CHINESE FUND BACKED BY HUNTER BIDEN INVESTED IN TECHNOLOGY USED TO SURVEIL MUSLIMS
Lee Fang
May 3 2019, 4:53
ON WEDNESDAY, Human Rights Watch released a troubling report about a phone application made by the Chinese government. The app provides law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.
The app relies heavily on facial recognition software supplied by Face++, a division of the Chinese startup Megvii, a relationship that sparked questions in the press for Megvii investors. One of the most prominent of these investors is Alibaba Group Holding, which was co-founded by Jack Ma, the wealthiest Chinese billionaire and an icon for the country’s image of entrepreneurship.
The flurry of media reports about private investment in China’s increasingly sprawling surveillance state left out a prominent investor: Hunter Biden.
The flurry of media reports this week about Face++, Ma, and the role of the private sector in building China’s increasingly sprawling surveillance state, however, left out another prominent investor in the company: Hunter Biden.
The son of the former Vice President Joe Biden has spent much of the last decade building overseas investments and business deals, arrangements that could complicate his father’s bid for the presidency by posing an array of potential conflicts of interest.
Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, has pooled money, largely from state-owned venture capital, to buy or invest in a range of industries in the U.S. and China. Bohai Harvest has put money into an automotive firm, mining companies, and technology ventures, such as Didi Chuxing Technology, one of the largest ride-hailing companies in the world after Uber. (Hunter Biden, Bohai Harvest, and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2017, Bohai Harvest bought into Face++, part of a $460 million haul in the company’s Series C investment round. Bohai Harvest’s website featuresFace++ in its portfolio of investments.
BOHAI HARVEST OPERATES and works with a number of funds to make its various investments, a tangled business structure that has brought Hunter Biden into close proximity to influential Chinese government and business figures, according to a review of Chinese business filings by The Intercept.
Bohai Harvest relies heavily on an international subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China to finance its investments.
Bohai Harvest relies heavily on an international subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China to finance its investments, referring to itself as an “investment platform under BOC” on its website. The investment fund has also partnered with a subsidiary of HNA Group, a controversial conglomerate that has snapped up investments in a wide range of businesses across the world.
As The Intercept has previously reported, the HNA Group has made unusually extensive efforts to cultivate U.S. officials. The company floated an offer to buy out the hedge fund owned by former White House official Anthony Scaramucci; retained the legal services of Gary Locke, the former U.S. ambassador to China, shortly before his confirmation; and provided financing to a private-equity firm backed by Jeb Bush. HNA Group, notably, also courted Bill Clinton, touting meetings with the former president at philanthropy events hosted by the company…..
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business/