Worldly, charming, and quietly equipping a brutal navy

Three years in the past, the Kyaw Thaung household partied on the Pegu Club. The venerable Burmese Irish clan had restored the teak-lined institution to its Nineteenth-century glory. The Pegu Club venture befitted the household’s East-meets-West positioning and the optimism of a rustic newly partaking with the world.
As Myanmar’s navy dictators ended many years of isolationism, the Kyaw Thaungs appeared to embody the proper combine: an august household with a protracted historical past of charitable giving that was dedicated to the type of enterprise reforms wanted to coax a corrupt, closed nation into the worldwide economic system. But the primary supply of the household fortune, purported vaguely to be from property and import-export firms, was hid behind a facade.
For all their efforts to distinguish themselves from the drug lords and enterprise cronies who dominated Myanmar’s economic system, the Kyaw Thaungs had been quietly equipping one of many world’s most brutal militaries. Their partnership with the Tatmadaw, because the Myanmar navy is thought, deepened at the same time as its generals dedicated ethnic cleaning towards Rohingya Muslims. And it continued into this 12 months, when the military staged a coup and seized full energy of the nation, killing greater than 1,300 civilians thus far, within the estimate of a monitoring group.
Jonathan Kyaw Thaung, the scion, was the general public face of the household. As he chased Tatmadaw contracts, he hobnobbed with the household of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the navy chief who orchestrated the coup. He met with the Myanmar air power commander on the 2015 Paris Air Show, the place the navy chief checked out Pakistani fighter jets that ended up within the Tatmadaw’s arsenal. A Kyaw Thaung household enterprise bid to assist provide the navy with spare elements for Russian assault helicopters which have been used to strafe civilian populations immune to the coup.

Even the renovation of the Pegu Club trusted a deal during which the Kyaw Thaungs needed to pay at the least $510,000 a 12 months to a navy conglomerate, the settlement for the membership reveals.
An investigation of the Kyaw Thaung household by The New York Times — primarily based on interviews with dozens of former firm workers, enterprise associates, navy insiders and members of the family, in addition to hundreds of pages of company filings, contracts, tenders and different monetary paperwork — exposes an unlimited net of navy procurement that was strategically hidden from the general public. The household, greatest identified for its charitable basis, was taking advantage of its shut ties to the Tatmadaw and serving to the navy keep away from scrutiny by Western governments.
At cocktail events and enterprise boards, the household talked up worldwide enterprise requirements, like rigorous governance, company social accountability and open tenders. Behind closed doorways, the Kyaw Thaungs, charismatic, Western-educated and English-speaking, relied on the type of insider deal-making with the Tatmadaw that has enriched a whole class of cronies in one among Asia’s poorest and most repressive nations.
Ultimately, the story of the Kyaw Thaungs parallels that of Myanmar: a rustic of huge potential foiled by a ruthless navy and the households keen to compromise themselves in pursuit of its riches.
A Thai soldier sits in entrance of a blocked street resulting in the Thailand-Myanmar border the place preventing between the Myanmar military and ethnic minority rebels nonetheless continues, December 19, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha/File)
The Kyaw Thaungs capitalized on their household ties to safe profitable contracts supplying the navy with European plane and a French coastal surveillance system. They bid for a deal to offer Italian weapons to the navy, based on a former firm worker and an e mail discussing the provide. A relative, a former common who served as each power minister and the chair of the nationwide funding fee, formally permitted offers that Kyaw Thaung firms made with military-linked companies or with the navy itself.
To obscure the actual font of their wealth, they arrange a tangle of firms in jurisdictions starting from the British Virgin Islands to Singapore. Some of those opened and closed with a single deal, and so they trusted possession constructions that at instances masked the involvement of members of the family.
Some of the household’s navy procurement was devised to evade Western export controls meant to forestall the Tatmadaw from strengthening its command, based on worldwide sanctions specialists and 5 former firm workers. The coastal radar expertise, for instance, may have run afoul of such guidelines; it was operational when Rohingya Muslims tried to flee a navy bloodbath that United Nations investigators say may represent genocide.
One of the household’s firms donated greater than $40,000 to the Tatmadaw for what the United Nations described as a cover-up of the location of ethnic cleaning. A 2019 U.N. report on the navy’s persecution of the Rohingya highlighted that contribution.
In interviews, Jonathan Kyaw Thaung, 39, denied impropriety, saying his relations with the navy had been not more than any enterprise working in Myanmar. He mentioned his family, his father included, didn’t provide navy tools to the Tatmadaw and mentioned different households had been the nation’s actual arms sellers.
Family Ties
The Kyaw Thaungs grew up as a part of a snug, well-connected set that was protected as Myanmar’s generals turned the nation inward.
The household’s preliminary fortune got here from jute, a pure fiber that’s used to make rope and cord. The jute mill was nationalized throughout the navy’s disastrous enterprise into socialism after its first coup in 1962.
Burma, as soon as lauded for its superb colleges and polyglot cosmopolitanism, sank into penury. The ruling junta renamed the nation Myanmar.
Jonathan Kyaw Thaung’s father, Moe Kyaw Thaung, was despatched to Northern Ireland, the place he escaped Myanmar’s privations. His siblings scattered to Thailand, Singapore, the United States and Britain. The household’s swish villa in Yangon moldered, as did the remainder of the nation.
But at the same time as lots of them headed overseas, the household remained related to Myanmar and traveled there to do enterprise. Their path again was eased by the prolonged household tree, which included high-ranking Tatmadaw officers, Cabinet ministers and confidants of junta chiefs.
A cousin married Zeyar Aung, an urbane, English-speaking common who led the Northern Command and the 88th Light Infantry Division, each of which the United Nations has tied to many years of conflict crimes towards Myanmar’s personal folks.
Myanmar’s patronage networks are a tangle of roots that bind household timber. Generals’ kids are likely to marry inside tight circles, maybe to different navy progeny or the offspring of enterprise cronies.
As the Tatmadaw started loosening management over the economic system, partaking in a fireplace sale of property that had as soon as been the navy’s fief, that elite class of the well-connected swooped in to revenue. Jonathan Kyaw Thaung returned to Myanmar, together with siblings and cousins who had additionally been raised abroad.
In September 2017, with the violence towards the Rohingya upsetting worldwide alarm, Ky-Tha, Moe Kyaw Thaung’s enterprise group, organized a gathering between a consultant of Safran, a Paris-based aviation and protection producer, and prime officers of the Myanmar air power, based on a leaked doc supplied by Justice For Myanmar, a watchdog group that investigates Tatmadaw enterprise dealings. The assembly centered on Tatmadaw helicopters, together with the Russian-made MI-17, a gunship deployed towards the Rohingya and different ethnic minorities.
Safran declined to remark. It is unclear whether or not the discussions led to a servicing deal. Jonathan Kyaw Thaung mentioned he had by no means heard of Safran.
Flying Under the Radar
The European-made helicopter appeared destined for the Myanmar oil and gasoline business.
But the $2.16 million helicopter on sale in Brazil was not meant for business functions, as a Kyaw Thaung contract indicated. It ended up with the Tatmadaw, the true recipient hidden behind falsified paperwork.
At one level, Myanmar’s Department of Civil Aviation wrote in a letter to Brazilian authorities that the plane could be used for “Tourism and Oil and Gas industry.” The letter was primarily based on drafts with handwritten annotations supplied by the KT Group, based on the overseas worker and copies reviewed by the Times.
A Tatmadaw officer was listed as a buyer on separate inner paperwork for the helicopter, which was reviewed by the Times.
A letter from MWG, a Kyaw Thaung aviation firm, requesting visas for six Brazilian crew members to enter Myanmar to ship the helicopter was addressed to not civil aviation authorities however to the commander in chief of Myanmar’s air power. The letter, which was additionally reviewed by the Times, specified that MWG could be handing over the Eurocopter to the air power.
When the overseas worker and the Brazilian crew arrived in Myanmar, he mentioned they had been met on the tarmac by about 20 males in blue uniforms who swarmed the helicopter, marveling over its options. The worker mentioned he confronted Jonathan Kyaw Thaung when he returned to Myanmar, expressing discomfort on the deception.
Jonathan Kyaw Thaung declined to touch upon the deal.

