Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui gets 30 years in US prison for huge fraud 

A 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 on Monday in a Manhattan court by Judge Analisa Torres.

Guo, once believed to be among China’s wealthiest men, was also ordered to forfeit $889m in restitution.

A jury unanimously found Guo guilty of fraud, various securities offences, wire fraud and money laundering in 2024.

The FBI arrested him the year before in his luxury Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park.

At Monday’s sentencing, Torres said 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.

Judge Torres 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”.

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 he 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”.

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 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”.

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.