US President Joe Biden. Photo: AP “He’s smart, he’s tough, and I see him as a worthy opponent,” Biden said. At the same time, President Biden said that the upcoming meeting with President Putin is important and he will ask Moscow to cooperate in areas of mutual interest if the Kremlin chooses to do the same, according to Reuters. “I want to make it clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate if he chooses to go this way. If he chooses not to cooperate and act the way he has in the past with regard to cybersecurity and certain other activities, we will respond in the same way,” Biden said. However, President Biden also said that he would make it clear to Putin where the “red lines” are. “I have shared with our allies what will convey to Putin, that I do not seek conflict with Russia but we will respond if Russia continues its harmful activities and we will not. failed to defend the transatlantic alliance. We stand for democratic values,” Biden said. In addition, the White House president also noted that “it would be a disaster” if Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died in prison. Specifically, according to the US leader, “Mr Navalny’s death will be another sign that Russia has little or no intention to adhere to basic human rights. It was a disaster. That does nothing but hurt Russia’s relationship with the rest of the world.” It is known that the meeting between President Biden and his counterpart Putin is scheduled to take place in Ho Chi Minh City. Geneva (Switzerland) on June 16. Both Washington and Moscow welcomed the upcoming summit as a positive step towards finding stability in the bilateral relationship.

“As early as Soviet times, this concept was formed when our armed forces simultaneously used front-line fighters of both heavy and light.” “If in the fourth generation, the MiG-29 plays the role of a twin-engine light fighter and the corresponding heavy is the Su-27, in the fifth generation we have the same twin-engine Su-57. for expensive”. “Until recently we did not have an aircraft of another light weight class,” said AviaPort’s head of analysis, expert Oleg Panteleev. At the same time, light and heavy fighters are designed to solve different problems. “Heavy fighters are needed to cover large areas, which means they have to fly a long enough distance before completing the mission,” the expert explained. “For light fighters, aircraft with fuel reserves and a smaller combat range, another mission has been determined. Figuratively speaking, it would fight over a protected object and tackle an equivalent range of missions in terms of versatility, including aerial combat and assault against ground and water targets, but at a shorter distance from its base,” added Panteleev. Concept graphics of a new generation of Russian single-engine light fighter This expert considers the idea of ​​​​building a single-engine fighter to be right. “Common sense, a single-engine aircraft will always be cheaper than a two-engine aircraft if we consider comparable performance,” he said. “However, in the event of one engine failure, the plane is likely to crash, while a twin-engine aircraft can continue to fly thanks to the other engine.” “But with the progress being made in improving the engines and increasing their reliability, situations where engine failure leads to the loss of an aircraft are quite rare. Second, rescue work has developed well enough to ensure guarantee the rescue of the pilot,” Panteleev said. The expert also pointed out that at the test stage, Al-31FN series 3 and 4 engines can be used. In addition, during aircraft construction, flight tests can be performed on existing engines to check the operation of systems independent of the dynamometer. Of course it does not match the full range of engine characteristics that are the target of the aircraft. “We also know that the AL-31 and its modifications are a well-run and mass-produced engine with high reliability due to the modernization carried out. So at the experimental stage, its use proved to be quite reasonable,” said Panteleev. At the same time, the expert noted that the construction of engines that can be used in the light version of the fifth-generation aircraft has been taking place in Russia for a long time. “We remember that the new engine for the Su-57 was used and the T-50 prototype of the Su-57 fighter even flew with this engine. So there will certainly be no delay in creating a new engine,” Panteleev said. As for the difficulties that need to be solved when building a fifth-generation light fighter, the expert notes a large number of requirements for it. Often these requirements conflict – “compact, low reflectivity and high payload, long flight time and, if possible, supersonic cruise; deployment of concealed weapons and an increase in the range of weapons carried, including relatively large long-range missiles”. “So the main difficulty is how to achieve the optimal combination of requirements, and at the same time to compete on price so that the aircraft does not burden the Russian budget and is attractive for export.” Mr. Panteleev concluded.

By Marilina Görz y Moratalla, SWR, and Jan-Philipp Hein The counter-espionage of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is said to have so far found no evidence that the fugitive former Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek was tied to Russian intelligence services. However, the search continues. That writes the special investigator of the Wirecard investigation committee, the former Berlin Justice Senator Wolfgang Wieland (Greens), in his investigation report, the SWR is present. At the end of November, the committee of inquiry commissioned Wieland to deal specifically with the contacts of the former DAX group with secret services. In his report, Wieland also mentions that Marsalek’s colleague on the board, Susanne Steidl, reported to the Munich public prosecutor that Marsalek had “requested and received a complete annual data set of Wirecard business partners to be forwarded to the BND”. The Wieland paper does not reveal what kind of data it was about. But: The BND excludes “verifiably” from ever having received it. For Wieland, therefore, the question arises who received it instead.

