MMS China: The first 9 dead miners/day are free
Entrepreneurs, especially from the coastal province of Zhejiang, flooded into the Shanxi mining sector. Those with seed capital and strong networking skills prospered, sometimes earning returns of a 1,000 percent within a few years. With wealth came power, as they entrenched themselves and used their money to ensure that officials wouldn’t be too curious about the unsavory aspects of their dealings, such as unsafe working conditions. One coal owner told Fortune last year that 20 percent of his operating costs went to corruption (like paying off inspection teams and local officials), and that illegal mine owners paid a higher premium. According to someone present in local discussions about accountability — who requested anonymity — officials debated how many workers had to die before they reported it to their superiors in the provincial hierarchy. The number was originally three, but officials from coal-mining towns complained that at that level, “we’d be reporting, like, every day,” so it was eventually raised to 10 deaths.
Posted by James on Tuesday, July 20, 2010