Self-exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui gets 30 years in US prison for fraud conviction

NEW YORK (AP) — A self-exiled billionaire Chinese business tycoon once believed to be among China's wealthiest men was sentenced Monday to 30 years in a U.S. prison for a massive financial fraud.

Guo Wengui, who fled China a decade ago and reinvented himself as a U.S.-based Communist Party critic, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan.

Given a chance to speak before hearing his sentence, Guo protested his treatment in jail, saying he fainted and fell down at 5 a.m. Monday. He said doctors at a hospital said he should stay there for treatment, but he was returned to jail and repeatedly vomited on the trip back. He said a doctor visited him in jail before he was brought to the courthouse.

“When I came here, I said I have a stomach ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well,” Guo said through an interpreter.

“The reason I came to the U.S. was to destroy the CCP,” Guo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The judge, in sentencing him, read snippets of letters she received from victims who described losing their life savings and developing fear, severe anxiety and losing family members.

"Mr. Guo preyed on those seeking to bring democracy to China,” Torres said.

She also said that to this day, Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists incredibly his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.” She said he “has called upon supporters to harass and intimidate those who dare to speak out against him.”

Guo grew so close to conservative political strategist Steve Bannon that they announced a joint initiative to overthrow the Chinese government in 2020. He lived in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park and had joined President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Florida golf club before his New York arrest and detention without bail three years ago.

Prosecutors had asked that he serve at least 30 years in prison, saying his "astonishing" fraud from 2018 to 2023 “destroyed hundreds of lives” and left “a wreckage of victims and families who have been devastated financially, emotionally, and psychologically” despite his claims that many followers still trust him.

Prosecutors said in court papers that his ill-gotten riches fueled “a lifestyle of extraordinary excess and indulgence, a gilded life of mansions, yachts, race cars, designer clothes and luxury furnishings.”

Guo was convicted of nine of 12 criminal charges during a seven-week trial that prosecutors said showcased his deception of thousands of investors in bogus deals that enabled Guo's lavish lifestyle.

In a court filing, Guo's lawyers wrote that he was the victim of the Chinese Communist Party's “grand, pervasive, and life threatening” pursuit of him. They alleged that the party recruited elites in U.S. business, entertainment and politics to conspire against him.

They said in presentence court papers that a lengthy prison term would only validate China's smear campaign and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life.” They said defendants sentenced in similar cases received prison terms of two to four years.

The lawyers noted that a court probation officer wrote to the sentencing judge that Guo, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, had scars and disfigurements from physical torture he endured in China and subsequent surgeries he underwent from 1993 to 2022 to repair the injuries.

The Probation Department recommended a 25-year prison sentence and cited “astronomical losses” of over $1 billion for victims, the government noted in court papers.

Defense lawyers said Guo's wealth grew as his family became the largest shareholder of China's largest publicly traded securities company, but he became a target of Chinese government officials as he exposed them as corrupt and they began to claim he was a U.S. operative. Eventually, the lawyers wrote, Guo moved to Hong Kong, London and then New York in 2017.

Chinese authorities accused him of rape, kidnapping, bribery and other crimes, but Guo said those allegations were false and designed to punish him for criticizing leading Communist Party figures.

Prosecutors say Guo convinced hundreds of thousands of people to invest more than $1 billion, total, in entities he controlled, including his media company, GTV Media Group Inc., and his so-called Himalaya Farm Alliance and the Himalaya Exchange.

Guo, the government alleged in presentence court papers, was “entirely unrepentant” for his crimes after he took advantage of lax U.S. asylum laws to flourish in America.

“He does not even offer the lip service of remorse or acceptance of any responsibility for the harms he caused so many individuals and their loved ones, some of whom have been pushed to consider suicide as a result of his crimes, and some of whom confronted him directly by bravely testifying at trial about how he brainwashed, cheated, and harmed them,” prosecutors wrote.