AFP

Hong Konger Kitty Chan pivoted to takeout to help her restaurant survive the pandemic, but she has since opened a second shop as demand for cheap mealboxes surges in a city enduring economic woes.

Small shops selling inexpensive two-dish mealboxes have mushroomed across one of the world’s least affordable cities, cropping up in working-class and white-collar areas alike as people tighten their belts.

“The Covid restrictions were a catalyst,” she told AFP at her restaurant in Kowloon, one of the world’s most densely populated city districts, as a queue of hungry patrons snaked down the street.

“There are multiple factors in this city that make us many people’s kitchen.”

Hong Kong took an economic hit in 2019 when months of democracy protests kept visitors away and helped tip the city into a prolonged recession.

More than 2.5 years of strict Covid controls have again pushed the Asian finance hub into negative growth. 

Hong Kong finance chief Paul Chan warned Thursday there is a “very high chance” the city will end the year in a full-blown recession while the fiscal deficit is expected to balloon to HK$100 billion ($12.7 billion), twice initial estimates.

The mealbox boom “is similar to the emergence of dollar shops during the (2008) financial crisis,” said Andy Kwan, director of the ACE Centre for Business and Economic Research think tank.

“People tend to spend less when the economy is not well and confidence is low,” he told AFP. 

Chan’s restaurants are selling 2,000 to 3,000 mealboxes per day at around HK$48 ($6).

Mealboxes go for anything from HK$25 to HK$80 depending on ingredients and shop locations, and many include a drink or soup.

– Buffet in a box – 

To compete in what is now a crowded market, Chan tries to supply the kind of food you can get in a sit-down restaurant — mostly wok-fried Cantonese dishes such as black-pepper beef short ribs, steamed fish and razor clams.

Her strategy has attracted a mostly white-collar clientele.

“The two-dish mealbox is a very interesting entry point to observe our economy,” said Fred Ku, an economist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Ku said that while the two-dish restaurant had long been a feature of the city, “the consumers’ perception has changed and these mealboxes are no longer a symbol of relatively low income”.

China and Hong Kong have largely escaped the runaway inflation seen across the globe. 

But food in particular has become more expensive — Chan estimates her grocery purchases have risen about 20 percent this year.

Mealbox restaurants are also popular with Hong Kongers who have refused to vaccinate themselves against Covid.

The city uses a QR code system that denies unvaccinated people access to most public premises.

Retiree Grace, who gave only her first name, described herself as “a denied person” because she had only gotten one vaccination shot. 

“At first I thought why not give (mealboxes) a try since I had to have takeaway,” the 68-year-old told AFP. “But now I find it pretty attractive… it feels like having a buffet.”  

– Tourist trickle –

A Facebook group for sharing tips on mealbox restaurants, started by social worker Andrew Wong, has grown to 87,000 members.

“When I opened the group at the end of 2021, we found 110 to 120 such restaurants, and so far in 2022, we have found 150 brand new spots,” he told AFP.

Another crowd-sourced map lists more than 440 two-dish restaurants across Hong Kong, up from around 330 in May.

Wong said the boom was fuelled by Covid restrictions and the drop in tourist numbers over the last three years.

Before the protests and pandemic, Hong Kong would see around 65 million tourists a year, with 78 percent coming from the Chinese mainland.

That has slowed to a trickle, with the Chinese border effectively closed and international arrivals still facing mandatory hotel quarantine on arrival.

City leader John Lee has vowed to reopen the city and hinted at further Covid relaxations in the coming weeks. 

But Hong Kong’s international access remains far behind rivals such as Singapore, London and Tokyo.

“People are wondering if there is any policy to stabilise the economy and whether the government is enterprising enough to bring changes,” think-tank director Kwan said. 

“Meanwhile, people are cutting daily expenses so they can have more to spend if the worst happens”.

Wearing headphones and anti-sweat finger sleeves, gamers from eight countries guided gun-toting avatars through a battle royale in the Saudi capital, as cheering onlookers watched the action on a big screen.

The PUBG Mobile tournament was part of Gamers8, a summer festival spotlighting Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a global eSports dynamo — one that officials hope can compete with powerhouses like China and South Korea.

Much like with Formula One and professional golf, the world’s biggest oil exporter has in recent years leveraged its immense wealth to assert itself on the eSports stage, hosting glitzy conferences and snapping up established tournament organisers.

These moves have attracted the kind of criticism Saudi officials have come to expect, with some eSports leaders objecting to Riyadh’s human rights record.

Yet the lack of long-term financing for eSports makes the industry especially eager to do business with the Saudis, which helps explain why the backlash so far has been relatively muted, analysts say.

Saudi gamers, meanwhile, are revelling in their country’s newfound status and the eye-watering prize pools it brings.

“In the past, there was no support,” said 22-year-old Faisal Ghafiri, who competed in the PUBG tournament, which featured $3 million in prize money.

“Thank God, now is the best time for me to play eSports and participate in tournaments,” he added, noting that what was once a hobby had transformed into a lucrative “job”.

– Call of duty –

Saudi Arabia’s interest in gaming and eSports comes from the very top, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said to be an avid “Call of Duty” player.

The national eSports federation was created in 2017, and the number of eSports teams in the kingdom has since blossomed from two to more than 100.

Survey findings indicate 21 million people -– nearly two-thirds the national population –- consider themselves gamers.

In January, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund launched the Savvy Gaming Group, which acquired top eSports firms ESL Gaming and FACEIT in deals reportedly worth a total of $1.5 billion.

Last week, Prince Mohammed released a national eSports strategy that calls for the kingdom to create some 39,000 eSports-related jobs by 2030 while producing more than 30 games in domestic studios.

Next year Riyadh will host the Global Esports Games, billed as the world’s “flagship” competitive eSports event.

“I think what’s incredible is that the government has put eSports front and centre, whereas a lot of countries are still trying to work out a positioning,” said Chester King, CEO of British Esports.

“The investment, I would say, is probably top of the world.”

Gaming is also expected to be a major component of headline-grabbing development projects like the Red Sea megacity NEOM, with its planned 170-kilometre-long (105 miles) twin skyscrapers known as The Line.

Yet NEOM is also where Saudi Arabia has encountered its biggest eSports setback. 

Two years ago, Riot Games announced a partnership that would have made NEOM a sponsor of the European championship for the game League of Legends.

The outcry was immediate and intense, led by LGBTQ gamers who condemned Saudi Arabia’s prohibition of same-sex sexual acts, which can be a capital offence.

League of Legends is considered LGBTQ-friendly, having just last week named gay hip-hop star Lil Nas X as its “president”, an honorary title.

Within 24 hours of its NEOM announcement, Riot Games backed out, and Danish tournament organiser BLAST terminated its own deal with the megacity roughly two weeks later.

– eSportswashing? –

“Saudi Arabia’s reputation will always be a hindrance to the Western eSport community, despite attempts to improve it,” said Jason Delestre of the University of Lille, who studies the geopolitics of eSports.

Saudi officials are undeterred, however, and they have deep backing in the eSports world.

“Gaming was always a bit more morally flexible, as they are mostly project-based and lack a sustainable business model,” said Tobias Scholz, an eSports expert at the University of Siegen in Germany.

“ESports need the money compared to golf or others.”

Vlad Marinescu, president of the International Esports Federation, dismissed any suggestion the kingdom was using eSports to engage in reputation-laundering.

“Laundering is a word that has the prerequisite of starting with something dirty. The culture of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is beautiful and rich,” Marinescu told AFP.

Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan, chairman of the Saudi Esports Federation, told AFP his vision is for the kingdom to become a natural choice for all eSports programming.

“One of the most amazing things for me is at our recent event, at Gamers8, the amount of young Saudi players who came up to me and said, ‘We always loved watching these things, but we never thought we would have it here,'” he recalled.

“And that’s the emotion, and that’s the image that I want to keep.”

Donald Trump and family members lied to tax collectors, lenders and insurers for years in a scheme that routinely misstated the value of his properties to enrich themselves, according to a suit filed by New York’s attorney general on Wednesday.

Top state prosecutor Letitia James said that with the help of his children and others at the Trump Organization, the former president provided fraudulent statements of his net worth and false asset valuations “to obtain and satisfy loans, get insurance benefits, and pay lower taxes.”

“In short, he lied to gain massive financial benefits for himself.”

The sweeping investigation is one of many criminal, civil and congressional probes into Trump, who is eyeing another run for the White House in 2024.

Trump repeated his oft-used defense that the suit is “another witch hunt” against him, while his spokesperson denounced it as a political move by Democrats against the Republican businessman.

James’ office requested that the former president pay at least $250 million in penalties — a sum she says he made from the fraud — and that his family be banned from running businesses in the state. 

She also urged that Trump along with his children Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump be barred from purchasing property in the state for five years.

“The very foundation of his purported net worth is rooted in incredible fraud and illegality,” James said in a statement.

Referring the title of Trump’s book “The Art of Deal,” she said that “Mr. Trump thought he could get away with the art of the steal, but today, that conduct ends.”

– ‘Staggering’ overvaluations –

James said her office, which lacks authority to file criminal charges, was making a criminal referral to the US Justice Department as well as the Internal Revenue Service based on the three-year investigation.

The lawsuit filed with the New York State Supreme Court includes allegations that Trump’s annual financial statements for at least a decade grossly inflated property values across his assets — from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to Manhattan’s Trump Tower — to a “staggering” degree.

He did so to obtain favorable loans with lower interests and premiums, said James, who is running to be re-elected to her post in November.

The suit details tactics used by Trump and his associates, saying they would represent that he had cash on hand when he didn’t, change valuation properties wildly, and use “objectively false numbers to calculate property values” including at his famous triplex on Fifth Avenue.

“White collar financial crime is not a victimless crime,” James said.

