Skip to main content

Guo Wengui arrested on fraud charges



There has been some talk that former President Donald Trump will be arrested today. If he is, talk of Guo Wengui's arrest will fade into the background. Before it does, though: 

The Trumper fire who was our last President was quite sparing about which of his grifter buddies he pardoned. 

If, God forbid, he ever gets another crack at it he will presumably extend pardons far and wide but, last time around, he kept the circle narrow,  perhaps to generate incentives for all the grifters in the galaxy o work hard to see that there would be a next time. 

Against that background, federal prosecutors in New York recently arrested exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. On the Trump scorecard, he is a friend-of-a-friend. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is a friend. Full stop.

Trump, you may remember, signed Bannon's pardon, freeing him from responsibility for the We-Fatten-the-Wall-it-oddly-looks-like-Bannon's-wallet scam: he signed this document in his final hours in office, on the morning of Jan. 20, 2021.  

Guo, though, can't count on such help. He was arrested on the 15th of this month in connection with a scheme to defraud his online followers (he is something of a social media star) of more that $1 billion. 

The indictment is careful to list a lot of aliases. I've been following most mainstream news coverage in using Guo Wengui as his principal name. The indictment gives Ho Wan Kwok as the principal, and Guo shows up as the third on the list of A/K/As. 

The indictment also observes that Kin Ming Je, described as Guo's financier, is also charged and still at large. [I am not being disrespectful in using "Guo," in the Chinese manner that is his family name.] Kin Ming Je is apparently only known as Kin Ming Je. 

A note on the relationship between Guo and Bannon: Bannon was arrested, in his pretend-the-money-is-for-a-wall scam, in August 2020, while literally on Guo's yacht, apparently a 150-foot beauty.  There is no closer relationship between privileged Bros than to have one Bro arrested while luxuriating on the others' yacht. 

Anyway: put the Guo fraud on your list of cases to follow in the months to come. The continued unravelling of this whole circle of grifters is devoutly to be wished. From the Orange central figure outward. 



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more