Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kickback: 20%. The trouble can be traced to the days in 1955 when Communist armies of the Viet Minh hovered on Laos' borders after the French debacle at Dienbienphu. With the French withdrawing financial support, the urgent necessity was to keep the 25,000-man Laotian army in the field. In a hastily drawn agreement, the U.S. committed itself to exchange dollars for Laotian kip at the rate...
...steadily broadened its aid program, the free rate has soared as high as 120 kip for $1 in the markets of Vientiane, Bangkok and Hong Kong. The disparity between official and free-exchange rates has become an open invitation to speculators. The system works this way: a Laotian importer wants to bring in 20 radios at a unit cost of $50 each. He gets an import license for $1,000 worth of radios from the Laotian government. He pays for it with $1,000 in Laotian kip, which he has already bought on the free market in Bangkok or Hong...
...Laos (marked with the universally recognized symbol of clasped hands in front of a U.S. flag). But before Laos' primitive customs guards can catch up and impose an import tax, the radios are smuggled back across the Mekong River and shipped into Bangkok for sale at handsome profits. Laotian officials, either out of confusion or collusion, have granted orders for some items that seem of questionable utility in a country that is still largely jungle. Recently, licenses were granted for 25 television receivers, though Laos has no TV station. The receivers were smuggled back into Thailand and resold...
...Phouma has shown itself increasingly aware of the extent to which both corruption and the artificial exchange rate are damaging both Laos and the U.S. attempts to aid it. Last week U.S. Ambassador J. Graham Parsons flew back from Washington to his post in Vientiane to sit down with Laotian officials and work out plans for 1) establishing a realistic rate of exchange, and 2) helping Laos get a larger real share of the benefits it is entitled...
When the Japanese set up the independent kingdom of Laos on the eve of their departure in 1945, an autocratic and petulant prince named Phetsarath decided he was tired of his viceregal yellow umbrella, deposed his uncle King Sisavang Vong, and named himself head of a short-lived Laotian republic. For a brief time nobody had any umbrellas...