“When the well-connected break the law to take in more money than they are entitled to, it reduces resources available to working people, to regular people, to small businesses and to all tax payers.”

James’ lawsuit requests that a judge appoint an independent authority to monitor the Trump Organization’s financial practices, and remove the Trumps from their own family business.

– Web of investigations –

New York authorities have been probing Trump and his family business since 2018, when the Manhattan district attorney opened a probe into the then-president who has long vied to present himself as a self-made billionaire.

James’ civil inquiry began the next year, after Trump’s former lawyer gave testimony that indicated the company had engaged in misconduct.

The DA’s criminal probe has not resulted in any charges as of yet.

Last month Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s long-time finance chief, pleaded guilty to tax fraud and agreed to testify at an upcoming criminal trial of the former US president’s real estate company.

He is to serve five months in prison contingent on his testifying truthfully at the October criminal trial of the Trump Organization on tax fraud charges, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said last month.

FBI agents separately searched Trump’s palatial Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on August 8 and seized numerous boxes of documents, including some marked “Top Secret,” “Secret” and “Confidential.”

His lawyers have tried to block the government’s access to those files, requesting that an independent arbiter sort through the documents to determine if any fall under special legal privileges.

A federal judge sided with Trump and allowed the appointment of a so-called special master, though the government appealed her decision to block their access to those documents marked as classified.

A three-judge appellate panel, two of whom were nominated by Trump, agreed on Wednesday that government should regain access to the classified documents.

Trump is also facing legal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the results of the November 2020 election and over the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

The Swiss will vote Sunday on whether to ban intensive livestock farming in the largely rural country, which already has some of the world’s strictest animal welfare laws.

The animal rights and welfare organisations behind the initiative want to make protecting the dignity of farm animals like cattle, chickens or pigs a constitutional requirement.

Their proposal, which received more than the 100,000 signatures needed to put any issue to a popular vote under Switzerland’s famous direct democracy system, would essentially eradicate all factory farming.

“We believe animal agriculture is one of the defining problems of our time,” animal welfare group Sentience, which presented the initiative, says on its website.

It points to the “immense suffering experienced by animals on factory farms,” but also to scientific studies showing that “industrial animal husbandry is disastrous for the environment and detrimental to our health”.

If accepted, the initiative — which has the backing of left-leaning parties, Greenpeace and other environmental organisations — would impose stricter minimum requirements for animal-friendly housing and care, access to outdoors, and slaughtering practices.

It would also significantly shrink the maximum number of animals per pen.

– Price hikes –

The government and parliament oppose the initiative, insisting that Switzerland already has strict animal welfare laws defining how much living space each animal should have.

The initiative “goes too far,” Swiss Health Minister Alain Berset told reporters in June, maintaining that the government for the past quarter century had been promoting “respectful animal husbandry”.

According to the current laws, farms cannot keep more than 1,500 fattening pigs, 27,000 broiler chickens or 300 calves, basically ruling out the kinds of massive factory farms seen in other countries.

“There is no factory farming in Switzerland,” insisted Marcel Dettling, a farmer and parliamentarian with the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party.

Pointing out that limits in neighbouring Germany for instance can be 100 times higher, he told Swissinfo.ch that the initiative would only serve to hike prices. 

Sentience campaign manager Philipp Ryf, however, said that when you have 27,000 chickens crammed into a pen and only 12 percent of farm animals ever go outside, “we do think that is factory farming”.

He acknowledged to AFP that the law in Switzerland “is quite strong compared to other countries”, but added: “We don’t necessarily think that’s a good metric.”

“We want to look at what we are doing… We think we could be doing more.”

The government has also warned that if the initiative passes, prices would swell, and has cautioned it could also impact relations with trading partners.

This is because the requirements would also apply to the import of animals and animal products, which the government says would force Switzerland to violate its World Trade Organization obligations and to renegotiate trade agreements.

The Swiss would also have to invest large amounts in costly inspections of foreign farms, it argues.

– ‘Misconception’ –

Such arguments appear to have convinced a growing number of Swiss.

While early polls indicated that a slim majority was in favour of the initiative, the latest gfs.bern poll last week saw the “no” camp take the lead, with 52 percent of those questioned opposed to the move.

The farmers themselves appear particularly sceptical. 

The latest poll showed 62 percent of those questioned in rural areas rejecting the proposal, while 53 percent of city-dwellers surveyed said they would vote in favour.

Ryf said the strong opposition in rural areas was largely due to a well-funded campaign by the initiative’s opponents that had spread the “misconception” it would be bad for farmers.

“We regret that, because we do believe that our initiative will be good for farmers,” he said, pointing out that it would provide them support and 25 years to implement the changes.

While Switzerland’s largest farmers association is staunchly opposed to the initiative, many of those running smaller farms support it. 

David Rotzler, who has a small, diverse livestock farm in Sonvilier in northern Switzerland, told the Journal du Jura daily that “animal welfare does not depend on the size of the farm, but on the farmer”.

But, he said, it is certainly “easier to care for animals when you are smaller”.