[ 溫家寶一族隱藏美金二十八億元財產，已經是紐約時報頭條新聞，將會保證留名青史。其實，豈止溫爺爺、薄熙來、習近平幾人，其他高幹的家產，只是沒有被查而已。國民黨、共產黨都出自同門，溫爺爺、連爺爺、薄熙來，都沒甚麼區別，只差的是幾十億 "美金"、"人民幣" 或 "台幣" 而已，而且權貴互相包庇，保證甜頭不外流。這種文化將來五十年、一百年，都不會變。
台灣要成為權貴集體貪汙、賄選欺騙充斥的社會，成為 "偉大的中國一省"，或是要成為自由民主、公平法治的獨立自主國，端靠兩支力量:
一是美國的支持，另一是台灣人自己的選擇。美國的支持絕對堅定，不可能動搖 (臺灣關係法是美國國內法!)。關鍵的問題在: 台灣的中年人年輕人是否仍有早一代的小貪慣性、愚蠢奴性? 台灣的中年人年輕人是否會響往真正的自由民主、公平法治，有決心做自己的主人?
台灣人要怎麼樣的將來，完全是自己的決定哦。好好地選擇吧! ]
(這篇是中國看不到的報導)
[要知道中國高幹子孫之超級財富，看這一篇: http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/ccshsu-clement/article?mid=10067&prev=-1&next=10065 ]
Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader
By DAVID BARBOZA October 25, 2012
BEIJING — The mother of China’s prime minister was
a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one
of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely
poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year.
But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not
only left poverty behind — she became outright rich, at least on paper,
according to corporate and regulatory records. Just one investment in her name,
in a large Chinese financial services company, had a value of $120 million five
years ago, the records show.
The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such
wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name. But
it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998
as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.
Many relatives of Wen Jiabao, including his son,
daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law, have become extraordinarily
wealthy during his leadership, an investigation by The New York Times shows. A
review of corporate and regulatory records indicates that the prime minister’s
relatives, some of whom have a knack for aggressive deal-making, including his
wife, have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.
In many cases, the names of the relatives have been
hidden behind layers of partnerships and investment vehicles involving friends,
work colleagues and business partners. Untangling their financial holdings
provides an unusually detailed look at how politically connected people have
profited from being at the intersection of government and business as state
influence and private wealth converge in China’s fast-growing economy.
Unlike most new businesses in China, the family’s
ventures sometimes received financial backing from state-owned companies,
including China Mobile, one of the country’s biggest phone operators, the
documents show. At other times, the ventures won support from some of Asia’s
richest tycoons. The Times found that Mr. Wen’s relatives accumulated shares in
banks, jewelers, tourist resorts, telecommunications companies and
infrastructure projects, sometimes by using offshore entities.
The holdings include a villa development project in
Beijing; a tire factory in northern China; a company that helped build some of
Beijing’s Olympic stadiums, including the well-known “Bird’s Nest”; and Ping An
Insurance, one of the world’s biggest financial services companies.
As prime minister in an economy that remains heavily
state-driven, Mr. Wen, who is best known for his simple ways and common touch,
more importantly has broad authority over the major industries where his
relatives have made their fortunes. Chinese companies cannot list their shares
on a stock exchange without approval from agencies overseen by Mr. Wen, for
example. He also has the power to influence investments in strategic sectors
like energy and telecommunications.
Because the Chinese government rarely makes its
deliberations public, it is not known what role — if any — Mr. Wen, who is 70,
has played in most policy or regulatory decisions. But in some cases, his
relatives have sought to profit from opportunities made possible by those decisions.
The prime minister’s younger brother, for example, has a
company that was awarded more than $30 million in government contracts and
subsidies to handle wastewater treatment and medical waste disposal for some of
China’s biggest cities, according to estimates based on government records. The
contracts were announced after Mr. Wen ordered tougher regulations on medical
waste disposal in 2003 after the SARS outbreak.
In 2004, after the State Council, a government body Mr.
