Rush to rip up land in Vietnam for a Trump golf complex
www.thestar.com.my

... When officials in the home province of Vietnam's top leader went door to door recently, pressing residents to sign letters agreeing to the Trump Organisation's plans for a new golf community, Le Van Truong wanted to refuse.

Planning documents promised a "new benchmark in luxury, recreation and business". Truong, 54, pictured something else: the uprooting of a cemetery with five generations of his ancestors and the loss of rich farmland that has sustained local families for centuries.

Yet, he signed anyway, because, as he put it, "there's nothing I can do".

"Trump says it's separate " the presidency and his business," Truong said. "But he has the power to do whatever he wants."

This US$1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City are the Trump family's first projects in Vietnam " part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting US president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.

To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was "receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally".

And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off Trump's threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 per cent of Vietnam's exports. ...