A billionaire businessman accused of meddling in Australian politics on China’s behalf was a coconspirator in a plot to bribe a top UN official, a senior Australian politician has said.
Lawmaker Andrew Hastie, who chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, used the legal protection of parliamentary privilege to say that Chinese-Australian Chau Chak Wing (周澤榮) was a figure codenamed CC-3 by the FBI.
“CC-3 is Dr Chau Chak Wing,” Hastie said in a speech on Tuesday. “The same man who coconspired to bribe the UN president of the General Assembly, John Ashe. The same man with extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party.”
He said the reasons CC-3 had not been charged were “best undisclosed.”
Beijing yesterday blasted the disclosure during a news briefing, calling it “purely a sheer fabrication out of nothing.”
Ashe, an Antiguan who was UN General Assembly president for a year from September 2013, was accused of accepting bribes from Chinese businesspeople.
He was arrested in 2015 and died a year later.
The scandal prompted the UN to overhaul financial oversight of the General Assembly president’s office.
Several people involved the conspiracy have previously been named and some have been jailed, but the identity of CC-3 has never been made public.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was caught off guard by the revelation, saying he had not been forewarned by Hastie and had sought advice from national security agencies on the implications of publicly revealing intelligence from an ally.
However, he also said that the allegations were not new, “and I do not propose to say anything more about them, because they are subject to judicial proceedings.”
Chau last year was at the center of an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corp and Fairfax Media, which said he and another man had donated millions to Australian political parties over a decade.
Chau has consistently denied any links to the Chinese Communist Party or the UN scandal, and is suing the two media organizations.
His lawyer in that defamation case, Mark O’Brien, yesterday told the Australian that Hastie had slandered his client and the reason Chau was given the CC-3 pseudonym was to protect his reputation.
Hastie said he was partly motivated to speak out because of Chau’s lawsuit.
“My concern is that defamation cases can have a chilling effect on our free press,” Hastie said.
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