Word: lao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kerry and Kay Danes' small world is defined by heat and separation. At seven o'clock in the morning, guards rouse them from their stifling communal cells and lead them and their fellow inmates into the dusty exercise yard of a Lao prison. Forbidden to speak to each other, the Danes communicate in stolen glances and occasional whispered words. This is not the way their new life was supposed to work out. Moving from Australia to Vientiane with their three young children, aged seven to 15, was to be an exotic adventure in a city of decaying French colonial mansions...
...idyll ended abruptly last Dec. 23, the day Lao secret police entered Kerry's office and arrested him. A half hour later, as his wife attempted to walk into Thailand across the Friendship Bridge with her savings of about $50,000 stashed in her dirty laundry, Kay was taken into custody, while two of her children stood helplessly by. The family had become a casualty in a war they didn't even know they were fighting...
...When Hong Kong-based Jardine Securicor hired Kerry to run its subsidiary, Lao Securicor, the company's client list included the Settha Palace Hotel, the Australian embassy and a sapphire-mining company that, despite the appearance of its dirty, three-story office building on Sihom Street in Vientiane, seemed on the verge of success. Gem Mining Lao held sapphire mining concessions, estimated to be worth $100 million, in Bokeo province, a region of dense forest, green rice paddies and rusty tin shacks where farmers were known to find sapphires and rubies in the red earth after heavy rains...
...initially it wasn't the government that caused Gem Mining Lao's problems. A falling out between Jeppesen and his investors in late 1999?he claimed they were bilking him out of his rightful share of the company, they alleged he was ripping off the best sapphires?resulted in the competing factions battling for support from the Lao government. It was a fight Jeppesen and Bruns ultimately lost. One insider says: "Bernie paid the wrong people off." The pair fled in late May 2000, leaving behind unpaid bills, few friends and a letter appointing Kerry Danes "to handle...
...then it was too late. To Lao officials, Kerry and Kay Danes and Gem Mining Lao were one and the same. With Jeppesen and Bruns out of reach, the government arrested the only corporate representatives left in Laos, the Danes. Held for more than six months before they were charged, the couple was finally accused of embezzling and selling sapphires. Prosecutors at the one-day trial provided little evidence to support the claims, and the verdict was typed before the trial even started. The case has provoked outrage in Australia and, though negotiations continue, calls are growing...