BRASILIA/SAO PAULO — Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, is meeting this week with business and finance leaders to address skepticism over his economic policies as he prepares to run for president next year, people familiar with his plans said.

After a lunch last Thursday at UBS offices in Sao Paulo where attendees questioned the seriousness of his bid, the senator is meeting this week with banks, investment funds, business leaders and a market-focused podcast, two of the sources told Reuters.

Another of the sources close to the senator said he is unlikely to define an economic program before February. Until then, he plans an intense schedule of private-sector meetings and international travel including a visit to the United States, the same source said.

Flavio Bolsonaro did not respond to a request for comment. The people declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The goal, according to the first two sources, is to present his candidacy as credible to business leaders who helped propel his father to the presidency in 2018. The former president, serving time for a coup plot after his 2022 electoral defeat, said this month he wanted his eldest son to run for Brazil’s highest office in 2026.

The elder Mr. Bolsonaro’s endorsement of his son sent Brazil’s currency and stock market sliding. Many investors had bet on Mr. Bolsonaro backing a more seasoned candidate with executive experience, such as Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, his former minister, to challenge leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva next year.

Mr. Lula is polling 10 percentage points ahead of both Mr. de Freitas and Flavio Bolsonaro in simulated run-off scenarios, according to a survey by pollster Quaest released on Tuesday.

The younger Mr. Bolsonaro added to skepticism last Sunday by saying he could withdraw his candidacy although that would come “at a price,” while his allies pushed in Congress to shorten his father’s prison sentence. The senator has since vowed to stay in the race, pledging to present a market-friendly agenda as “a more centrist Bolsonaro.”

The elder Mr. Bolsonaro deferred economic policy questions throughout his 2018 campaign to University of Chicago-trained economist Paulo Guedes, his eventual economy minister, but his son has not named a point person to coordinate his policy proposals.

At the UBS lunch, Flavio Bolsonaro said his agenda would mirror his father’s pro-market policies, such as privatizations and fiscal discipline, according to attendees. They said the senator suggested his economic policies would be led by Mr. Guedes, former central bank chief Roberto Campos Neto, former development bank head Gustavo Montezano, or someone similar.

Mr. Guedes and Mr. Campos Neto have not been invited to take a role in Mr. Bolsonaro’s nascent campaign, nor are they interested in one, according to people close to the former officials.

Mr. Guedes has told acquaintances he is reluctant to return to frontline politics given the deep polarization in Latin America’s largest economy, the same sources said. Mr. Campos Neto in July became vice-chairman of Nubank, Latin America’s biggest digital lender.

Mr. Montezano, chief executive of investment firm YvY Capital, was at the UBS luncheon but said through his press office that he attended strictly as a guest at the organizers’ invitation.

“The person chosen will be someone who worked with Guedes, is close to him, or aligns with the same agenda – that is guaranteed,” one of the sources close to the senator said, adding that it would be too early to settle on a single name.

Two of the sources close to the former economic officials said Flavio Bolsonaro recently reached out to Adolfo Sachsida, who headed Brazil’s economic policy secretariat under Mr. Guedes and later served as energy minister.

Their conversation was broadly focused on political support rather than any specific role in the campaign, one of them said. — Reuters

BANGKOK — With general elections just months away and its billionaire patriarch in prison, Thailand’s embattled Pheu Thai party is turning to another member of the divisive Shinawatra family with little experience in politics to help mount a comeback.

Yodchanan Wongsawat, 46, the nephew and son of former prime ministers, is Pheu Thai’s leading candidate for the top job in the February 8 general election.

“I’m the very small guy, but I’m on the shoulder of a giant,” said Mr. Wongsawat, referring to the Shinawatra family, which has yielded four prime ministers in two decades, including his uncle, Thaksin Shinawatra and father, Somchai Wongsawat.

A dominating figure in contemporary Thai politics, Mr. Shinawatra was jailed for one year in September for avoiding an initial prison sentence for conflict of interest and abuse of power while he was prime minister from 2001-2006.

Thaksin’s daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, was ousted as prime minister by a court order in August over a leaked June telephone call, during which she appeared to kowtow to Cambodia’s powerful former leader Hun Sen – until recently a close Shinawatra family ally – when both countries were on the brink of an armed conflict. Fighting erupted weeks later and flared up again on December 8.

Pheu Thai’s support has nosedived during the upheaval, and this month polled at only 11.04% in a nationwide survey conducted by the National Institute of Development Administration, from 13.96% in September and 28.05% in March.

Thailand was plunged into an earlier-than-expected election season after Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul dissolved parliament earlier this month following a disagreement with the largest grouping in parliament, the opposition People’s Party.

PHEU THAI’S RECORD OF BACKING OUTSIDERS
Mr. Wongsawat says he believes that Pheu Thai’s political legacy, including populist policies like universal healthcare and cash handouts that won it years of support among people in the country’s rural areas, can still help.

“We still believe we can win,” he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. “If we can translate (policies) and make the people know that vision, people would protect us.”

An engineer by training with a PhD from the University of Texas in Arlington, Mr. Wongsawat spent most of his adult life in academia and is currently a professor in biomedical engineering at Bangkok’s Mahidol University.