Wen presides over, exempted Ping An Insurance and other companies from rules
that limited their scope, Ping An went on to raise $1.8 billion in an initial
public offering of stock. Partnerships controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives —
along with their friends and colleagues — made a fortune by investing in the
company before the public offering.
In 2007, the last year the stock holdings were disclosed
in public documents, those partnerships held as much as $2.2 billion worth of
Ping An stock, according to an accounting of the investments by The Times that
was verified by outside auditors. Ping An’s overall market value is now nearly
$60 billion.
Ping An said in a statement that the company did “not
know the background of the entities behind our shareholders.” The statement
said, “Ping An has no means to know the intentions behind shareholders when
they buy and sell our shares.”
While Communist Party regulations call for top officials
to disclose their wealth and that of their immediate family members, no law or
regulation prohibits relatives of even the most senior officials from becoming
deal-makers or major investors — a loophole that effectively allows them to
trade on their family name. Some Chinese argue that permitting the families of
Communist Party leaders to profit from the country’s long economic boom has
been important to ensuring elite support for market-oriented reforms.
Even so, the business dealings of Mr. Wen’s relatives
have sometimes been hidden in ways that suggest the relatives are eager to
avoid public scrutiny, the records filed with Chinese regulatory authorities
show. Their ownership stakes are often veiled by an intricate web of holdings
as many as five steps removed from the operating companies, according to the
review.
In the case of Mr. Wen’s mother, The Times calculated her
stake in Ping An — valued at $120 million in 2007 — by examining public records
and government-issued identity cards, and by following the ownership trail to
three Chinese investment entities. The name recorded on his mother’s shares was
Taihong, a holding company registered in Tianjin, the prime minister’s
hometown.
The apparent efforts to conceal the wealth reflect the
highly charged politics surrounding the country’s ruling elite, many of whom
are also enormously wealthy but reluctant to draw attention to their riches.
When Bloomberg News reported in June that the
extended family of Vice President Xi Jinping, set to become China’s next
president, had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the Chinese
government blocked access inside the country to the Bloomberg Web site.
“In the senior leadership, there’s no family that doesn’t
have these problems,” said a former government colleague of Wen Jiabao who has
known him for more than 20 years and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“His enemies are intentionally trying to smear him by letting this leak out.”
The Times presented its findings to the Chinese
government for comment. The Foreign Ministry declined to respond to questions
about the investments, the prime minister or his relatives. Members of Mr.
Wen’s family also declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Duan Weihong, a wealthy businesswoman whose company,
Taihong, was the investment vehicle for the Ping An shares held by the prime
minister’s mother and other relatives, said the investments were actually her
own. Ms. Duan, who comes from the prime minister’s hometown and is a close
friend of his wife, said ownership of the shares was listed in the names of Mr.
Wen’s relatives in an effort to conceal the size of Ms. Duan’s own holdings.
“When I invested in Ping An I didn’t want to be written
about,” Ms. Duan said, “so I had my relatives find some other people to hold
these shares for me.”
But it was an “accident,” she said, that her company
chose the relatives of the prime minister as the listed shareholders — a
process that required registering their official ID numbers and obtaining their
signatures. Until presented with the names of the investors by The Times, she
said, she had no idea that they had selected the relatives of Wen Jiabao.
The review of the corporate and regulatory records, which
covers 1992 to 2012, found no holdings in Mr. Wen’s name. And it was not
possible to determine from the documents whether he recused himself from any
decisions that might have affected his relatives’ holdings, or whether they
received preferential treatment on investments.
For much of his tenure, Wen Jiabao has been at the center
of rumors and conjecture about efforts by his relatives to profit from his
position. Yet until the review by The Times, there has been no detailed
accounting of the family’s riches.
His wife, Zhang Beili, is one of the country’s leading
authorities on jewelry and gemstones and is an accomplished businesswoman in
her own right. By managing state diamond companies that were later privatized,
The Times found, she helped her relatives parlay their minority stakes into a
billion-dollar portfolio of insurance, technology and real estate ventures.
The couple’s only son sold a technology company he
started to the family of Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, for $10 million,
and used another investment vehicle to establish New Horizon Capital, now one
of China’s biggest private equity firms, with
partners like the government of Singapore, according to records and interviews
with bankers.