The special investigator Wieland does not feel adequately informed by the federal government. Image: picture alliance / dpa / dpa-Zentral A spokesman for Steidl says this SWR– Inquiry: “The BND was a customer like many others.” Therefore, the process from summer 2019 was not unusual. It was also anonymous data, such as can be bought from other service providers. To this day, Steidl does not know what Marsalek did with the data.

“Ignorance of the intelligence services”

Shortly after the collapse of the then DAX group in the early summer of last year – this is also shown by documents supporting the SWR are available – the Federal Chancellery and various security authorities began investigating Wirecard and the fleeting top manager Marsalek after inquiries from the press and parliament. Shortly after his disappearance, he was said to have had close relationships with Russian secret services. But neither the BND nor the Office for the Protection of the Constitution want Marsalek and Wirecard to be on their radar. “As a result, the ignorance of the intelligence services was confirmed by June 2020,” writes Wieland. The fact that Marsalek is repeatedly associated with Russia is due to the fact that he pursued a large number of projects and businesses there and traveled there very often. In 2017 and 2018 he also tried to start a project in Libya together with a professor of Arabic studies from Moscow, a high-ranking officer in the Austrian Armed Forces and a German refugee expert. In addition, his escape with a private jet via Belarusian Minsk is said to have finally led him to Russia itself. The secret service expert and historian Wolfgang Krieger from the Philipps University in Marburg says: “Jan Marsalek does not get protection from Russia for free. It is very likely that he received protection for financial espionage.”

Wirecard worked together with the BKA

Several units of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) worked together with the later scandal group, whose bankruptcy has grown into one of the largest criminal cases in German history. From 2013, online criminals were to be convicted with the help of the Group’s own Wirecard bank. The bank also made credit cards available for this purpose. Later, the BKA turned to the group “in order to obtain information about the whereabouts of known or unknown perpetrators in real time when developing new search approaches with the help of data from credit cards,” Wieland writes in his report. For Wieland, the fact that the report leaves many questions unanswered in spite of everything is also due to the lack of cooperation and willingness to provide information on the part of the federal government and the Bavarian state government. Information is blocked to this day due to ongoing criminal investigations. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice did not even send confirmations of receipt in response to inquiries. The SPD MP Jens Zimmermann from the Wirecard committee also criticizes this: “The fact that the Bavarian Ministry of Justice did not respond to the request for support from the investigative committee’s special investigator casts a bad but telling picture of the lack of willingness to provide information in Bavaria.”

Ex-top secret service agent in front of the committee

Wieland will present an expanded version of his report to the committee of inquiry on Thursday morning. Immediately afterwards, two former intelligence coordinators from the Chancellery have to testify before the committee. Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, who was responsible for the secret services at the government headquarters from 2014 to 2018, signed a consulting contract with Wirecard in 2019. Until 2020, Fritsche lobbied for the group at its old place of work. In 2019, a department head of the Chancellery met a Wirecard board member. According to Fritsche, Bernd Schmidbauer, who worked under Helmut Kohl in the Chancellery from 1991 to 1998, must testify. Schmidbauer admitted in February that he had met Marsalek about two years ago in his Munich property. In addition, Schmidbauer was in contact for years with one of Marsalek’s escape helpers, a former chief constitutional protection officer from Austria. The FDP chairman Florian Toncar has high hopes for the interrogations of the two ex-top secret service agents. The whole complex around Wirecard and the intelligence services has been “underexposed” so far, says Toncar. It is “worrying” that foreign intelligence services apparently got involved with Wirecard. Toncar calls the fact that the company was used as a “money laundering machine” for the interests of the Russian government or to pay mercenaries in Libya or Syria or to circumvent sanctions, “says Toncar,” hypotheses that the facts point to. ” Addition from April 14th, 2021: According to its own account, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice “transmitted” the information requested by the investigative officer Wieland. These were received by him today at noon. Confirmations of receipt, according to a spokeswoman, “are generally not sent by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice”. Therefore, the allegations made against the Bavarian government are incorrect.

Opening the argument, lawyer Dinh Anh Tuan, defending defendant Tran Trong Mung (former General Director of TISCO) said that in this case, the procedural agency should consider the responsibility of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Vietnam Industrial Construction Corporation (VINAINCON) to defendants who are leaders of TISCO and leaders of Vietnam Steel Corporation (VNS) so that they choose VINAINCON as a subcontractor.

