Investors spent more than $US400 million buying stock in social media platform GTV Media Group through an allegedly illegal private stock offering, the US says. Guo skimmed $US100 million off the top and placed it in a Kyle Bass hedge fund for a high-risk bet against the Hong Kong dollar, the government says. The wager led to a $US30 million loss.
Guo was an associate of former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
The next alleged scam was G Clubs, an exclusive private members club with a minimum $US10,000 buy-in. Investors were told the membership could earn them stock in GTV and other perks, including a discount at G Fashion, “which sold expensive clothing to the defendant’s followers,” according to the government.
$US800 sweatpants
In his statement to the jury, Fergenson rattled off a list of Guo’s more extravagant purchases, including a Lamborghini worth almost $US1 million, a $US4 million Ferrari for his son, even a $US35,000 mattress. The US claims he bought these assets with investor funds. Fergenson also cited “an $US800 pair of sweatpants” Guo sold through his fashion brand.
But his lawyer told the jury that Guo, one of eight children in a family that amassed a fortune in Chinese real estate, lived that life long before he was alleged to have committed these crimes.
“The government would like you to draw many negative inferences about a person who spends thousands on a TV or a mattress,” Shroff said, urging the jurors to put the indulgences in context.
Guo had devoted his life to a whistleblower movement, Shroff said, and it came at a cost. His phones and computers had been hacked by the Communist Party, his wife and daughter had been detained for two years in China, and he had an Interpol arrest notice against his name, she said. The party had also deposited money into Guo’s bank accounts under the names of people subject to US sanctions, triggering banks to close his accounts, she said.
Messing with Guo
The Chinese Communist Party “had a thousand different ways to mess with Guo and stop a political movement that was really the essence of his entire being,” Shroff told the jury.
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Guo, who applied for asylum in the US in 2017, also forged ties to former president Donald Trump’s inner-circle. When former Trump campaign chairman Bannon was arrested for fraud in 2020, he was on board Guo’s 150-foot “Lady May” yacht off the Connecticut coast.
Since his arrest at his $US67.5 million penthouse in the Sherry-Netherland hotel in March 2023, Guo’s court appearances have attracted a steady throng of supporters and detractors. Outside the courthouse on Friday morning, a woman stood next to a speaker playing sound bites about regulators seizing the assets of Guo, who was a billionaire at the time of his arrest.
Since then he has been held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Centre.
Bloomberg