US announces travel ban on former president, parliamentarian
BY Giff JOHNSON Marshall Islands Correspondent
MAJURO, Marshall Islands — A scheme by Chinese nationals with Marshallese citizenship to establish an investor haven on a nuclear test-affected atoll in the Marshall Islands — which nearly took down an elected government in 2018 —continues to reverberate in the Marshalls.
Mike Halferty, left with Kessai Note during a January parliament session. Photo by Hilary Hosia.
In mid-December, the United States issued a travel ban against two members of the Marshall Islands parliament for corruption it says involved bribe-taking. This is the first-time elected leaders in this U.S.-aligned nation have been publicly sanctioned by the U.S. government.
To commemorate International Anti-Corruption Day on Dec. 11, the U.S. State Department announced travel bans on more than two dozen of individuals in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Pacific it said were involved in corrupt practices. These included former Marshall Islands president Kessai Note and multi-term member of parliament Michael J. Halferty. Note was most recently the minister for Transportation in the government of David Kabua. He was reelected for his 12th term in the November national elections, making him the longest serving member of parliament. The U.S. travel ban was due to the pair’s “involvement in significant corruption,” the state department said in a release about the travel ban.
The state department said its travel sanction against Note and Halferty was for taking bribes in a scheme involving two Chinese-born scammers, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou, to further a plan to create “a semi-autonomous region in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.” Yan and Zhou were at the center of a major investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project that was published in October detailing their attempt to establish the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region in the Marshall Islands, activities at the United Nations and in other countries.
Yan and Zhou pleaded guilty to one count each of bribery and were sentenced earlier this year, largely to time already served while awaiting trial in the U.S. Zhou was deported to Majuro in April and Yan, currently in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, is expected to be deported next month.
The Department of Justice said Yan “played a long game,” in its sentencing to a New York court.
“He acquired an unaffiliated NGO in order to position himself to bribe numerous RMI officials. When those initial bribes failed to accomplish Yan’s goal of establishing the [Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region,], he sought to boot the RMI’s then-president from office. And although that attempt failed, when there was a change in administrations, Yan worked with the officials he had bribed to try again.”
The U.S. government’s action in red flagging Note and Halferty was questioned by commentators Cleo Paskal and Grant Newsham writing in The Sunday Guardian in late December. “Going after corruption is essential, but if the U.S. government really wanted to help, why didn’t it not deport back to the Marshalls — and especially not without case files to prosecute them — the two who tried to undermine democracy in one of the U.S.’s closest allies?” they asked.
The state department noted that the travel ban may extend to family members. “Section 7031(c) provides that in cases where there is credible information that officials of foreign governments have been involved in significant corruption or a gross violation of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are generally ineligible for entry into the United States and must be either publicly or privately designated,” the State Department’s release said.
In response to an inquiry, Note said, “The whole thing is predicated on false accusations. No further comments.”
Note and Halferty were designated alongside 28 other foreign nationals for accepting “bribes in the form of services and cash, in exchange for their legislative support of a bill in the RMI legislature to create a semi-autonomous region in the RMI,” the statement said, adding, “The United States is publicly designating Note and Halferty, for their involvement in significant corruption by accepting articles of monetary value and other benefits in exchange for acts in the performance of their public functions.”
The RASAR plan sparked fears that it could fracture the Marshall Islands, a country in “free association” with the United States. There were also concerns the plan could provide China with a foothold near a sensitive U.S. military facility.
The main advocates of the project — Yan and Zhou —were convicted in New York earlier this year for a conspiracy to bribe Marshall Islands officials to support the scheme. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s investigation, published in October, however, revealed that Yan and Zhou’s plan was just one part of a series of globe-spanning frauds by the pair, which started as a pyramid scheme to sell a miracle water cure and ended up with them gaining top-level access to senior officials of the United Nations in New York. mbj
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