Guo Wengui is suspected of scamming thousands of individuals out of $1 billion through investment schemes
US arrests Chinese billionaire
FILE PHOTO: Guo Wengui in 2018. © DON EMMERT / AFP
The US government has charged fugitive Chinese businessman Guo Wengui with conspiracy to defraud investors. The tycoon allegedly scammed hundreds of thousands of online followers by luring them with his anti-Beijing rhetoric into investing money in his businesses, US officials say.
The indictments against the entrepreneur and business partner Kin Ming Je were unsealed on Wednesday. He was identified in legal papers under the name Ho Wan Kwok and five aliases, including ‘Brother Seven’, ‘The Principal’, but is best-known as Guo Wengui.
Both men were charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering, while his business partner was additionally charged with obstruction of justice. They are facing several decades in prison.
Guo was arrested on Wednesday morning and pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan federal court. His associate remains at large.
The Chinese businessman “led a complex conspiracy to defraud thousands of his online followers out of over $1 billion dollars,” US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams stated.
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A vocal critic of the Chinese government, Guo resided in the US since around 2015. He used purported nonprofit organizations to spread his political messages to accumulate a substantial online following. He then exploited the trust that he gained to cheat his followers out of money with promises of “outsized” investment returns, according to the allegations.
Guo is also a business associate of Steve Bannon, a former adviser to ex-US President Donald Trump. The two were in the media business together. In 2020, Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht, the Lady May, in an unrelated fraud case. Trump pardoned Bannon in the last days of his presidency.
The charges against Guo echo those he faced in his home country, where he was a real estate mogul before leaving in 2014. The Chinese authorities accused him of bribery and embezzlement, and placed him on an international wanted list through Interpol in 2017. Guo claimed to be a whistleblower seeking to expose Beijing’s wrongdoings.
Any moment now I am expecting John Cleese (a veteran of Monty Python) to jump out of the bushes and announce the creation of the Ministry of Silly Wars, with Donald Trump as the deranged leader. For you youngsters out there, Monty Python’s skit, The Ministry of Silly Walks, helped make the members of MP legends. I had to reference Monty Python because the line of bullshit the Trump administration is feeding the American people and the world about the amazing, obliterating US attack on Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday morning, is more ridiculous that all of the silly walks pictured in the following video:
My hopes that Donald Trump would finally act like a responsible adult are dashed. He’s a dangerous buffoon. While the team around him are working frantically to maintain the fiction that Trump has a vision and is calling the shots on the foreign policy front, he is careening around the globe like an out-of-control cue ball on a billiards table. It started a week ago… first, he claimed...
Tuesday marks the third anniversary of the launch of the Fujian, China's first aircraft carrier equipped with electromagnetic catapults. Official media said China is about to enter a three-aircraft-carrier era, with the Fujian expected to enter service by 2025.
After the launch of the Fujian on June 17, 2022, it carried out its first sea trial from May 1 to 8 in 2024. Since then, the Fujian has completed multiple sea trials, accumulating more than 100 days of sea trial, China Central Television (CCTV) News reported on Tuesday.
Wei Dongxu, a Chinese military affairs commentator, said that the aircraft carrier Fujian has been making steady progress in sea trials, and is expected to be commissioned within this year, CCTV News reported.
With a full displacement of more than 80,000 tons, the Fujian is the world's first conventionally powered aircraft carrier to feature electromagnetic catapult technologies, according to CCTV News. The report noted that it will carry a wide variety of carrier-borne...
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China and Central Asian countries have explored and formed the China-Central Asia Spirit, which features mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual benefit, mutual assistance, and the pursuit of common modernization through high-quality development.
Xi made the remarks in his speech at the second China-Central Asia Summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana.
Xi said that the Chinese side has decided to establish three cooperation centers and a trade facilitation platform within the China-Central Asia cooperation mechanism.
When addressing the summit, Xi said these institutions include the China-Central Asia poverty reduction cooperation center, the China-Central Asia education exchange cooperation center, the China-Central Asia desertification control cooperation center, as well as the China-Central Asia trade facilitation cooperation....more below
