NO ANWAR UNTIL '08

I was expecting this:

KUALA LUMPUR : Malaysia's highest court crushed the immediate political ambitions of former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim when it refused to hear a new appeal against his conviction for corruption.
Anwar remained defiant, telling AFP in a telephone interview from the Munich clinic where he is recuperating from back surgery, that the decision "will not impede my political activity.
"I will give political speeches. I have made it clear I will participate in politics," he said Wednesday.
Anwar, 57, has already served his six-year sentence for corruption, which he says was part of a political conspiracy against him.
But Wednesday's court decision means he will be barred from holding political office until 2008 under regulations governing convicted criminals.

Back in 1998, when Anwar was put on trial and jailed, it was readily apparent that the sodomy charges were trumped up. The chief witness for the prosecution kept changing the alleged dates of the offenses, even claiming that he was sodomized in a building that hadn't been built.

The corruption charges were a different story. They were clearly politically motivated, but not necessarily untrue. It's not uncommon in much of Asia for high officials' crimes to go unpunished. Anwar was one of the top Malaysian officials for several years, so he had plenty of time to profit from shady deals. The flaw in the Malaysian justice system was possibly that he was not prosecuted earlier (and that other Malaysian officials have never been investigated).

In Korea, tax evasion is common, but it had typically been those in opposition who were targets of audits (this has somewhat been improving over the years). A more current example of the unequal application of justice has been the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former boss of Russian oil giant Yukos.

Its doubtful that Khodorkovsky did not evade taxes (what Russian oligarch didn't?). But the trial of Khodorkovsky is more based on his opposition to Putin than it is on the actual charges against him.

Was Anwar corrupt? Probably. Was he more corrupt than other UMNO officials who stayed close to Mahathir? I doubt it.

Off topic, how the hell did Jean Chrétien retire as a multimillionaire after decades in the relatively low-paying public sector.