Chinese aluminum maker defiant despite $1.8bn US fraud verdict

LOS ANGELES — A federal jury Monday found a half-dozen Southern California corporate entities guilty of participating in a wide-ranging wire-and-customs fraud scheme in which huge amounts of aluminum were disguised as pallets to avoid $1.8 billion in customs duties.

The bogus pallets were exported to the United States and “sold” to fraudulently inflate a China-based company’s revenues and deceive investors worldwide, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The jury found the following two aluminum businesses and four warehousing companies — all of which were related to one another — guilty of one count of conspiracy, nine counts of wire fraud and seven counts of passing false and fraudulent papers through a customhouse:

— Perfectus Aluminium Inc., an Ontario-based business;

— Perfectus Aluminium Acquisitions LLC, a subsidiary of Perfectus Aluminium formed in 2014 to oversee several companies that received aluminum pallets shipped to the United States after duties were imposed on Chinese aluminum in 2011;

— Scuderia Development LLC, which owns a warehouse in Riverside;

— 1001 Doubleday LLC, which owns a warehouse in Ontario;

— Von Karman — Main Street LLC, which owns a warehouse in Irvine; and

— 10681 Production Avenue LLC, which owns a warehouse in Fontana.

The two Perfectus companies also were found guilty of seven additional counts of international promotional money laundering.

U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner scheduled a Dec. 13 sentencing hearing in the case.

According to evidence presented at the nine-day trial in Los Angeles, China Zhongwang Holdings Ltd., Asia’s largest manufacturer of aluminum extrusions, Zhongtian Liu, the company’s former president and chairman, several individual defendants and the corporate defendants found guilty Monday lied to U.S. Customs and Border Protection to avoid paying the United States $1.8 billion in anti-dumping and countervailing duties that were imposed in 2011 on certain types of extruded aluminum imported into the United States from China.

The aluminum sold to United States-based companies controlled by Liu was simply aluminum extrusions that were spot-welded together to make them appear to be functional pallets. In fact, there were no customers for the 2.2 million pallets imported by the Liu-controlled companies between 2011 and 2014, and no pallets were ever sold, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The vast majority of the pallets were imported through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and then stockpiled at four large warehouses in Southern California, all of which were purchased at Liu’s direction, prosecutors said.

Liu and his co-defendants orchestrated the bogus sales of aluminum to Liu-controlled companies in Southern California to falsely inflate China Zhongwang’s value, according to court documents. Liu was the majority owner of China Zhongwang, which has been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since a 2009 initial public offering that raised $1.26 billion.

Since there was no actual demand for the pallets, defendants Liu and China Zhongwang arranged for aluminum melting facilities to be built and acquired, which were to be used to reconfigure the aluminum imported as pallets into a form with commercial value, according to federal prosecutors.

The defendants facilitated their schemes by laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through shell companies to the U.S.-based aluminum companies controlled by Liu. The funds were then transferred to China Zhongwang and the other shell companies as payments for the aluminum, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Four remaining defendants charged in the 2019 federal grand jury indictment have yet to appear in court in the United States to face the criminal charges in this matter. They are:

— Liu, 57, a billionaire Chinese citizen who is a onetime Tustin resident and the former president and former chairman of the board of China Zhongwang Holdings Ltd.;

— China Zhongwang Holdings Ltd., a publicly traded aluminum company based in Liaoyang City that at the time of the indictment was the largest aluminum extrusion manufacturer in Asia and the second largest in the world;

— Zhaohua Chen, 62, a Chinese national who allegedly was a close friend of Liu and a key player in the scheme; and

— Xiang Chun Shao, also known as “Johnson Shao,” 60, most recently of Irvine, who allegedly managed a collection of Southern California businesses that pretended to be independent third parties importing the Chinese aluminum.

In 2017, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed civil forfeiture actions against the four Southern California warehouses used by Perfectus to store the pallets.

In 2018, the government filed a fifth civil forfeiture complaint targeting 279,808 aluminum structures in the shape of pallets — about half of which were seized in early 2017 at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the other half were seized from three other warehouses Perfectus was using to store the pallets.

The civil asset forfeiture cases have been stayed pending the completion of the criminal prosecution, in which the government is seeking the forfeiture of the warehouses and seized aluminum, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.