A self-exiled Chinese billionaire tycoon, Guo Wengui, was sentenced to 30 years in a US prison on Monday for financial fraud that a federal judge said cost more than 1,000 people worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars. Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan also ordered Guo to forfeit $889 million in restitution.

Guo, once believed to be among China's wealthiest men, fled China a decade ago and reinvented himself in the US as a critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A jury unanimously found him guilty of fraud, securities offenses, wire fraud, and money laundering in 2024. The FBI arrested him the year prior in his luxury Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park.

At sentencing, Torres said Guo, also known as Miles Guo, “preyed on those seeking to bring Democracy to China,” taking their money to live lavishly. She read snippets of victim letters describing lost life savings, severe anxiety, and shame. Guo, she said, took no responsibility and “instead insists, incredibly, his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.”

Victim Wei Chen testified that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and her family’s. Prosecutors had sought at least 30 years, calling his “astounding” fraud from 2018 to 2023 a “wreckage of victims and families devastated financially, emotionally, and psychologically.”

Guo’s lawyers argued he was a victim of the CCP’s “grand, pervasive, and life-threatening” pursuit, claiming a lengthy prison term would validate China’s smear campaign and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life.”

Guo, who made his fortune in real estate, moved to the US in 2015. Based in New York, he portrayed himself as a fierce critic of the Chinese government and a staunch defender of democracy, while maintaining ties with US right-wing figure Steve Bannon. Together, they formed a lobbying group opposed to the CCP, the New Federal State of China. Bannon was arrested in 2020 on Guo’s yacht in a case involving embezzlement tied to a US border wall project.

Source: www.aljazeera.com