Sansiri will add another condominium on the Wireless Road. (Photo supplied by the company) Despite a spate of challenges, SET-listed developer Sansiri Plc (SIRI) remains bullish on its sales prospects and will almost double its number of new projects to 21 worth 50.5 billion baht this year.It aims at having 42 billion baht in presales this year, up 50% from last year. President Srettha Thavisin said 2016 would be a challenging year due to several negative factors including the political and economic situations. "The government's initiatives, particularly investment in infrastructure nationwide, can help boost market sentiment," he said. "Other positive factors include low interest rates, which raise housing affordability, declining oil prices, which reduce development costs, and property tax incentives, which can boost housing demand in the first half." Seven of Sansiri's 21 new projects will be single houses in Greater Bangkok, Udon Thani and Phuket, where demand remains strong.

Three projects will be townhouses, mainly with unit prices of more than 3.1 million baht. It will also develop 11 condo projects worth 23 billion baht, with six under a joint venture with Bangkok Mass Transit System Plc. One of the five projects developed by Sansiri alone will be 98 Wireless, where it will introduce its highest-ever price per square metre at 630,000 baht. With a sales value of 8 billion baht, the project on Wireless Road in Bangkok will have 77 units that will be launched in the fourth quarter.Eco Friendly Toilet Partitions "There were no bank rejections in the high-end segment last year because the segment rarely got an impact from the economic slowdown," Mr Srettha said. Vampire Atv Tires Sizes"The low-end segment was hit by lower purchasing power, high household debt and decreasing prices of agricultural products."Doberman Puppies For Sale In Dallas Area

Most projects this year will focus on the middle- to upper-end segment, where condos priced higher than 100,000 baht per sq m account for 86% of the market and single houses priced higher than 5 million baht represent 88%. Sansiri aims to achieve 42 billion baht in presales, up from 28.5 billion in 2015, which increased from only 8.8 billion in 2014. Revenue will decrease to 36 billion baht from last year's record 38 billion. As of the end of 2015, Sansiri had a sales backlog of 38.1 billion baht. It also had an inventory worth 9 billion baht, with about half of units qualifying for property tax incentives. The company will continue overseas investment, aiming for gross profit of about 28% from residential development in London. It plans to renovate a three-storey office building of 3,000 sq m near Oxford Street into residential units for sale in the next three years after rental contracts with tenants expire. It bought the building last year for £10 million (513 million baht).

SIRI shares closed yesterday on the SET at 1.45 baht, down one satang, in trade worth 117 million baht.Seven years have passed since federal agents raided the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, seizing dozens of Thai antiquities in a dramatic operation to bust smugglers and repatriate allegedly looted cultural artifacts trafficked to museums across Southern California.The artifacts never made it home to Thailand. In fact, they never made it out of the museum. Federal agents tagged them as evidence and ordered the Mingei to keep them in the vault. Nearly 70 items, most of them pottery, jewelry and other pieces from Thailand’s ancient Ban Chiang culture, had been languishing in storage for the better part of a decade when U-T Watchdog inquired about the dormant case two weeks ago.WATCHDOGInvestigative tipsCall or text 858-224-BARKIn response to questions, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it had decided to let the artifacts go.“After a careful review of the matter, we are planning on lifting the ‘seizure in place’ order and directing the museum to repatriate the artifacts that we believe were illegally obtained,” Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, wrote in an email Friday.

