Investigation: Blood Profits: How the Junta funds a black market empire through Jade,Oil, and Ethnic Plunder

DVB Myanmar
Jun 18, 2025
4 min read

Myanmar junta air strike on market kills 15 civilians, with fumes of destruction billowing out of innocents’ lodgings (Image: Agence France-Presse, South China Morning Post)

The junta has ruined so many innocents with weapons of mass destruction. How

do they possess the capital for these attacks? The DVB finds out.

HPAKANT, KACHIN STATE

“I feel guilty for surviving.” Si Thu Phyo was just a 21-year-old trying to make a basic living off his mining job in Myanmar, common for an average Burmese citizen under the Junta. He was scavenging for leftover gemstones when he felt an intense tremor on the ground.

As the landslide was crashing down, Si Thu and countless others tried to flee for their lives, but it was impossible to outrun such a disaster. Si Thu was dragged under the water and mud. When interviewed, he said: "My mouth was full of mud, the stones were hitting me and the waves pushed me under again and again," and “thought I was going to die”.

Si Thu, in a miracle, was able to swim out and emerge alive. However, others were not as lucky.

Under intense pressure by the international community, the Myanmar government formed an investigative committee, but no results were yielded, with the Minister for Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, Ohn Win, blaming the catastrophe on “greedy” miners.

Junta-led Conglomerates: The illicit financial backbone of the Tatmadaw

The fact that Myanmar’s junta, led by Min Aung Hliang, is one of the most heavily sanctioned and internationally criticised organisations in the world, yet has the funds and resources to sustain its domestic and military operations should draw some concern.

There is no single source of revenue for the regime. A patchwork of companies, headquartered in countries around the world, conduct business in war-torn Myanmar, with the proceeds backing their operations.

Across the Junta’s coup for the past 4 years, several companies across the

ASEAN region and even in Australia, providing them with the funds for aviation fuel and dangerous weapons — all used in their civil war. The Junta’s economic stronghold is also financed by two main military-controlled conglomerates namely the Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) and Myanma Economic Holdings Limited (MEHL). controlling everything from jade to finances to tourism.

According to Amnesty International, Myanmar’s military has received an $18 billion payout through 1990 to 2020, funding its illicit operations. Being exempt from taxation and opaque in operation, these conglomerates funnel money into Tatmadaw, with soldiers forced to buy MEHL shares, their salaries paid likewise, channeling profits straight into the junta’s hands.

Silenced Voices

Whether Shan, Kayin, Rakhine, or Karen, the minority ethnic groups in Myanmar are blessed with bountiful resources. The extraction of such resources — jade, timber, oil, and gas, makes up roughly 60% of Myanmar’s total gross domestic product.

While ethnic minorities fight for their rights to exist, elsewhere corporations

engage in unsustainable and exploitative resource extraction practices on their

homelands.

China, for one, has covertly been conducting jade mining operations in fringe states, with a strong domestic market for jade products. These resources are stripped from the land, without compensation for the ethnic communities that live there, fuelling a thriving black market based on the hard labour of Burmese citizens. Meanwhile, deforestation en masse by large multinational corporations conducting work as usual has led to the muddying of rivers, which once supplied communities with drinking water

The ethnic minorities suffer in silence. The junta actively engages in its

systematic persecution. Who can they turn to?

The world is completely oblivious to their plight. They are the people who will fall

through the tracks, faceless, nameless, marginalised.

The social and cultural impact will be devastating. And we will have no way to document, to fight for these oppressed peoples’ rights in an international community, one that remains on the fence about whether or not to intervene in Myanmar.

Impactless sanctions, law evasions.

In the AFMM conference, the Burmese delegation introduced a “Mineral Cost Observatory” and “Environmental Research Initiative”, and “Downstream Processing Hubs”.

With this proposal, the Junta is visibly trying to legitimize itself despite its illegal mining and deforestation attempts. The observatories run by the Junta are meaningless - they simply cannot be trusted to take accountability due to their existing circumvention of international norms. Besides, the idea of “downstream hubs” just acts as a facade for the junta’s

backdoor funneling of foreign capital into its war economy.

Urgent action is required

The junta continues to enrich itself at the cost of democracy and human lives, all while the world feigns ignorance and pushes for “diplomacy” that clearly is not an option. The world has to act, intervening in the worsening crisis Myanmar is facing to prevent unnecessary death and suffering, holding the junta accountable for its atrocities.

Written by Aaron Tan Rui Ze, Tham Harkman, and Chen Chak Kai

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