With Sean Turnell, Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute. This week on What’s Happening in Myanmar, the military ships nearly 1,000 Rohingya from Yangon to wartorn Sittwe, Chinese are repatriated from border scam compounds, and we speak about the military’s access to foreign exchange and other finance matters in the wake of the new report, The Military, Money, and Myanmar: Breaking the Nexus.

Email the show at whimyanmar@proton.me

Timecodes—

1m15s :: Weekly news digest
7m35s :: With Sean Turnell, the military’s finances
10m40s :: Foreign exchange
13m30s :: Sanctions on Myanmar’s banks
21m16s :: Financing the resistance
28m06s :: Multilateral institutions noting the NUG
37m06s :: Close

Our guest—

Sean Turnell, Honorary Professor of Economics at Macquarie University, Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute, and author of the 1999 book Fiery Dragons: Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma, and more recently, An Unlikely Prisoner: How an Eternal Optimist Found Hope in Myanmar’s Most Notorious Jail. Sean advised the National League for Democracy government on economic matters from 2016-2020, was detained and locked up by the military for 650 days following the 2021 coup, and now serves as Special Advisor to the alternative National Unity Government’s Interim Central Bank.

The Military, Money, and Myanmar: Breaking the Nexus

And here’s links to the Frontier Myanmar interviews with Dr Sui Khar and Thai opposition MP Rangsiman Rome.