“In short, the museum will soon be informed that it should not have possession of the items and it should take immediate steps to do whatever it can to return the items to their country of origin.”This was news to the museum’s attorney, Jerry Coughlan. He told the U-T that no one in the U.S. Attorney’s Office had contacted him or the museum about plans to release the artifacts from federal custody.“We can’t comment on something that we’ve haven’t heard from them at all about,” Coughlan said. “And we haven’t heard from them in years. This particular issue is not one we’ve ever had presented to us, so I can’t comment on that in any way.”Coughlan has long asserted that the Mingei did nothing wrong when it accepted the donated artifacts, although the federal investigation prompted the museum to tighten its policies for how it vets donations.It has been more than a decade since federal investigators went undercover to infiltrate an antiquities and tax-fraud operation tied to the Mingei, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.The investigation involved a private art gallery in Los Angeles, whose owners allegedly purchased artifacts that had been looted from the Ban Chiang World Heritage Site in Thailand and smuggled into the U.S.The Ban Chiang culture

existed in Thailand’s Udon Thani province, just south of the Laos border, and some of its most important archeological resources date from 1000 B.C. to 200 A.D. at the site in question.According to court records, the owners of Silk Roads Design Gallery sold the plundered artifacts to rich clients, then provided appraisals that far overstated the values. The clients then donated the artifacts to museums and used the overstated appraisals to claim inflated tax-write offs, thus defrauding the IRS, authorities said.At least eight people and one business identified as suspects during the undercover investigation were indicted, according to court records provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. An art gallery in Encino, the gallery’s owner, and another private art dealer pleaded guilty to crimes including illegal trafficking of archeological resources and selling merchandise imported contrary to law. The defendants were sentenced in 2012 to serve probation and pay fines and restitution.At least three people targeted in the lengthy investigation died before prosecutors could make their case.

One of them, pottery expert Roxanna Brown, died in federal custody shortly after she was indicted in 2008 for wire fraud. Brown’s family sued, claiming she died because authorities failed to treat a serious medical condition she suffered while in custody, and won an $880,000 settlement.There has not been any substantive litigation in the tax-fraud charges against the owners of the Silk Roads Gallery for reasons the U.S. Attorney’s Office could not discuss, Mrozek said. Two defendants in the investigation, both suspected smugglers, are expected to stand trial June 16 in Los Angeles.Over the years, some observers have questioned the efficacy of the federal effort.“The entire spectacle of it (the investigation) seemed out of proportion,” said Stephen K. Urice, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law who specializes in art, museum and cultural property issues. “Money for law enforcement is not unlimited, and I would love to know who the decision-maker was who thought that this case and these facts (rose) to this level of this concern that couldn’t be taken care of without a raid and just by talking to people at the museum.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has defended the investigation, saying it sparked a “sea change” in how art museums do business, and prompted stricter acquisition policies at many institutions.About six months after the museum raids, the Association of Art Museum Directors, which sets best practices for museums, released updated guidelines urging museums to significantly increase the number of years they trace provenance before acquiring new piece of archaeological material or ancient art. Mrozek said that the list of indictments is just the starting point of a much more complicated process, and does not reflect “the difficulty of investigating and prosecuting these cases, lengthy negotiations between the government and various parties involved in the investigation, and other considerations, such as working with foreign governments.” For example, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the process involved bringing in teams of domestic and foreign archaeologists to authenticate thousands of artifacts suspected of having been illegally imported, Mrozek said.

The archeologists then had to track each object back to the archeological site where it originated so that they could determine how much damage the thieves caused. Repatriating thousands of seized artifacts to Thai cultural authorities required “lengthy and complicated international negotiation” between the involved governments and parties to determine how to best accomplish the repatriation. When some 500 antiquities from the Bowers Museum finally arrived back in Thailand in October, Thai authorities praised the United States’ effort to return the stolen artifacts. They promptly identified some of the artifacts as fakes or reproductions, but said even those could aid anthropological research.For prosecutors, returning the artifacts from the Bowers was a significant accomplishment. But there are more items on the to-do list.“Now that we have resolved the matter as it related to the Bowers Museum and have seen the repatriation of hundreds of artifacts that were illegally exported from their country of origin, we are now turning attention to other matters,” Mrozek said Friday.It was unclear Wednesday who would be responsible for managing the complicated, time-consuming, and potentially expensive effort to return the Mingei artifacts home.