The defendants at the trial.

According to the defense lawyer, one of the reasons why the leaders of TISCO and leaders of VNS accepted VINAINCON because there is a document signed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade signed by a leader of the ministry. Documents of the Ministry of Industry and Trade show that VINAINCON is an enterprise of the ministry with good capacity. According to lawyer Tuan, in this incident, the main responsibility belongs to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. TISCO and VNS only have to bear joint responsibility.

During the impeachment process, the representative of the Procuracy determined that the defendant Tran Trong Mung was responsible for the case when he did not terminate the contract with China Metallurgical Science, Technology and Trade Corporation (MCC), although the This industry has violated. Specifically, in 2007, TISCO and MCC signed a package EPC contract, costing 160 million USD to build a metallurgical line. MCC then violated the contract, did not build and demanded a price increase.

The Procuracy said that, at that time, defendant Mung must terminate the contract with MCC, withdraw the advance, report to the authorized person to cancel the bid and re-bid in accordance with the law. . However, the defendant Mung instructed to negotiate at the request of MCC, and at the same time signed a written request to increase the price of part C (construction and installation) in the EPC Contract.

In addition, the defendant Mung also introduced and accepted VINAINCON as a subcontractor. Because VINAINCON is not capable enough, in 2011 the project had to stop construction, so far the project has not been completed.

The defense lawyers at the trial.

Debating about TISCO not stopping the contract with MCC, lawyer Tuan cited many legal documents, the defendant Mung signed many documents urging MCC to implement the project. Defendant Mung also signed a document to the Ministry of Industry and Trade and VNS with the content “Request the Ministry of Industry and Trade to report to the Government for permission to terminate the EPC contract with the MCC contractor. Require MCC to return the deposit and reimburse damages ”. But this is not accepted by the authorities.

Under the EPC Contract, if there is a dispute, TISCO and MCC will settle in an arbitration court in Singapore. Therefore, TISCO signed a contract with Kenvil Chia law firm of this island nation to advise and received a reply with the content “The termination of the contract cannot be taken lightly and should only consider the termination if there are no more options. choose another one ”.

Since then, the defendant Mung chose to continue the contract, change the price of construction and installation and change the price of the EPC contract according to the provisions of Circular 09/2008 of the Ministry of Construction.

Also according to lawyer Tuan, the change in the form of part C contract from package to unit price contract was not given by defendant Mung. Even the defendant Mung once opposed this because the change in unit price is that the next quarter’s price is higher than the previous quarter, causing the project to raise the price, the contractor is not actively working.

Lawyer Tuan said that his client, the defendant Mung has only part of the responsibility in introducing VINAINCON as a subcontractor, so he asked the Panel to transfer the charge to the defendant Mung from the crime of “Violation of regulations on management. and the use of State property causes loss and waste “to the crime of” Lack of responsibility, causing serious consequences “.

Lawyer Tran Van Tao, defending defendant Tran Van Kham (former Chairman of the Board of Directors cum General Director of TISCO) who is the successor to the defendant Tran Trong Mung said that the impeachment view of the representative of the Procuracy towards the body. His boss is too heavy. Lawyer Tao acknowledged that all the acts of defendant Kham were just for the purpose of expecting the project to be completed soon.

According to Tao, defendant Khâm received the project when the project had been implemented for 24 months with MCC general contractor not under construction. The project was also asked for permission by the defendant and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Government allowed to separate part C assigned to VINAINCON for construction and increase the investment for part C. Therefore, the Procuracy said, the defendant Khâm’s actions to prolong the performance of the contract, increase the contract price, separate Part C from the contract, agree that VINAINCON is incapable of performing the contract is incorrect.

The representative of the Procuracy exercises prosecution rights at the trial.

During the impeachment process, the representative of the Procuracy determined that defendant Khâm has the role of organizing the offense. With his powers as Chairman of the Board of Directors cum General Director of TISCO, as the successor to the defendant Mung directing the project implementation, defendant Kham knows that the EPC contract is a package contract, without grounds for price adjustment, but still directs to advise, propose and sign the decision to adjust the total project investment structure, including the provision for part C of the Contract to increase by 15.57 million USD.

Defendant Kham also signed the fourth adjustment annex with MCC agreed to separate Part C from the contract, at the same time signed a three-party subcontract, agreed to assign incompetent VINAINCON and other real subcontractors. Part C is in the form of an adjustable unit price contract, TISCO organizes the implementation and assumes all risks without a legal basis, not in accordance with the provisions of the contract.