The prime minister’s younger brother, Wen Jiahong,
controls $200 million in assets, including wastewater treatment plants and
recycling businesses, the records show.
As prime minister, Mr. Wen has staked out a position as a
populist and a reformer, someone whom the state-run media has nicknamed “the
People’s Premier” and “Grandpa Wen” because of his frequent outings to meet
ordinary people, especially in moments of crisis like natural disasters.
While it is unclear how much the prime minister knows
about his family’s wealth, State Department documents released by the WikiLeaks
organization in 2010 included a cable that suggested Mr. Wen was aware of his
relatives’ business dealings and unhappy about them.
“Wen is disgusted with his family’s activities, but is
either unable or unwilling to curtail them,” a Chinese-born executive working
at an American company in Shanghai told American diplomats, according to the
2007 cable.
China’s ‘Diamond Queen’
It is no secret in China’s elite circles that the prime
minister’s wife, Zhang Beili, is rich, and that she has helped control the
nation’s jewelry and gem trade. But her lucrative diamond businesses became an
off-the-charts success only as her husband moved into the country’s top
leadership ranks, the review of corporate and regulatory records by The Times
found.
A geologist with an expertise in gemstones, Ms. Zhang is
largely unknown among ordinary Chinese. She rarely travels with the prime
minister or appears with him, and there are few official photographs of the
couple together. And while people who have worked with her say she has a taste
for jade and fine diamonds, they say she usually dresses modestly, does not
exude glamour and prefers to wield influence behind the scenes, much like the
relatives of other senior leaders.
The State Department documents released by WikiLeaks
included a suggestion that Mr. Wen had once considered divorcing Ms. Zhang
because she had exploited their relationship in her diamond trades. Taiwanese
television reported in 2007 that Ms. Zhang had bought a pair of jade earrings
worth about $275,000 at a Beijing trade show, though the source — a Taiwanese
trader — later backed off the claim and Chinese government censors moved
swiftly to block coverage of the subject in China, according to news reports at
the time.
“Her business activities are known to everyone in the
leadership,” said one banker who worked with relatives of Wen Jiabao. The
banker said it was not unusual for her office to call upon businesspeople. “And
if you get that call, how can you say no?”
Zhang Beili first gained influence in the 1990s, while
working as a regulator at the Ministry of Geology. At the time, China’s jewelry
market was still in its infancy.
While her husband was serving in China’s main leadership
compound, known as Zhongnanhai, Ms. Zhang was setting industry standards in the
jewelry and gem trade. She helped create the National Gemstone Testing Center
in Beijing, and the Shanghai Diamond Exchange, two of the industry’s most
powerful institutions.
In a country where the state has long dominated the
marketplace, jewelry regulators often decided which companies could set up
diamond-processing factories, and which would gain entry to the retail jewelry
market. State regulators even formulated rules that required diamond sellers to
buy certificates of authenticity for any diamond sold in China, from the
government-run testing center in Beijing, which Ms. Zhang managed.
As a result, when executives from Cartier or De Beers
visited China with hopes of selling diamonds and jewelry here, they often went
to visit Ms. Zhang, who became known as China’s “diamond queen.”
“She’s the most important person there,” said Gaetano
Cavalieri, president of the World Jewelry Confederation in Switzerland. “She
was bridging relations between partners — Chinese and foreign partners.”
As early as 1992, people who worked with Ms. Zhang said,
she had begun to blur the line between government official and businesswoman.
As head of the state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, she began
investing the state company’s money in start-ups. And by the time her husband
was named vice premier, in 1998, she was busy setting up business ventures with
friends and relatives.
The state company she ran invested in a group of
affiliated diamond companies, according to public records. Many of them were
run by Ms. Zhang’s relatives — or colleagues who had worked with her at the National
Gemstone Testing Center.
