Word: hong
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...luggage and shipping crates. The rewards far outweigh the risks. The owner of a truck carrying $2 million worth of illicit tusks and rhino horns was fined a mere $2,613 by Botswa officials last year. His cargo was said to be bound for a South African firm with Hong Kong connections. Despite crackdowns, the poachers are undaunted. Just two weeks ago, in a predawn raid on a farm, Namibian officials seized 980 tusks...
...trade could not continue on such a scale without the collusion of African officials. "So many of Africa's functionaries are corrupt," says K.T. Wang, one of Hong Kong's major ivory traders. "If they get money, they say it's legal ivory. If they don't get money, they say it's poached." Over the years, senior African officials, their spouses and close friends, and wildlife authorities have been implicated in ivory scandals...
...Hong Kong has long been the crossroads of the ivory trade. Government figures show 675 tons of ivory stockpiled in scores of factories and about 300 shops. Ten families or syndicates account for three-quarters of the ivory Hong Kong imports each year. One of those is headed by Poon Tat Hing, whose ivory network has extended from Africa to Dubai and Singapore, and into Japan. His shop, Tat Hing Ivory, displays 6-ft.-tall ivory figures that sell for $15,000 and up. When asked where the ivory comes from, salesmen simply say "Africa." The Lai family...
...Wang, 66, a businessman with silver hair and impeccable manners, is the dean of Hong Kong's ivory trade. He has never been to Africa, and the only elephant he has seen was in the Paris zoo. Yet he is a major conduit for ivory entering both Hong Kong and Japan. In February he helped Tokyo's largest trader, Koichiro Kitagawa, purchase nearly five tons of Sudanese ivory for $1 million from another Hong Kong dealer. In 1987 he engineered the purchase of 26 tons of Congo ivory by the Osaka trader Kageo Takaichi. The $3.5 million shipment contained...
...years, ivory of questionable origin flowed into Hong Kong. Until mid- 1988, the importation of carved ivory was largely unregulated, and so tusks lacking documentation were diverted through the Middle East and elsewhere, where they were lightly carved so they could enter Hong Kong as legal ivory. Last June, as nations moved to ban ivory imports, Hong Kong set up a special customs task force aimed at smugglers, as well as a 24-hour hot line. It has closed its borders to ivory imports for the time being...