A self-exiled Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, once considered among China’s wealthiest individuals, was sentenced on Monday to 30 years in a U.S. prison. The severe penalty comes after his conviction for a massive financial fraud scheme that a federal judge confirmed cost over 1,000 people worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars.
In a Manhattan courtroom packed with his supporters, Judge Analisa Torres delivered the sentence, asserting that Guo “preyed on those seeking to bring Democracy to China,” exploiting their aspirations to fund his opulent lifestyle. Guo, who fled China a decade ago, had reinvented himself as a prominent U.S.-based critic of the Communist Party.
Before the sentencing, Guo protested his treatment in jail, stating he was taken to the hospital earlier Monday. He disputed a prosecutor’s characterization of him as a malingerer faking illness, describing how he repeatedly vomited upon his return to jail before being brought to court.
“When I came here, I said, ‘I have a tummy ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well,’” Guo explained through an interpreter about his courthouse arrival. He was later seen repeatedly wiping his mouth with a tissue.
He only briefly addressed the criminal case, defending his intentions by saying in reference to the Chinese Communist Party: “The reason I came to the U.S. was to destroy the CCP.”
The judge, in sentencing him, read snippets of letters she received from victims who described losing their life savings and feeling severely anxious and shamed and having family members turn on them for their poor investment choice.
Torres said Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists incredibly his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.” She said he “has called upon supporters to harass and intimidate those who dare to speak out against him.”
The judge ordered Guo to forfeit $889 million in restitution.
Wei Chen, a victim who testified at trial, told Torres that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and that of her family.
As Guo left the courtroom after the sentencing, supporters applauded and shouted toward him.
Before his arrest and detention without bail three years ago, Guo grew so close to conservative political strategist Steve Bannon that they announced a joint initiative to overthrow the Chinese government in 2020. He lived in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park and had joined President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida golf club.
Prosecutors had requested he serve at least 30 years in prison, saying his “astonishing” fraud from 2018 to 2023 “destroyed hundreds of lives” and left “a wreckage of victims and families who have been devastated financially, emotionally, and psychologically.”
Prosecutors said in court papers that his ill-gotten riches fueled “a lifestyle of extraordinary excess and indulgence, a gilded life of mansions, yachts, race cars, designer clothes and luxury furnishings.”
Guo was convicted of nine of 12 criminal charges during a seven-week trial that prosecutors said showcased his deception of thousands of investors in bogus deals that enabled Guo’s lavish lifestyle.
In a court filing, Guo’s lawyers wrote that he was the victim of the Chinese Communist Party’s “grand, pervasive, and life threatening” pursuit of him. They alleged that the party recruited elites in U.S. business, entertainment and politics to conspire against him.
They said in presentence court papers that a lengthy prison term would only validate China’s smear campaign and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life” while defendants in similar cases received prison terms of two-to-four years.
The lawyers noted that a court probation officer wrote to the sentencing judge that Guo, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, had scars and disfigurements from physical torture he endured in China and subsequent surgeries he underwent from 1993 to 2022 to repair the injuries.
Defense lawyers said Guo’s wealth grew as his family became the largest shareholder of China’s largest publicly traded securities company, but he became a target of Chinese government officials as he exposed them as corrupt. Eventually, the lawyers wrote, Guo moved to Hong Kong, London and then New York in 2017.
Chinese authorities accused him of rape, kidnapping, bribery and other crimes, but Guo said those allegations were false.
Prosecutors say Guo convinced hundreds of thousands of people to invest more than $1 billion, total, in entities he controlled, including his media company, GTV Media Group Inc., and his so-called Himalaya Farm Alliance and the Himalaya Exchange.
Guo, the government alleged in presentence court papers, was “entirely unrepentant” for his crimes after he took advantage of lax U.S. asylum laws to flourish in America.