In 1993, for instance, the state company Ms. Zhang ran
helped found Beijing Diamond, a big jewelry retailer. A year later, one of her
younger brothers, Zhang Jianming, and two of her government colleagues
personally acquired 80 percent of the company, according to shareholder
registers. Beijing Diamond invested in Shenzhen Diamond, which was controlled
by her brother-in-law, Wen Jiahong, the prime minister’s younger brother.
Among the successful undertakings was Sino-Diamond, a
venture financed by the state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, which
she headed. The company had business ties with a state-owned company managed by
another brother, Zhang Jiankun, who worked as an official in Jiaxing, Ms.
Zhang’s hometown, in Zhejiang Province.
In the summer of 1999, after securing agreements to
import diamonds from Russia and South Africa, Sino-Diamond went public, raising
$50 million on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The offering netted Ms. Zhang’s
family about $8 million, according to corporate filings.
Although she was never listed as a shareholder, former
colleagues and business partners say Ms. Zhang’s early diamond partnerships
were the nucleus of a larger portfolio of companies she would later help her
family and colleagues gain a stake in.
The Times found no indication that Wen Jiabao used his
political clout to influence the diamond companies his relatives invested in.
But former business partners said that the family’s success in diamonds, and
beyond, was often bolstered with financial backing from wealthy businessmen who
sought to curry favor with the prime minister’s family.
“After Wen became prime minister, his wife sold off some
of her diamond investments and moved into new things,” said a Chinese executive
who did business with the family. He asked not to be named because of fear of
government retaliation. Corporate records show that beginning in the late
1990s, a series of rich businessmen took turns buying up large stakes in the
diamond companies, often from relatives of Mr. Wen, and then helped them
reinvest in other lucrative ventures, like real estate and finance.
According to corporate records and interviews, the
businessmen often supplied accountants and office space to investment
partnerships partly controlled by the relatives.
“When they formed companies,” said one businessman who
set up a company with members of the Wen family, “Ms. Zhang stayed in the
background. That’s how it worked.”
The Only Son
Late one evening early this year, the prime minister’s
only son, Wen Yunsong, was in the cigar lounge at Xiu, an upscale bar and
lounge at the Park Hyatt in Beijing. He was having cocktails as Beijing’s
nouveau riche gathered around, clutching designer bags and wearing expensive
business suits, according to two guests who were present.
In China, the children of senior leaders are widely
believed to be in a class of their own. Known as “princelings,” they often hold
Ivy League degrees, get V.I.P. treatment, and are even offered preferred
pricing on shares in hot stock offerings.
They are also known as people who can get things done in
China’s heavily regulated marketplace, where the state controls access. And in
recent years, few princelings have been as bold as the younger Mr. Wen, who
goes by the English name Winston and is about 40 years old.
A Times review of Winston Wen’s investments, and
interviews with people who have known him for years, show that his deal-making
has been extensive and lucrative, even by the standards of his princeling
peers.
State-run giants like China Mobile have formed start-ups
with him. In recent years, Winston Wen has been in talks with Hollywood studios
about a financing deal.
Concerned that China does not have an elite boarding
school for Chinese students, he recently hired the headmasters of Choate and
Hotchkiss in Connecticut to oversee the creation of a $150 million private
school now being built in the Beijing suburbs.
Winston Wen and his wife, moreover, have stakes in the
technology industry and an electric company, as well as an indirect stake in
Union Mobile Pay, the government-backed online payment platform — all while
living in the prime minister’s residence, in central Beijing, according to
corporate records and people familiar with the family’s investments.
“He’s not shy about using his influence to get things
done,” said one venture capitalist who regularly meets with Winston Wen.
The younger Mr. Wen declined to comment. But in a
telephone interview, his wife, Yang Xiaomeng, said her husband had been
unfairly criticized for his business dealings.
“Everything that has been written about him has been
wrong,” she said. “He’s really not doing that much business anymore.”
Winston Wen was educated in Beijing and then earned an
engineering degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology. He went abroad and
earned a master’s degree in engineering materials from the University of
Windsor, in Canada, and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Business at
Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago.
When he returned to China in 2000, he helped set up three
successful technology companies in five years, according to people familiar
with those deals. Two of them were sold to Hong Kong businessmen, one to the
family of Li Ka-shing, one of the wealthiest men in Asia.
