Special Report: An image makeover for Myanmar Inc

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12/us-myanmar-cronies-image-idUSBRE83B0YU20120412

He's the flashiest tycoon in one of Asia's poorest cities, with a canary-yellow Lamborghini parked outside his neoclassical mansion.

Tay Za is also one of the most vilified associates of Myanmar's former junta. The U.S. Treasury has branded him a "notorious henchman and arms dealer," slapping him with sanctions that froze his assets and blocked his jet-setting family from cities across the globe.

Now, as his country starts to open up after decades of military misrule, Tay Za is leading a wave of crony capitalists who are repositioning themselves as the fresh new faces of Myanmar Inc. According to his son, the 44-year-old multimillionaire has become a semi-retired philanthropist.

Quietly, they are bringing sons and daughters into play, spawning a second-generation elite that is consolidating through business and marriage, even as Washington and Brussels debate how to lift sanctions without enriching Than Shwe's business allies.

Myanmar's crony capitalists - a clique of fewer than 20 families - grew rich with help from the dictator who ruled Myanmar from 1992 until his retirement just last year. Than Shwe led a military junta whose abuses include killings, torture, rape and forced labor, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School said in a 2009 report.

During her visit to Myanmar in December 2011, the first by a U.S. secretary of state in over 50 years, Clinton called for economic as well as political reforms so that the benefits of lifting sanctions would "flow to a broad-based group of people and not just to a very few."

That's easier said than done. Even for Clinton: She stayed at the Thingaha, a crony-owned hotel in Myanmar's crony-built capital city of Naypyitaw.