In 2015, the Singapore department of a Kyaw Thaung firm signed a deal to produce the Tatmadaw with a coastal radar expertise system made by Thales, the weapons maker partly owned by the French authorities. The gross sales settlement for the surveillance system, known as the Coast Watcher 100, was a part of the leaked paperwork supplied by Justice For Myanmar.
The Coast Watcher 100, which spanned a protracted shoreline, required towers 50 meters excessive affixed with state-of-the-art radar. A British radar knowledgeable, who had labored on tasks for Thales in Afghanistan and Iraq, was introduced in to direct the venture. A French former protection attaché was employed as a common supervisor for worldwide enterprise improvement and now works at Thales.
As the Rohingya disaster intensified, the Coast Watcher 100 was operational on Myanmar’s western flank, which grew to become the location of the world’s quickest exodus of refugees in a era.
The Tatmadaw swept by way of Rohingya villages, killing and raping civilians. To escape, Rohingya piled onto rickety boats. The Tatmadaw caught craft after craft.
In September 2017, throughout the frenzy of the Rohingya disaster, the Kyaw Thaung firm organized for Thales representatives to satisfy with senior officers of the Navy, one other leaked doc supplied by Justice For Myanmar reveals.
In an announcement to the Times, Thales mentioned that it “does not sell defense systems to Myanmar.”
Jonathan Kyaw Thaung denied any information of the Thales system.
It will not be clear whether or not the Coast Watcher 100 was particularly used for monitoring the Rohingya. But the system, which might choose up the presence of a small raft, had clear navy purposes throughout the exodus of refugees.
Maintenance of the Coast Watcher 100 continues. Leaked protection budgets for 2020-21 present allocations of greater than $160,000 for servicing the radar system. The earlier 12 months, $120,000 was spent for a similar goal, a document of overseas forex transactions reveals, a part of the trove from Justice For Myanmar.
Such outlays most definitely contravene the European Union commerce embargo on the Tatmadaw that targets tools that may be used for repression, mentioned Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and an knowledgeable in Tatmadaw procurement. The commerce ban was strengthened in 2018 after the Rohingya massacres, cracking down on so-called dual-use merchandise with both civilian or navy functions.
“The Rohingya are a coastal group, and automatically anything that is checking coastal waters would be for checking for movement of the Rohingya and might be used for repression, end of story,” Wezeman mentioned, referring to the Thales surveillance system.