Winston Wen’s earliest venture, an Internet data services
provider called Unihub Global, was founded in 2000 with $2 million in start-up
capital, according to Hong Kong and Beijing corporate filings. Financing came
from a tight-knit group of relatives and his mother’s former colleagues from
government and the diamond trade, as well as an associate of Cheng Yu-tung,
patriarch of Hong Kong’s second-wealthiest family. The firm’s earliest
customers were state-owned brokerage houses and Ping An, in which the Wen
family has held a large financial stake.
He made an even bolder move in 2005, by pushing into
private equity when he formed New Horizon Capital with a group of Chinese-born
classmates from Northwestern. The firm quickly raised $100 million from investors,
including SBI Holdings, a division of the Japanese group SoftBank, and Temasek,
the Singapore government investment fund.
Under Mr. Wen, New Horizon established itself as a
leading private equity firm, investing in biotech, solar, wind and construction
equipment makers. Since it began operations, the firm has returned about $430
million to investors, a fourfold profit, according to SBI Holdings.
“Their first fund was dynamite,” said Kathleen Ng, editor
of Asia Private Equity Review, an industry publication in Hong Kong. “And that
allowed them to raise a lot more money.”
Today, New Horizon has more than $2.5 billion under
management.
Some of Winston Wen’s deal-making, though, has attracted
unwanted attention for the prime minister.
In 2010, when New Horizon acquired a 9 percent stake in a
company called Sihuan Pharmaceuticals just two months before its public
offering, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange said the late-stage investment violated
its rules and forced the firm to return the stake. Still, New Horizon made a
$46.5 million profit on the sale.
Soon after, New Horizon announced that Winston Wen had
handed over day-to-day operations and taken up a position at the China
Satellite Communications Corporation, a state-owned company that has ties to the
Chinese space program. He has since been named chairman.
The Tycoons
In the late 1990s, Duan Weihong was managing an office
building and several other properties in Tianjin, the prime minister’s hometown
in northern China, through her property company, Taihong. She was in her 20s
and had studied at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
Around 2002, Ms. Duan went into business with several
relatives of Wen Jiabao, transforming her property company into an investment
vehicle of the same name. The company helped make Ms. Duan very wealthy.
It is not known whether Ms. Duan, now 43, is related to
the prime minister. In a series of interviews, she first said she did not know
any members of the Wen family, but later described herself as a friend of the
family and particularly close to Zhang Beili, the prime minister’s wife. As
happened to a handful of other Chinese entrepreneurs, Ms. Duan’s fortunes
soared as she teamed up with the relatives and their network of friends and
colleagues, though she described her relationship with them involving the
shares in Ping An as existing on paper only and having no financial component.
Ms. Duan and other wealthy businesspeople — among them,
six billionaires from across China — have been instrumental in getting
multimillion-dollar ventures off the ground and, at crucial times, helping
members of the Wen family set up investment vehicles to profit from them,
according to investment bankers who have worked with all parties.
Established in Tianjin, Taihong had spectacular returns.
In 2002, the company paid about $65 million to acquire a 3 percent stake in
Ping An before its initial public offering, according to corporate records and
Ms. Duan’s graduate school thesis. Five years later, those shares were worth
$3.7 billion
The company’s Hong Kong affiliate, Great Ocean, also run
by Ms. Duan, later formed a joint venture with the Beijing government and
acquired a huge tract of land adjacent to Capital International Airport. Today,
the site is home to a sprawling cargo and logistics center. Last year, Great
Ocean sold its 53 percent stake in the project to a Singapore company for
nearly $400 million.
That deal and several other investments, in luxury
hotels, Beijing villa developments and the Hong Kong-listed BBMG, one of
China’s largest building materials companies, have been instrumental to Ms.
Duan’s accumulation of riches, according to The Times’s review of corporate
records.
The review also showed that over the past decade there
have been nearly three dozen individual shareholders of Taihong, many of whom
are either relatives of Wen Jiabao or former colleagues of his wife.
