in his bed at his house in Dai Duong Residential Area – a new and sparsely populated area in Long An’s Tan An Town in the Mekong Delta.

He died 11 days later from severe burns he had sustained on 60 percent of his body.

The case grabbed headlines both locally and abroad. Hung had covered several corruption cases in the Mekong Delta as a local correspondent of the Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper in Long An, Tien Giang and Ben Tre provinces.

A month after his death, Lieu turned herself in to the police, saying that she had killed Hung because he beat her and accused her of having an affair and that he had refused to sell their house to cover her debts. She said she bought two liters of gasoline in a plastic bag, tied a rope on the balcony to make it seem someone had come into the house from outside, and set her husband on fire on her own.

The confession drew more questions from his family and the public, who suspected there were more people involved. They argued that a wife would never kill her husband with the causes listed so far as motivation.

The latest demand for additional investigation was made after almost a year of transferring the case forward and back among judicial agencies.

An important aspect of the case, which seems to have been insufficiently examined by authorities, is the alleged relationship between Lieu and Tam, the former market watchdog official. Tam was sacked from his post in August for gambling and having an affair with Lieu.

Police said Lieu had accompanied Tam to Cambodian casinos several times, crossing the border illegally.

The provincial prosecutors’ office has rejected the conclusions of the initial investigation and has asked that police scrutinize several details, including Tam’s lack of an alibi and Lieu’s motivation for murder and the contradictions in her confession.

In September 2011, the prosecutors’ office ratified murder charges against Lieu and transferred the case to the Long An People’s Court.

Unlikely

Hung’s younger brother, Le Hoang Thanh echoed his mother when he said he does not believe Lieu had acted alone.

“We have known each other for years. She would not dare to kill a chicken or a duck, how is it that she can kill a human being?” said the 43-year-old daily laborer.

Nga’s attorney, Nguyen Van Duc, said that the new probe was a good sign. However, he did not comment on the possibility of other suspects, saying he was waiting for the results of the new investigation.

Meanwhile, editor-in-chief Do Danh Phuong of Nguoi Lao Dong said that he and other people at the newspaper knew Lieu was involved but was not the only one “soon after we visited Hung at the hospital.”

“Logically, a wife may set her husband on fire due to a sudden conflict. There was no sudden conflict in this case,” he told the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper in a recent interview.

“Hung was a good reporter and was covering various fields, including corruption. It is too simple to conclude that this was a case of a wife killing her husband,” he said.

“Before, during and after Hung’s funeral, Tam and Lieu exchanged a number of phone calls, text messages and hand-written letters. Why didn’t investigators clarify this issue?” he said.

Le Hoang Tuan, Hung’s younger brother, also visited him at the hospital and asked him who he thought it was who set him ablaze. Hung refused to say, changing the subject quickly.

On January 20, Nguoi Lao Dong received a document from the governmental office notifying that Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has instructed relevant agencies to clarify Hung’s case.

But Nga, Hung’s mother, said she had grown weary waiting for a trial.

 “I am old and may die any time. I am afraid that I will die before a trial opens and the actual culprits are convicted.”

Vietnam Airlines has slashed prices on flights to Europe and Northeast Asia by as much as 46 percent from now until March 31 , Thoi bao kinh te Saigon quoted the national carrier as saying Saturday.

According to the report, the round-trips fare from Ho Chi Minh City to London is now only US$699, down 46 percent from normal. A trip from HCMC to Moscow and back now costs $700, a 39 percent discount.

Meanwhile, customers can expect to pay $480 for a round-trip ticket from HCMC to Tokyo and $449 from HCMC to Seoul.

Quoted fares do not include taxes and surcharges, the report said.

Vietnam Airlines currently operates 25 flights per week from HCMC to Japan and 14 to South Korea. The national carrier also offers 25 flights to England, France and Germany each week, and seven to Russia.

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The Vietnam Gas Association is requesting the government to cut the import tax on cooking gas to 2 percent from 5 percent so that retail prices can be lowered.

If approved, the tax reduction will allow gas prices to be cut by at least VND7,000 per 12-kilogram cylinder, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Nguyen Si Thang, chairman of the association.

Local gas distributors have raised the price of a 12-kilogram cylinder by VND42,000 (US$2) this month, citing price hikes in global markets.

Apart from rural areas where coal and wood are still used for cooking, many households in Vietnam use LPG gas cylinders delivered to their homes by retailers.

The recent hike sparked strong criticism among consumers and advocacy groups as they suspected that gas companies had colluded to raise prices. The increase was the third in two months, bringing gas prices to up tp VND460,000 ($22) per 12-kilogram cylinder.

Thang has told Thanh Nien that there was nothing unusual with the hike. The increase was similar among all distributors simply because prices are calculated based on the same formula that the association has created for each region, he said.

However, Nguyen Mong Hung, chairman of a consumer protection group in Ho Chi Minh City, said the authorities need to look into the increase.

“It’s necessary to prevent any kind of collusion between gas companies,” he said, adding that the government should also set a limit on commissions that distributors are allowed to offer to their retail agents to stabilize prices.

