Guest contributor
James Shwe
From Ne Win to Min Aung Hlaing, every military seizure of power has made a narrow circle rich and the people poorer.
When the Financial Action Task Force meets in Paris on October 26–30, it will show whether the world judges Myanmar by results or by its new civilian title.
Three months after the 2021 coup, one bank in Sittwe let only 50 customers a day withdraw their own money. Five years later, Yangon condominium prices have roughly doubled, partly as a hedge against inflation.
Ordinary people lined up for their savings while the well-connected watched their assets rise. That is the coup’s hidden story.
The world remembers February 1, 2021, as the day the military overturned an election. That is true. But the coup was also a rescue of a financial order built for generals and their cronies, one that was finally being asked to pay its debts.
This matters right now. From October 26 to 30, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global anti-money-laundering watchdog, meets in Paris to decide whether to escalate measures against Myanmar, which has been on its blacklist since 2022 alongside only Iran and North Korea.
Banks worldwide use that list to decide whom they can safely do business with. Tougher “countermeasures” could require foreign banks to review or end their ties with Myanmar banks.
The regime will call its failings technical. They are not. They are the product of a bargain our country has lived under for more than sixty years.
Ne Win and Than Shwe: Enriching the few
On March 2, 1962, General Ne Win seized power while ethnic leaders were meeting in Rangoon to finalize proposals for a genuine federal union. He arrested them along with the elected prime minister, claiming he had to “check the disintegration of Burma.”
The military makes the same accusation today against the movement for a federal democratic union.
Power made Ne Win’s circle rich; the Los Angeles Times reported cash grants to loyal officers, often deposited in Swiss bank accounts. The people got the opposite.
The 1987 demonetization wiped out, by one estimate, 80 percent of the money in circulation. Many families still remember savings that turned to worthless paper overnight.
General Than Shwe changed the method, not the bargain. His regime sold 782 state enterprises below market rates, largely to generals’ families and their cronies.
Min Aung Hlaing is following the same path, handing 55 of 107 factories in one ministry department to private buyers, including the military’s own conglomerates.
Meanwhile, the people were kept poor and uneducated. Under the juntas of 1988 to 2011, defense typically took more than 40 per cent of the budget and education only 1 to 2 per cent.
Many of us believe this was deliberate: a people kept poor and uninformed is easier to control. Regimes do not write such intentions down, but sixty years of the same choices make that belief hard to dismiss.
The reckoning the 2021 coup cancelled
For decades, our private banks were, in the words of economist Sean Turnell, who advised Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) government, “little more than corporate cash boxes” for crony conglomerates.
Loans were rolled over year after year, secured against land.
From 2017, the civilian-era central bank began requiring banks to classify loans by international standards, turn endless overdrafts into loans that must be repaid and hold enough capital.
The International Monetary Fund warned that this was exposing rising bad loans and bank capital that was “already weak.”
The deadline had been pushed back to 2023 because of the pandemic, but a civilian government with a fresh landslide mandate was in a position to enforce it.
The coup stopped it. Turnell was detained within days and spent 650 days in prison. He has since said he believes a core of crony conglomerates “were complicit in the coup.”
We do not need to prove that bad debt sent the tanks into the streets. It is enough to see that the men with the guns and the men with the debts gained from the same outcome.
The quiet bailout paid by the people
What followed was a bailout no parliament approved. Since 2021, the World Bank says, the budget deficit has been financed mainly by the central bank creating money, and more recently by commercial banks holding the public’s deposits.
Either way, the people’s money carries the regime’s deficit.
Here is why that rescues the big borrowers. A debt is a fixed number of kyat, and inflation makes each kyat worth less. Imagine a company that owed 10 billion kyat in 2020, worth about $7.5 million USD.
Today that debt is worth about US$4.8 million at the official rate and $2.2 million USD at the market rate, while the land securing it has roughly doubled in price.
A loan the reformers would have written off as bad now looks healthy. (This is an illustration, not any one company’s accounts.) Interest rates capped below inflation add to the gain.
The war feeds the same market. Junta airstrikes and offensives have driven some 3.5 million people from their homes, and many have crowded into regime-held cities such as Yangon, where rents and property prices have soared.
Families who lose their homes pay more for shelter, while those who already own city property, including the well-connected, gain.
The regime also widened a 2019 tax amnesty, charging as little as 3 per cent on undeclared money used to buy property or vehicles.
The FATF’s own guidance warns that such amnesties raise money-laundering risk. In plain words, money nobody can explain can be cleaned for a small fee and parked in real estate.
The loss did not disappear. It moved to everyone holding Myanmar kyat: savers, workers and pensioners. Fuel shocks and the 2025 earthquake added pressure, but inflation has run near or above 20 percent for years, and 16.4 million people now live below the national poverty line.
Rising property prices alongside falling living standards is not recovery. It is a transfer of wealth from the people to the powerful.
Normalization is asset protection
Wealth preserved on paper still needs foreign banks, buyers and legitimacy to become real. That is why normalization creep is not just diplomacy. It is asset protection.
The packaging is in place. More than 50 parties, including the National League for Democracy, were barred from the 2025–26 election, and Min Aung Hlaing was then elected president by a military-dominated parliament.
The regime has hired Washington lobbying firm DCI Group for $3 million USD.
U.S. officials have met its representatives twice in a month, and five Southeast Asian governments have hosted the coup leader.
The next milestone is not a summit but a technical meeting in Paris.
What the FATF should decide
The FATF has credited Myanmar with progress in three areas, and the regime says 13 of its 15 action items are complete. The two still open measure real results: whether suspicious money is actually investigated, and whether money-laundering prosecutions match the country’s risks.
FATF members should take five steps.
- No extension for laws on paper. Ask for prosecutions and seized assets tied to scam compounds, real-estate laundering, senior officials and connected tycoons.
- Targeted measures if the evidence is missing, aimed at regime-controlled banks such as Myanma Foreign Trade Bank and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank, which the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in 2023.
- Written protection for our families, so that aid and remittances are “neither disrupted nor discouraged.”
- Extra scrutiny for Myanmar-linked property and concession money, with disclosure of its real owners.
- A technical decision. Governments engaging the regime, including FATF member Indonesia, which Min Aung Hlaing is due to visit, must not lower the bar in Paris.
Some will say these measures hurt ordinary people. They are already paying. Measures aimed at regime banks, with remittances protected, put the cost where the risk lies.
Raids are not prosecutions
The regime will point to its October 2025 raid on the KK Park scam compound.
It announced the site’s demolition, but later reporting showed the networks remained active. By its own count, it detained 14,730 foreigners in Myawaddy and deported 13,553; the 662 it is prosecuting face immigration and drug charges, not money-laundering charges.
As anti-trafficking advocate Jay Kritiya put it, those responsible “must be arrested, prosecuted, and have all their assets seized.” Demolition footage is not a prosecution record.
What we can all do
Members of the U.S. Congress can ask the Treasury Department, which leads the US delegation to the FATF, to state its position publicly.
Lawmakers in Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia can ask their ministers how their delegations will vote.
The Steering Council for the Evolvement of Federal Democracy in Myanmar (SCEF), the National Unity Government (NUG) and our ethnic revolutionary partners must make the economic case as clearly as the democratic one.
They should publish a plan for the day after military rule, with independent bank audits, protection for small depositors first and an independent central bank, and document the real owners behind major post-coup deals.
Before October 26, write to your government’s finance ministry and your elected representatives with three tasks: no extension for laws on paper, targeted measures on regime-controlled banks, and written protection for remittances and aid.
One clear ask from many voices carries more weight than many different asks. Inside Myanmar, act only where it is safe.
A warning for every democracy
Myanmar’s coup was preceded by fraud claims that independent observers called baseless, and welcomed by cronies who feared accountability. Every democracy should watch for the same signs: baseless fraud claims, pressure on central banks and alliances between security forces and connected creditors.
Ne Win, Than Shwe and Min Aung Hlaing each turned control of the state into wealth for a few and poverty for the many.
Enforced anti-money-laundering rules, independent central banks and civilian control of the military are the walls that keep guns and balance sheets apart. The people of Myanmar are paying to rebuild those walls.
This month, in Paris, the world can show that it will not help tear them down again.
James H. Shwe is a Los Angeles-based professional engineer, writer and advocate for federal democracy in Myanmar.
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