Netherlands, U.K. and Spain among countries investigating claims the stations are used to force Chinese to go home. Portugal became the latest nation to open a probe into allegations that China has been running “illegal police stations” in the country just as Ireland ordered Beijing to shut down its "overseas Chinese police service centre" in Dublin. Portuguese police launched an investigation into China's alleged overseas police "service stations", the Attorney General’s Office confirmed to the Expresso newspaper on Thursday. The authorities are paying “special attention” to the Chinese Embassy in Lisbon after Portuguese lawmakers raised concerns about a report by human rights group Safeguard Defenders in September that Chinese authorities operate 54 “police stations” overseas, including three in Portugal. A growing number of governments including Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands are investigating reports about Chinese police offices overseas that are accused of coercing emigrants to return home to China to face criminal charges or silencing dissent abroad. Until now, no cases of immigrants living in Portugal having been forced to travel to China are yet known, the Expresso quoted a police source as saying. Also on Thursday, Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs ordered the so-called Fuzhou Police Service Overseas Station in Dublin city center to close, Irish media reported. The office opened earlier this year and Chinese authorities said it offered services to Chinese citizens in Ireland such as driving license renewals. However, Ireland’s Foreign Ministry said Chinese officials have never sought permission to set up the station in Dublin. "The Department noted that actions of all foreign states on Irish territory must be in compliance with international law and domestic law requirements," the Irish Times quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying. "On this basis, the Department informed the Embassy that the office on Capel Street should close and cease operations.” The Chinese Embassy confirmed that the office has now ceased operations.
China denies reports The Irish statement came after the Dutch government said it would probe service centres in the Netherlands in response to two reports run by broadcaster RTL Nieuws earlier this week. "Appropriate action will be taken. We take this very seriously," a Dutch foreign ministry spokesperson told the station.
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A Datacenter – But for Gold
From the photos, you can see that the gold storage vault of the Portuguese central bank has a very orderly design, with tall racks of bars (maybe 30 rows high) laid out in close proximity to each other to form a number of aisles and corridors. It almost has a datacenter feel to it, except instead of servers and routers, there are gold bars. Commenting on the visit, reporters Sandra Afonso and Marta Grosso from Radio Renascença wrote: : “This Tuesday, on a guided tour, journalists were able for the first time to take photographs of the gold in the Casa Forte de Reserva, located in Carregado. Much gold is stored in these facilities: 13,666 bars, totaling 173 tons. Each bar weighs about 12 pounds. In Carregado, there are still 406 bars that belong to the European Central Bank (ECB), but are in the custody of the Bank of Portugal (BdP). “Interestingly, most of the gold is abroad. We have 186 tonnes in custody at the Bank of England, one of the main gold custody and gold transaction locations. We have a significant part of our gold there: around 49%”, said Hélder Rosalino [Banco de Portugal director]” Interestingly, the Banco de Portugal’s Carregado vault claims to be storing about 5 tonnes of gold which belongs to the European Central Bank (ECB). This is gold that was transferred by the Banco de Portugal to the ECB in 1999 as part of the creation of the Euro when each founding central bank member transferred foreign reserve assets to the ECB, 15% of which had to be in the form of physical gold.“
Like anything in the central bank gold world, there is no transparency into the claimed gold of any of these central banks nor any independent physical audits of the gold bars they claim to hold, so when talking about relative rankings, we will just have to go with the figures of the IMF / World Gold Council. Just Outside Lisbon The Banco de Portugal maintains that just over 45% of its total gold reserves, or 127.6 tonnes (5,549,238 ozs), is held in the form of gold bars in its vault in Carregado, and it was these gold bars which the Portuguese reporters and photographers were briefly shown in what the Reuters report about the visit called a ‘Rare Glimpse'. But apart from Reuters, a whole host of Portuguese media seemed to be present for the tour of the vault, judging by the extensive coverage this gold vault ‘tour’ received in the Portuguese media. So it is these reports of the Portuguese media which we turn to get more details about the Carregado vault and what the media saw. And since there were photographers present, quite a few photographs of the gold were taken, a selection of which are included below. The Banco de Portugal’s Carregado Complex is a 67,000 square metre compound in an industrial part of the town which is surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, and which is guarded by machine gun toting members of Portugal’s National Republican Guard, and their four-legged friends, German Shepherds. As well as the gold vault, this Carregado Complex, built in 1995, is where the Portuguese central bank prints Euro banknotes, so there are said to be more than 200 bank employees working in this operational centre.
