Guo Wengui, self-exiled billionaire Chinese business tycoon has been sentenced to 30 years in a United States prison for financial fraud that a federal Judge said cost more than 1,000 people worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars.
Guo Wengui, who fled China a decade ago and reinvented himself in the US as a critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was sentenced in a Manhattan court by Judge Analisa Torres.
A jury unanimously found Guo guilty of fraud, various securities offences, wire fraud and money laundering in 2024. He 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.
At the sentencing, Torres said that Guo, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, “preyed on those seeking to bring Democracy to China”, taking their money so he could live lavishly. In court, Guo complained of his health and only briefly touched on the criminal case, defending his intentions by saying he had come to the US “to destroy” the CCP.
Before he was sentenced, Guo protested his treatment in jail, saying he was taken to the hospital. He disputed a prosecutor’s portrayal of him as a malinger faking illness, saying that he repeatedly vomited as he was returned to jail before being brought to court. “When I came here, I said: ‘I have a tummy ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well,’” Guo said through an interpreter of his courthouse arrival.
Judge Torres in sentencing Guo, read snippets of letters she received from victims, who described losing their life savings and feeling severely anxious and shamed, as well as having family members turn on them for their poor investment choice.
Guo, she said, took 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.” Wei Chen, a victim who testified at the trial, told Torres that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and that of her family.
Prosecutors had requested that Guo serve at least 30 years in prison, saying his “astounding” 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.”
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.”
Prosecutors say that 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 US asylum laws to flourish in America.
Guo, who made his fortune in real estate, moved to the US in 2015 after fleeing China. 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 the US right-wing figure Steve Bannon. Together, Guo and Bannon 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 the embezzlement of funds tied to a US border wall project on the frontier with Mexico, a flagship promise of US President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Judge Orders Guo To Forfeit $889 million In Restitution
Guo was also ordered to forfeit $889m in restitution.
In a court filing, Guo’s lawyers wrote that his client was the victim of the CCP’s “grand, pervasive, and life-threatening” pursuit. They alleged that the party recruited elites in US business, entertainment and politics to conspire against him.
They said in court papers that a lengthy prison term would only validate China’s smear campaign against Guo and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life.”
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.
Defense lawyers said that 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. Eventually, the lawyers wrote, Guo moved to Hong Kong, London and then New York in 2017.
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