The other wealthy entrepreneurs who have worked with the
prime minister’s relatives declined to comment for this article. Ms. Duan
strongly denied having financial ties to the prime minister or his relatives
and said she was only trying to avoid publicity by listing others as owning
Ping An shares. “The money I invested in Ping An was completely my own,” said
Ms. Duan, who has served as a member of the Ping An board of supervisors.
“Everything I did was legal.”
Another wealthy partner of the Wen relatives has been
Cheng Yu-tung, who controls the Hong Kong conglomerate New World Development
and is one of the richest men in Asia, worth about $15 billion, according to
Forbes.
In the 1990s, New World was seeking a foothold in
mainland China for a sister company that specializes in high-end retail
jewelry. The retail chain, Chow Tai Fook, opened its first store in China in
1998.
Mr. Cheng and his associates invested in a diamond
venture backed by the relatives of Mr. Wen and co-invested with them in an
array of corporate entities, including Sino-Life, National Trust and Ping An,
according to records and interviews with some of those involved. Those investments
by Mr. Cheng are now worth at least $5 billion, according to the corporate
filings. Chow Tai Fook, the jewelry chain, has also flourished. Today, China
accounts for 60 percent of the chain’s $4.2 billion in annual revenue.
Mr. Cheng, 87, could not be reached for comment. Calls to
New World Development were not returned.
Fallout for Premier
In the winter of 2007, just before he began his second
term as prime minister, Wen Jiabao called for new measures to fight corruption,
particularly among high-ranking officials.
“Leaders at all levels of government should take the lead
in the antigraft drive,” he told a gathering of high-level party members in
Beijing. “They should strictly ensure that their family members, friends and
close subordinates do not abuse government influence.”
The speech was consistent with the prime minister’s
earlier drive to toughen disclosure rules for public servants, and to require
senior officials to reveal their family assets.
Whether Mr. Wen has made such disclosures for his own
family is unclear, since the Communist Party does not release such information.
Even so, many of the holdings found by The Times would not need to be disclosed
under the rules since they are not held in the name of the prime minister’s
immediate family — his wife, son and daughter.
Eighty percent of the $2.7 billion in assets identified
in The Times’s investigation and verified by the outside auditors were held by,
among others, the prime minister’s mother, his younger brother, two
brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law, daughter-in-law and the parents of his son’s
wife, none of whom is subject to party disclosure rules. The total value of the
relatives’ stake in Ping An is based on calculations by The Times that were
confirmed by the auditors. The total includes shares held by the relatives that
were sold between 2004 and 2006, and the value of the remaining shares in late
2007, the last time the holdings were publicly disclosed.
Legal experts said that determining the precise value of
holdings in China could be difficult because there might be undisclosed side
agreements about the true beneficiaries.
“Complex corporate structures are not necessarily
insidious,” said Curtis J. Milhaupt, a Columbia University Law School professor
who has studied China’s corporate group structures. “But in a system like
China’s, where corporate ownership and political power are closely intertwined,
shell companies magnify questions about who owns what and where the money came
from.”
Among the investors in the Wen family ventures are
longtime business associates, former colleagues and college classmates,
including Yu Jianming, who attended Northwestern with Winston Wen, and Zhang
Yuhong, a longtime colleague of Wen Jiahong, the prime minister’s younger
brother. The associates did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
Revelations about the Wen family’s wealth could weaken
him politically.
Next month, at the 18th Party Congress in Beijing, the
Communist Party is expected to announce a new generation of leaders. But the
selection process has already been marred by one of the worst political
scandals in decades, the downfall of Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party boss, who
was vying for a top position.
In Beijing, Wen Jiabao is expected to step down as prime
minister because he has reached retirement age. Political analysts say that
even after leaving office he could remain a strong backstage political force.
But documents showing that his relatives amassed a fortune during his tenure
could diminish his standing, the analysts said.
“This will affect whatever residual power Wen has,” said
Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese leadership and a professor of government at
Claremont McKenna College in California.
