China’s highest profile fugitive, exiled billionaire Guo Wengui (郭文貴), is under attack from a former business partner who claims Guo got him framed for crimes he says he did not commit.
After having a conviction for embezzling 855 million yuan (US$130 million) from a company owned by Guo quashed, Qu Long (曲龍) said he is out for revenge.
“When he returns I will sue him in China,” Qu said of Guo, two days after being released from jail where he served six years of a 15-year sentence. “If he can’t return, I will sue him in the United States. As long as he is on the face of this Earth, I will find a lawyer and make him pay.”
In its ruling on Tuesday last week, the Hebei High People’s Court said there was not enough evidence to support the embezzlement conviction.
Qu’s interview with Reuters was arranged by the Chinese authorities, who also provided briefings by three members of a special police taskforce investigating Guo, who is living in New York.
Chinese officials said they wanted to get Qu’s narrative out through the Western media to counteract a barrage of Internet postings by Guo.
The officials and police involved in the case said that after an investigation that began in 2015 they had discovered that the charges against Qu were fabricated by Guo and government officials Guo had allegedly bribed, including Ma Jian (馬建), the former counterintelligence chief at China’s spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.
Ma was put under investigation for alleged corruption in 2015 and was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the following year. He remains in detention and Reuters was unable to reach him for comment.
Guo did not respond to requests for comment about Qu.
His New York-based lawyer, Josh Schiller, said Qu’s threat was “further persecution of Guo in order to silence his speech.”
Guo, who left China in late 2014 shortly before Ma was detained, has previously denied bribing government officials and says accusations leveled against him are politically motivated.
The police and other Chinese officials who talked to Reuters provided no evidence to support their bribery assertions in the case. Reuters was unable to independently confirm whether Guo engaged in any wrongdoing.
Guo is currently living in a US$68 million apartment overlooking Manhattan from where he has been using social media to make a series of incendiary, though mostly unverifiable, claims of corruption in the top levels of the Chinese government.
The Chinese authorities are trying to repatriate Guo, who applied for US political asylum earlier this month. In April, at Beijing’s request, Interpol issued a “red notice” seeking Guo’s arrest on corruption-related charges.
The same month, a video confession from Ma surfaced online, detailing 10 instances where he claimed he abused his power to benefit Guo in exchange for more than 60 million yuan in bribes, including conspiring to detain and frame Qu.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm the events that Ma cited.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS