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.
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