Graft, impunity in the Philippines raising the risks of doing business

SINCE Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte won the elections last May in a landslide, international observers have watched with growing alarm his dogged pursuit of a brutal war on drugs.

A January report by Amnesty International, aptly titled "If You Are Poor You Are Killed'', cites statistics from the Philippine National Police of over 7,000 drug-related killings between July 2016 and January this year, carried out by police officers and "unknown armed persons". This translates to an average of 34 deaths a day. The organisation charges that the vast majority of the killings appear to be "extrajudicial executions" - that is, "unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by government order or with its complicity or acquiescence"…