An industry insider said gas retailers used to earn only VND30,000 per 12-kilogram cylinder, but now gas companies, in an attempt to boost sales, are letting their retailers earn commissions of up to VND60,000 per cyclinder.

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A South Korean woman is establishing herself as one of the best foreign students of the Vietnamese language by getting a thesis published and translating Vietnamese novels into Korean.

Choi Hana is expected to publish next year her master thesis on Vietnamese and South Korean cooperation via official development assistance. Her thesis received 9.9 marks out of 10, the Tuoi Tre newspaper said in a recent report.

The 100-page thesis was assessed by professor Nguyen Quang Ngoc, head of the Institute of Vietnamese Studies and Development Sciences at the Vietnam National University-Hanoi, as “a perfect Vietnamese thesis written by a foreigner.”

Ngoc said there were no typos and the thesis showed the author’s very high command over the Vietnamese language.

The 41-year-old Choi Hana, now back in South Korea, is also translating into Korean the novel “Trong suong hong hien ra” (Beyond the Red Mist) by famous contemporary writer Ho Anh Thai.

According to Hana, the novel is an excellent depiction of modern life in Vietnam. The book has been translated into different languages, including Swedish, and has captured the interest of writers and social researchers in many countries.

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“I’m translating the book since I want Korean readers to understand more about the social situation in modern Vietnam,” Hana told Tuoi Tre in fluent Vietnamese.

“I believe that Korean experts on Vietnam and Korean writers will be very interested.”

Last year, Hana translated Thai’s “Nguoi dan ba tren dao” (The Woman on the Island) and the translation has been well received by Korean readers, she said.

To gain her current mastery of the Vietnamese language, Hana has spent more than 20 years working hard, including weeks when she just stayed indoors and read Vietnamese theses written by Vietnamese professors.

Hana started learning Vietnamese when she was 19 years old. Her method was to read intensively and to practice writing as much as she could.

She recalled that during the first year of her master’s course in Vietnam, she could not write anything.

In the second year, she consulted many language professors and they gave her their books and theses to read.

After weeks of reading, she continuously wrote nearly 30 Vietnamese essays in nine months, before finishing her own thesis successfully.

Hana said she had to pay a price for her focus on studying the language.

She gained a lot of weight and when returning to South Korea, doctors asked her to stop using the computer, stop reading books and walk more.

But the woman is still studying Vietnamese history under a South Korean professor.

“I want to know about Vietnam so that I can be a bridge between the two countries, and just to simply contribute something to Vietnamese society,” she said.

Hana said she has many great memories with many friendly Vietnamese friends, and that she was lucky to start learning Vietnamese during the time the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1992.

The woman has traveled throughout Vietnam and knows every street and alley in Hanoi. She has been an interpreter for many Vietnamese delegations to Korea and vice versa.

During her time of study in Vietnam, Hana was dubbed “Voi Coi yeu quy”, which means “Dear Little Elephant,” by her Vietnamese friends. She uses the Vietnamese nickname as her email ID.

Police in Ho Chi Minh City’s Nha Be District pledged on Monday to investigate accusations made by a journalist that he was beaten by a group of traffic police officers on Sunday evening.

Pham Phuoc Vinh, 47, a reporter for Nha Bao & Cong Luan (Journalist & Public Opinion) newspaper, called Thanh Nien via its hotline Monday morning claiming that he had been assaulted by traffic cops in Phuoc Kien Commune.

According to Vinh, he was driving his motorbike with two of his daughters aboard around 9 p.m. when he was pulled over by a six-member traffic police team for “carrying more people on motorbike than allowed.”

Vinh said the squad was led by Sergeant-Major Le Phuong Tinh.

After Vinh pulled over, he asked his daughters to walk home. He then telephoned his wife, asking her to bring the registration certificate motorbike to the site.

The police officers ordered Vinh to bring his bike to the nearby headquarters of the Hamlet 5 People’s Committee. As the officers were writing a report on Vinh’s violation, Vinh noticed that some of them were not wearing their name badges, so he pulled out his mobile phone to take photos.

The officers then tried to seize the mobile phone from his hands. They struggled for a while until Vinh rushed out of the building, calling out for help from local residents. Vinh reportedly pulled his press card from his pocket and screamed: “I’m a reporter, please help me!”

The officers chased after him for 30 meters. After seeing them pull out a gun, Vinh stopped running and allowed himself to be apprehended.

The officers led him back to the office. After closing the gate, they deleted the photo he had taken with his mobile phone and handcuffed him.

Afterwards, Vinh alleges that the officers took turns beating him until he was no longer able to struggle.

Around 20 minutes later, they transported him in a police car to the Phuoc Kien Commune Police Station several kilometers away.

They ordered him to draft a confession, admitting that he had caused a public disorder. Vinh accepted, for fear of being beaten again.

He was released at 11 p.m. Sunday and was taken to hospital around 2 a.m., suffering from difficulty breathing and bruises all over his body.

On Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Lam Ngoc Thich, chief of the Phuoc Kiem Commune Police Department, told Thanh Nien reporters he had not received any report from the traffic officers  that night related to "causing a public disorder.”

He said police will investigate Vinh’s allegations.