Who is Guo Wengui
Earlier this month, a sunburned Steve Bannon, holding a lit cigar and wearing a blue polo shirt with the collar turned up, stood in front of a camera on a yacht owned by his friend Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire.
A YouTube video shows Wengui putting his arm around Bannon
as the former Trump campaign chairman denounces the Chinese government and
extols the alleged benefits of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The
vessel's lavish interior gleams in the background.
On Thursday, Bannon was arrested by FBI agents on that same
yacht off Westbrook, Connecticut, and booked into jail on fraud charges. Though
the charges appear to have nothing to do with the Chinese businessman, the
arrest puts a new spotlight on Bannon's relationship with Guo, a controversial
figure with his own history of legal entanglements.
Multiple people familiar with the matter tell NBC News there
is a separate federal inquiry involving a company linked to both men, GTV Media
Group. As the Wall Street Journal first reported Wednesday, the FBI, the New
York State Attorney General and the Securities and Exchange Commission are
examining whether securities laws were violated during a $300 million private
offering by the company this spring, the sources say. In a memo to potential
investors, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company identified Bannon
as one of several prominent directors.
Last month, investigators with the Mercer Island Police Department in Washington state took an incident report from an unidentified victim who had become an investor in GTV Media Group Inc., with the promise it was launching a video-sharing platform, similar to YouTube, "that was supposed to go huge," according to an official familiar with the matter.
The investor wired $500,000 to receive shares in the company by the end of May,
but never received shares and wasn't able to get in contact with the reported
suspect, the report stated. As of July 10, local authorities noted that no
crime had been charged, and the FBI was investigating the matter.
The Mercer Island PD incident report identified the suspect
as Guo Wengui, describing him as a "billionaire" based out of New
York, and noted there were other victims. When Mercer Island police contacted
the FBI, local investigators learned that Wengui appeared "to be a target
of a large investigation personally and pertaining to his business,"
according to an official familiar with the matter.
When they followed up, investigators in Washington learned
FBI agents had been investigating the case for about a month. "The victims
that have been calling the FBI, FTC, and local police agencies have been
reporting fraud for a failure to return on promised investments," the
official said.
Guo's lawyer declined to comment, and Guo himself could not
be reached.
Guo, who sometimes goes by Miles Kwok, is a mysterious and
polarizing figure — a self-styled crusader against Chinese Communist corruption
who has drawn the ire of the Chinese government but has also been sued by other
Chinese dissidents. A former female employee alleges in an ongoing lawsuit that
he repeatedly raped her, a charge he disputes. And a former Trump aide, Sam
Nunberg, is among many who have sued Guo alleging defamation; he denies the
allegations.
"Utilizing his world-wide publicity, high profile,
social media accounts, and seemingly endless financial means, Defendant Guo
regularly uses his public platform and power to defame and harass his
enemies," Nunberg's suit says. "In this case, Guo set his sights on
destroying Plaintiff Samuel Nunberg's reputation and livelihood by filing
baseless litigation against him and slandering Nunberg with malicious, false
lies which discredit Nunberg both personally and professionally."
Nunberg's suit is ongoing.
Guo, who by all accounts made his money in real estate and
securities, portrays himself in interviews and court records as an exiled
whistleblower, proving an inside account of breathtaking corruption at the
heart of the Chinese system.
"Guo is a pioneer of using YouTube and Twitter to fight
for the rule of law, human rights, freedom and democracy in China," his
lawyers wrote in court papers in a federal lawsuit in Maryland against a
self-described Chinese democracy activist. "Guo has exposed widespread
corruption in the Chinese Communist Party ("CCP"), multiple senior
officials of the Chinese Government, and their family members."
That lawsuit itself offers an illustration of the divisions
of opinion about Guo: The defendant, Hongkuan Li, a well known dissident who
says he participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, accused Guo on
social media of being a "gangster," a "communist spy
puppy," "a rapist" and of "suffering from
schizophrenia," Guo's lawyers wrote, charges they say are all false.
That lawsuit purports to recount Guo's history, which
includes a 1989 incident he says turned him against the Chinese government.
As police sought to arrest him for supporting the Tiananmen
protests, the suit says, "Two drunken policemen raided Guo's office and
fired their weapons directly at his young wife, who was holding his three-month-old
baby daughter. His younger brother…tried to protect Guo's wife and daughter and
was shot twice in the altercation," the suit says.
Guo's brother was sent to the hospital, the suit says, but
"the policemen who shot him instructed the doctors to refuse him any
medical care and locked the door." As a result, he died, and Guo
"vowed to become a persistent and brave advocate against the Chinese
kleptocracy," the suit says.
As a New York Times magazine profile pointed out in 2018,
that timeline doesn't appear to explain why Guo spent the next two decades
growing rich in China through real estate development, a business that
typically requires close cooperation with government officials even in
democracies, let alone an authoritarian state like China. In nearly three
decades after his brother's death, there is no record of Guo taking a public
stand against the party he says caused it, the Times wrote.
There are darker allegations against Guo than hypocrisy,
however. A lawsuit filed in New York state by a 28-year-old Chinese woman says
Guo lured her to the U.S. from China to work as his assistant and then kept her
prisoner for three years, repeatedly assaulting and raping her. The suit says
she escaped while in London and went to the Chinese embassy, and that she filed
a criminal complaint with Chinese authorities.
Guo's lawyers have denied the allegations in court papers. A
lawyer for Guo told that Guo reiterated his denial of the allegations.
In a statement, the lawyer for Guo also said, “Mr. Guo is
aware of the situation involving Mr. Bannon who has been a strong ally in
fighting for freedom and democracy in China. Mr. Guo’s past efforts with Mr.
Bannon in fighting for democracy in China had nothing to do with the We Build
the Wall organization or Mr. Bannon’s activities with that organization. Mr.
Guo appreciates that unlike the Chinese Communist Party, the United States of
America affords all individuals accused in the United States, including Mr.
Bannon, the presumption of innocence and the right for a fair trial before an
impartial judge.”
In 2017, as Guo's public profile in the U.S. began to grow,
a journalist from the Voice of America, a government-funded news service,
arranged to interview him. The plan was to broadcast a live interview for three
hours on social media, but top officials at Voice of America ordered it stopped
after an hour and 20 minutes, according to documents and interviews, because
they were concerned he was making unverified allegations.
Guo accused the VOA of having been infiltrated by Chinese
intelligence, a serious charge that threw the agency into turmoil. But an
investigation by independent journalism experts—and a separate State Department
inspector general's inquiry — concluded that the decision was based solely on
journalistic principles, VOA officials said. The journalist who arranged the
interview, the chief of VOA's Mandarin Service, was fired.
In a 2019 tweet, the journalist, Sasha Gong, quoted Bannon
as saying, "Voice of America tried to clear out all truth-tellers about
China in Mandarin Service. VOA executives betrayed American people, Chinese
people."
Earlier this year, a Bannon ally, Michael Pack, became the
head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which includes the VOA, after a long
confirmation delay in his Senate confirmation.
The veteran journalists in charge of the VOA, Amanda Bennett
and Sandra Sugawara — both of whom were involved in the decision to stop the
Guo interview — immediately resigned.
Comments
Post a Comment