Sweden’s ambassador to China is under internal investigation over a meeting she arranged between the daughter of a detained Swedish publisher and two Chinese businessmen who the daughter has said threatened her father.
Swedish Ambassador to China Anna Lindstedt on Wednesday returned to Stockholm to meet with officials from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish embassy in Beijing said by telephone.
Lindstedt is not under criminal investigation.
Photo: AFP
The ministry later confirmed that Lindstedt’s departure was related to meetings she arranged between Angela Gui, the daughter of detained Swedish book publisher Gui Minhai (桂民海), and the two businessmen.
“The ambassador has acted incorrectly in the sense that the foreign ministry had no knowledge that the meetings took place,” ministry spokeswoman Catherine Johnsson told reporters.
The internal investigation was aimed at getting “an overall picture of what has happened,” and that “as far as the action of the ambassador is concerned, we must wait for what the inquiry will come up with,” Johnsson said.
Angela Gui on Wednesday published an account in which she described the meetings as “strange.”
She wrote on Medium, an online publishing platform, that the businessmen threatened her after initially offering to help secure her father’s release from prison in China.
Gui Minhai, a naturalized Swedish citizen, co-owned a Hong Kong bookstore that sold gossipy books about Chinese leaders.
The 53-year-old went missing in 2015 from his seaside home in Thailand, turning up months later on Chinese TV saying that he had turned himself in for an alleged 2003 drunken driving accident in which a female college student was killed.
Several of Gui Minhai’s colleagues from his Hong Kong publishing house also went missing in quick succession, sparking suspicions that Chinese security forces were seeking to snuff out independent voices in the semi-autonomous territory.
He was released in October 2017 after completing a two-year sentence, but committed to remaining in Ningbo, China, where he was born, until an investigation was completed into charges of running a business illegally.
In January last year, he was taken off a train by Chinese police while in the presence of two Swedish diplomats with whom he was traveling to Beijing.
Sweden said its officials were taking him to seek medical treatment.
China said that Gui Minhai was being investigated for leaking state secrets.
Gui Minhai later told pro-Beijing media outlets that he never wished to leave China and that Sweden was using his case to “create trouble” for China’s government.
The statement from Gui Minhai, who spoke in a detention facility flanked by police, was immediately denounced by rights activists as coerced.
Angela Gui is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge who has become a self-described “accidental activist” for her father.
She on Wednesday wrote that the role has landed her in a “fair number of bizarre situations,” but few of the same magnitude as her encounter with Lindstedt and the Chinese businessmen.
She said that Lindstedt convinced her to fly to Stockholm on Jan. 24 to explore a “new approach” to her father’s case.
During a two-day meeting with the businessmen and Lindstedt, she said that the businessmen told her they could arrange a Chinese visa and job for her, and that they had connections within the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
She said that they then told her they had already started to negotiate over her father’s case without her prior knowledge.
She cited one businessman as saying that it was possible that Gui Minhai would be released, but only if she promised to stop publicizing her father’s case for a month.
Angela Gui wrote that one of the men told her: “You have to trust me, or you will never see your father again.”
She said that she later learned that no one at the ministry had been informed of the meeting.
“I’m not going to be quiet in exchange for a visa and an arbitrary promise that my father ‘might’ be released,” she wrote. “Threats, verbal abuse, bribes, or flattery won’t change that.”
Sweden last month announced — prior to the incident described by Angela Gui — that Lindstedt was leaving the Beijing post to become ambassador for UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
She was to start in the new position next month.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of