Although a political novice, having only served as an adviser on tech-related policies to the last Pheu Thai-led government, Mr. Wongsawat says he plans to bring his experience in managing complex scientific and multi-disciplinary projects to politics.

Over the decades, the Pheu Thai party has nominated political novices for prime minister and successfully propelled them into office including Yingluck Shinawatra in 2011, and Srettha Thavisin and Paetongtarn Shinawatra in 2023.

Amid the ongoing conflict with Cambodia and nationalist fervor, it is unclear whether the party would be able to distance itself from the Shinawatra family’s once close links with Hun Sen.

Analysts say the next election could result in no clear majority for any of the parties contesting. Mr. Wongsawat indicated he was open to working in a coalition government.

“We want to win, obviously,” he said, “but if we cannot, we can pair with the party that would have the same intention.”— Reuters

CENTRAL African Republic (CAR) has embraced opaque cryptocurrency schemes that raise the risk of state assets being captured by foreign criminal organizations, according to a report published on Wednesday as the country gears up for an election.

President Faustin-Archange Touadéra is seeking a third term in office when the country, which has seen decades of coups, rebellions and unrest, goes to the polls on December 28.

He has emerged as a champion of cryptocurrency since taking office in 2016. In 2022, CAR became the first African country and the second nation in the world to adopt bitcoin as an official currency.

Mr. Touadéra has said the shift to digital currencies will deliver prosperity to citizens by raising funds from non-traditional sources to pay for infrastructure and other projects. Analysts widely expect him to win the election.

The Bangui government declined to comment on the report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), but a senior official speaking on condition of anonymity called it an effort to discredit it.

ALTERNATIVE TO BANKS’ MONOPOLY, OFFICIAL SAYS
GI-TOC said in its report that the opaque nature of the schemes benefited a small circle of insiders and transnational criminal organizations looking for ways to launder money.

“The CAR regime is effectively trading away the country’s sovereignty at the expense of the wider population,” said the report from the Switzerland-based network of some 600 experts tracking international organized crime.

The senior government official said on condition of anonymity: “These types of projects are now presented as alternatives to the monopoly of banks and the tightening of measures by financial institutions.”

Among the poorest countries in the world, the nation of 5.5 million people has experienced decades of conflict since gaining independence from France in 1960.

The GI-TOC report focused on two ventures that it says lack transparency and safeguards against money-laundering.

Mr. Touadéra billed the first venture, known as the Sango Coin project as a way to transform the capital, Bangui, into a futuristic city and improve national infrastructure, including by offering citizenship and e-residency and land to investors.

However, the proposed incentives were outlawed by the Constitutional Court in August 2022, soon after the venture was launched, and the project flopped, selling only 10% of its target 210 million tokens within a year, valued at less than 2 million euros, GI-TOC said.

The Sango Project said on X in April that it would not continue in its current form and “a new direction” was planned, without elaborating. The status of the funds invested in the scheme was unclear, GI-TOC said.

MEME COIN
In a second venture unveiled in February, Central African Republic launched $CAR, a meme coin meant to raise its profile globally and support development. Meme coins are crypto tokens that are usually highly volatile, often featuring brands or trading on short-lived internet trends.

The debut was marred by setbacks, including the suspension of its internet domain within hours of its launch. Since then, the $CAR meme coin has been used to buy tokenized land, but there is no indication of how those sales have contributed to the national budget, GI-TOC said.

The GI-TOC report said the government’s plan to extend the scheme to mineral concessions with virtually no identity verification or other money laundering safeguards could potentially auction off reserves of diamonds, gold, and oil to transnational criminals.— Reuters

TAIPEI — China’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, Taiwan’s defense ministry said, its first transit of the sensitive waterway since formally entering service last month.

Taiwan, which Beijing views as its territory, reports almost daily Chinese military activity around the island in what Taipei views as an ongoing pressure campaign against the democratically elected government.

In a statement on Wednesday, Taiwan’s defense ministry said the Fujian had transited the strait the previous day and that Taiwan’s forces had monitored it.

The ministry showed a grainy, black-and-white picture of the carrier with no aircraft on its deck. It did not say where the picture was taken and offered no other details.

China’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China says it alone has sovereignty over the strait, a major maritime artery for freight traffic. Taiwan and the United States say it is an international waterway.

In September, the carrier sailed through the Taiwan Strait and into the disputed South China Sea during trials.

The Fujian is China’s third aircraft carrier, with a flat flight deck and electromagnetic catapults for take-offs that make it a potentially far more powerful naval weapon than China’s first two Russian-designed carriers.

The Fujian will be able to carry significantly more and heavier armed jet fighters than the Liaoning and Shandong carriers, which are smaller and rely on ramps to launch aircraft.

With a flat deck and electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft, the Fujian is expected to host a larger and wider range of planes than the other two carriers – including early-warning aircraft and, eventually, China’s first carrier-capable stealth jet fighters.

China’s President Xi Jinping attended its commissioning and flag presenting ceremony in the southern island province of Hainan last month and boarded the vessel for an inspection tour.

Taiwan’s government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying only the island’s people can decide their future.— Reuters