Chinese authorities are investigating whether millions of dollars embezzled by a former rail company executive has been laundered through New Zealand, a report said yesterday.
Liu Guiting (劉貴亭), the former head of China’s first publicly listed rail company, gained New Zealand residency in 2002 and bought property through companies belonging to his wife and daughter.
He was jailed for life in China last year on a raft of charges including misappropriating 100 million yuan (US$14.6 million), taking 500,000 yuan in bribes and paying millions more under the table to government officials.
However, Chinese government documents show the total amount misappropriated is thought to be several hundred million dollars more, the Sunday Star-Times reported.
Liu’s wife, Yang Limin (楊麗敏), and daughter, Jasmine Liu (劉楊), live in New Zealand and are under investigation for suspected money laundering, according to Chinese justice ministry documents.
Yang appeared in the High Court in Auckland on Friday in an ongoing civil case she has brought against Paul Chen (陳保羅), a former business partner she says breached fiduciary duty and misappropriated assets of her companies.
Chen is being held in China as a witness against Liu.
A Chinese government lawyer sat in on the hearing and confirmed that his government was interested in learning what happened to the stolen rail company money.
Up to US$13 million may have been invested in New Zealand, the newspaper report said.
In court, Yang confirmed her husband had transferred money to New Zealand to buy property, but she said she did not know exactly where the money came from.
She said that when she first arrived in New Zealand in 2002 she regularly traveled to China to visit her husband, but that she had not returned since his arrest in 2006.
An affidavit to the court says that the Chinese justice ministry wished to interview Yang and her daughter “over the evidence which has been uncovered linking them to the movement and control of the missing money.”
They were “named in evidence as being accomplices involved in receiving misappropriated money as well as being implicated in ... laundering the money out of China and thereafter from country to country and bank account to bank account,” the affidavit said.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has warned that graft threatens to undermine the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy and in recent months has repeatedly called for a continued crackdown on corruption.
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