Apart from the 172.6 tonnes (45%) of Portuguese gold in the Carregado vault near Lisbon, the Banco de Portugal maintains that another 186.4 tonnes (48.7%) of its gold is stored in the Bank of England in London, with an additional 20 tonnes (5.2%) stored with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and the remaining 3.7% tonnes (1%) now stored at the Banque de France in Paris after having been moved in 2021 from the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). So overall, the split is 45% of Portugal’s gold is supposedly stored in Portugal, with the remaining 55% stored abroad. LISBON, February 6 -- A case: For the more than 120 workers at the Pedrosa & Rodrigues garment factory in northwestern Portugal, events in another country 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the north could jeopardize their livelihood. Sales to Britain make up about half of this family business's annual revenue of about 14 million euros ($16 million). But the U.K.'s impending departure from the European Union could make "Made in Portugal" labels less attractive once borders go back up between Britain and the 27 other countries in the bloc. "The worst-case scenario is losing 7 million euros" a year, says Ana Pedrosa Rodrigues, the company's client relations manager. "It would be extremely worrying." Companies like Pedrosa & Rodrigues fear they could be part of the collateral damage from Britain's withdrawal from the EU's single market, which guarantees no tariffs on trade and free movement for goods, workers and money. As Brexit-inspired economic adjustments ripple across the bloc, small countries like Portugal could feel a lot of economic pain, although the extent of the disruption remains unclear because the terms of Britain's divorce deal with the EU remain unresolved. Some economic forecasts have produced scary numbers. The Portuguese government says Brexit could wipe out up to 26 percent of Portuguese exports of goods and services and shave 1 percentage point off the country's GDP. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a policy adviser to developed economies, estimates that if Britain leaves without an agreement on new trade terms with the EU, it could reduce the EU's GDP by around 1 percentage point by 2020. That's more than half a year's economic growth at current rates. It could be three times worse for Britain, the OECD says. The OECD notes that some countries, sectors and businesses across the EU will feel more pain than others. A report last year by the European Committee of the Regions, an EU advisory body, identified Ireland as the likely major casualty of Brexit due to its geographic proximity to Britain, which historically has tied them together commercially. Some German regions, such as Stuttgart, that rely on auto industry exports to Britain could also feel the economic shockwaves, it said. Chemical and plastics companies in Belgium and the Netherlands are at risk, too. In Portugal, which has had close ties with Britain since the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, the textiles sector based in the northwest is one of the country's most exposed industries. It is largely located in what is one of the poorest regions of Portugal and western Europe. The textile companies already have felt a chill, with sales to Britain dropping by more than 3 percent since the 2016 Brexit referendum, according to Paulo Vaz, director-general of the Portuguese Textile and Clothing Association, which represents about 500 companies in the sector. He puts that down to the weak pound, which makes purchases from countries like Portugal that use the euro more expensive, and cautious spending by British consumers at a time when their financial future is uncertain. He says these are tense times for Portuguese companies, especially with the U.K. playing such a central role in the local textile industry. "We're talking about a market that is our fourth-largest, that's worth around 450 million euros ($516 million) a year to us and that was growing, and that now can be severely harmed by all this," Vaz said, referring to Brexit. For some businesses, the British market is their lifeblood The two-story Pedrosa & Rodrigues factory sits amid green fields on the fringes of a small town in Portugal's industrial heartland, where textile companies are an economic mainstay and provide about 130,000 jobs. Inside, there is a hum of sewing machines, a hissing of irons and a rumble of high-tech cloth-cutting machines. Ana Pedrosa Rodrigues remembers sitting as a child on the running boards of these machines after her parents started the company with five employees in a garage in 1982. Ana and her two older brothers recently joined their parents at the company. The other employees include husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. Generations of workers are common in the industry. Almost all of the workers live in town, many of them within walking distance, and have served on average of 19 years. Pedrosa & Rodrigues has prospered in part by selling "affordable luxury" brands to some of Britain's well-known fashion labels. The company makes ME+EM T-shirts that can be found at Selfridge's in London and produces some of the All England Club's range of Wimbledon tennis wear. In an ironic twist, it also delivers to British brand L.K. Bennett — a label occasionally worn by British Prime Minister Theresa May. Every Friday, workers stack dozens of brown cardboard boxes at the factory's loading bay and place them on trucks for the 2-3 day trip to warehouses in central Britain. At the moment, the trucks drive straight across the EU's open borders. If they are shut, the paperwork, delays and tariffs could add 12 percent to the cost price. A loss of British business would translate, inevitably, into job losses— and not just at this company, Ana Pedrosa Rodrigues says. "We are at the front end of a supply chain, and the losses would have a knock-on effect for our suppliers," she said. That includes the fabric producers, dying companies, printers and embroiderers. Most of them are their neighbors. "Nobody would escape the impact." Sofia Cardoso, a 43-year-old employee of Pedrosa & Rodrigues whose husband also works for a textile company, refuses to be gloomy, saying the sector has built up a lot of resilience over its long history. "We've been through crises before and we've survived," she said. "I think we'll get through this one too." |
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