Two Things To Keep an Eye On
Hunter Biden hits back, and Australian police raid a Chinese money-laundering front
Two things related to themes covered in recent posts on this blog have broken in the last 24 hours, which I want to draw your attention to.
As of yesterday, Hunter Biden has requested the DOJ’s National Security Division open a criminal investigation into the “laptop from hell,” and is threatening litigation against Fox. It might be time to begin questioning the wacky caper the various Murdoch properties have promoted about the laptop’s origins, which doesn’t make any sense. Think about the world we’re living in now: it’s much more likely someone hacked the laptop, then placed the files on some other machine to generate a cover story. Hunter Biden’s lawyers are on to this.
What is the role of Guo Wengui’s network here? It seems like an open question whether Wengui is a true defector, a false defector, or something in between: on the one hand, the DOJ intervened to prevent his extradition. On the other, Steve Bannon was arrested on his yacht. Yet again we have an instance of conservatives working with large amounts of Chinese money.
Second, the Sydney Morning Herald published at midnight this rather sensational story about a $10 billion money laundering scheme involving organized crime in Macau, cryptocurrency, and luxury real estate in Australia. I’ll quote liberally:
The landmark AFP operation uncovered an industrial-scale shadow-banking organisation that stretched from Australia to Asia, the Caribbean, Switzerland, America and the United Arab Emirates, and which facilitated the purchase of Australian real estate that police sources suggest might be worth billions. The syndicate, alleged to be responsible for the money laundering, was deemed to be such a risk to the national interest it was designated an Australian Priority Organisation Target by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission last year.
The AFP operation, and the fact that the organisation targeted is just one of several large money-laundering syndicates operating in Australia, will raise fresh questions about the role of foreign funds in inflating the nation’s property market and other legislative and policy gaps in the financial and migration systems that continue to be exploited by criminals.
Police have also seized cryptocurrency and are examining how the syndicate used crypto exchanges to transfer tainted funds around the world without drawing the attention of authorities, according to confidential sources with knowledge of the investigation.
One of those arrested, Steven Xin, is the local business partner of fallen global casino industry tycoon, Alvin Chau, who was sensationally jailed in Macau last week after being exposed in Australian media reports and casino commissions of inquiry as having links to money laundering and organised crime.
As a policy matter, capital flight out of China isn’t necessarily bad per se, from an American perspective. But there are two big downsides: one is that to get the money out sometimes requires working with networks linked to organized crime, like this one, which creates security risks. And second, when they’re putting it all into real estate in Western countries, it helps drive a lot of the troubling generational issues we’re seeing, like young people being unable to afford to buy homes.
This is a state of affairs the various real estate barons who financially supported Trump tend to like. Jared Kushner was up to his eyeballs in this trade—a woman linked to the Chinese government bought his penthouse. Not to belabor the point, but Politico’s article about Ron DeSantis’s inner circle this week touts his connection to another Macau casino owner, Miriam Adelson.