The prime minister’s supporters say he has not personally
benefited from his extended family’s business dealings, and may not even be
knowledgeable about the extent of them.
Last March, the prime minister hinted that he was at
least aware of the persistent rumors about his relatives. During a nationally
televised news conference in Beijing, he insisted that he had “never pursued
personal gain” in public office.
“I have the courage to face the people and to face
history,” he said in an emotional session. “There are people who will
appreciate what I have done, but there are also people who will criticize me.
Ultimately, history will have the final say.”
China Blocks Web
Access to Times After Article
Chinese Premier’s
Family Disputes Article on Riches
Published: October 27, 2012
HONG
KONG — Two lawyers who said they represented the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
of China
have issued a statement disputing aspects of a New York Times article
about the family’s wealth, a rare instance of a powerful Chinese
political family responding directly to a foreign media report.
The statement, published in The South China Morning Post
on Sunday, said, “The so-called ‘hidden riches’ of Wen Jiabao’s family members
in The New York Times’s report” did not exist.
After criticizing several points in the article, the
statement hinted at the possibility of future legal action. “We will continue
to make clarifications regarding untrue reports by The New York Times, and
reserve the right to hold it legally responsible,” the statement said.
The statement reported in The Post, a Hong Kong
newspaper, has not been obtained directly by The Times.
The statement was not a sweeping denial of the article.
The statement acknowledged that some family members were active in business and
that they “are responsible for all their own business activities.”
While the statement disputed that Mr. Wen’s mother had
held assets, it did not address the calculation in the article that the family
had controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.
Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times, expressed
confidence in the article. “We are standing by our story, which we are
incredibly proud of and which is an example of the quality investigative journalism
The Times is known for,” she wrote in an e-mail.
The lawyers’ statement represents an unusual move for the
family of a senior Chinese leader. When Bloomberg News published an article in
late June describing real estate and other assets held by the family of Vice
President Xi Jinping, his family did not respond publicly.
The statement published in The Post was attributed to Bai
Tao, a partner in the Beijing office of the Jun He Law Firm, and Wang Weidong,
the managing partner of the Beijing office of the Grandall Law Firm.
No one answered phone calls to both lawyers’ offices on
Sunday, nor did Mr. Wang respond immediately to an e-mail.
The statement denied an anecdote in The Times article
that described how one investment in the name of Mr. Wen’s mother, Yang Zhiyun,
was worth $120 million five years ago. “The mother of Wen Jiabao, except
receiving salary/pension according to the regulation, has never had
| 紐時再爆 溫家人收平安保險鉅額股權 〔國際新聞中心／綜合報導〕紐約時報上月披露中國國務院總理溫家寶家人擁有至少二十七億美元的鉅額資產，促使溫家寶公開表態以示清白後，紐時二十四日又發表駐上海記者張大衛（David 股權價值數十億美元 紐時上月報導溫家寶家族的鉅額財富中，最大宗便是來自平安保險股份，這些股份是在平安保險被特許免於分割的八個月後所購買。報導說，中國平安保險公司主席馬明哲，曾於一九九九年秋天致函當時的副總理溫家寶和中國人民銀行行長戴相龍，籲請當局對平安保險放寬實施在亞洲金融危機後要求大型金融公司分割的規定。後來平安保險逃過一劫，溫家寶親人也獲得價值數十億美元的股權。 Taihong持股 07年市值22億美元 平安保險後來成為價值五百億美元的中國最大金融服務公司，到二○○四年六月，溫家寶家人擁有的股份已上漲兩倍；到○七年，溫家寶家人控制的Taihong公司，最初的六千五百萬美元投資，已飆升為三十七億美元。到○七年稍晚，溫家寶家人所持股份仍有二十二億美元的價值，但此後溫家人是否繼續持有股份則不清楚。 報導強調，紐時不清楚溫家寶和戴相龍本人當時是否親自過問平安保險免於分割事務，也不清楚溫家寶本人是否知道家人持有平安股份。張大衛表示，中國政府封鎖紐時英文和中文網站，而且仍在封鎖，聲稱此舉乃按照法律規定採取的行動。 |
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