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.
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – The impact of the ongoing federal shutdown on the US economy is far worse than expected because it is lasting much longer than anticipated, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on Friday.
"The impact on the economy is far worse than we expected, because it's gone on for so long," Hassett told Fox Business. "I think we were thinking that we could have at least 3% [GDP] growth in the fourth quarter. I think now we're expecting something like half that because of the harm [caused] by the Democrats' policy.".......more here
https://sputnikglobe.com/20251107/federal-shutdown-hitting-us-economy-harder-than-expected--white-house-1123074810.html
Dozens of Palestinians, foreign activists, and journalists have been wounded as Israeli army-backed settlers carried out coordinated assaults across the occupied West Bank.
The attacks took place on Saturday, with the biggest number of the casualties, namely 17 people, being caused after settlers raided the outskirts of the Abu Falah village, northeast of the city of Ramallah, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported. Those injured included foreign activists.
According to the agency, settlers also torched a home, while Israeli forces attacked the area, targeting the residents, who had gathered near the scene. The latter incident, though, did not lead to any casualties.
In another wave of violence, settlers launched attacks on Palestinian farmers, journalists, and foreign activists participating in the annual olive harvest across several towns, leaving many with fractures and bruises.
The attacks were most severe in Beita, south of Nablus, where settlers descended from nearby outposts and ambushed ...
