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作者：jeramah 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Briton in a Chinese Scandal Reportedly Brokered Overseas Money Transfers
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and MICHAEL WINES
Published: April 16, 2012
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BEIJING — Neil Heywood, the British businessman at the center of a scandal involving the former Chinese Politburo member Bo Xilai, was believed to have transferred large sums of money overseas illicitly for Mr. Bo’s family before his death in November, one person familiar with an inquiry into the case said on Monday.
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The disclosure, which was previously reported by Reuters, would help explain the nature of the relationship between Mr. Heywood and the Bo family, in particular Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, who is in custody on suspicion of criminal involvement in Mr. Heywood’s death. The Chinese government said last week that an economic conflict between Mr. Heywood on one side and Ms. Gu and her son, Bo Guagua, on the other had intensified before Mr. Heywood’s death.
Mr. Heywood was found dead on Nov. 15 in Chongqing, a huge city with the status of a province, where Mr. Bo had been the Communist Party secretary since 2007. The scandal erupted in February after his top aide and former police chief, Wang Lijun, fell out with Mr. Bo and fled to a United States Consulate about 170 miles away. He claimed that Ms. Gu had ordered that Mr. Heywood be poisoned. Mr. Wang later left the consulate and is now in the custody of Chinese authorities.
Mr. Wang’s accusations relating to Mr. Heywood’s death, which have slowly emerged since he entered the consulate on Feb. 6, have fed a drama that has mesmerized the Chinese public and embarrassed British diplomats, who were slow to react to suspicions among Mr. Heywood’s acquaintances about how he had died.
The accusations have created the biggest political turmoil in China in years, and cast a long shadow over the Communist Party’s plans for a smooth transfer of power this year, when many of the top leaders will be replaced. Before he was stripped of his positions over the last month, Mr. Bo was angling for a seat on the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s top leadership body.
Reuters reported Monday that officials believe Mr. Heywood was killed at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, on a hilltop overlooking Chongqing’s Nan’an district. The Communist Party chief in Nan’an, where Mr. Bo’s influence was quite strong, was detained for questioning this month; the official has been a staunch ally of Mr. Bo.
Reuters reported that Ms. Gu and Mr. Heywood had argued about how much money Mr. Heywood was to have received for secretly moving a substantial amount of money out of China.
Chinese officials have been prosecuted for moving illicit gains out of the country, where the government is hard pressed to find or freeze the funds.
Nanshan Lijing staff members said Monday that they had no recollection of a guest’s death in November. A security guard blocked access to villas behind the main hotel, telling a reporter that a meeting was in progress.
Wang Kang, a Chongqing filmmaker, quoted friends of the Bo family as saying Ms. Gu had “felt betrayed by” Mr. Heywood, a 41-year-old business consultant who had ingratiated himself with the Bo family since the 1990s, when Mr. Bo was mayor of Dalian, in northeastern China.
Mr. Heywood helped Mr. Bo’s son Guagua gain admission to elite British schools, Mr. Heywood’s friends said. That role apparently grew into a business relationship as Mr. Bo rose through the Communist Party hierarchy. Besides acting as a conduit for the family’s funds, one source said, Mr. Heywood portrayed himself as a link between British business leaders and Mr. Bo.
Before Mr. Heywood’s death, Ms. Gu, Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, the former police chief, were all under some form of scrutiny by the party, according to people with ties to party officials.
According to one party academic with connections to the Bo family, Mr. Wang wrote two letters to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection accusing Ms. Gu of transferring up to several hundred million dollars out of the country. It was not known exactly when Mr. Wang had made those complaints, but they did not mention Mr. Heywood, the scholar said.
The commission did not officially take up Mr. Wang’s complaints at that time, the scholar said. But he and others said the pressure of inquiries by the commission, the party’s top disciplinary body, helped touch off a high-stakes vendetta between Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo.
In two phone conversations before he was dismissed as Chongqing’s party secretary in mid-March, the academic said, Mr. Bo said he was confident that he could withstand an investigation over corruption and other offenses. “If they let me continue working, I’ll continue working,” he said Mr. Bo had told him. “If not, it’s no big deal.”
In London, where the government’s handling of Mr. Heywood’s death is rapidly becoming a political issue, Prime Minister David Cameron is likely to raise the matter when a Chinese Politburo member, Li Changchun, visits Downing Street on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.
The British Foreign Office has come under widespread criticism for not having pressed harder and sooner for the Chinese to explain Mr. Heywood’s death. Critics have noted that the Foreign Office minister dealing with China, Jeremy Browne, visited Beijing in November, days after Mr. Heywood was cremated in Chongqing without an autopsy.
“I would have thought that those circumstances would at the very least have triggered an inquiry as to whether or not all of that explanation was credible,” Menzies Campbell, a barrister who is a prominent figure among the Liberal Democrats, coalition partners in Mr. Cameron’s government, told the BBC.
The government has said that it told ministers of concerns about the death in February and that it had raised the issue with the Chinese four times, twice at the ambassadorial level. The spokeswoman expressed satisfaction with consular officers’ work on the case, adding, “Neil Heywood’s family have said they are entirely happy with the support they have had from us.”
Reporting was contributed by Jonathan Ansfield and Ian Johnson from Beijing, Richard Macauley from Chongqing, China, and John F. Burns from London
作者：jeramah 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Our great Party continues to leak info: here is the story
