Guo Wengui must forfeit $889 million and serve 30 years in a U.S. prison. Judge Analisa Torres handed down the sentence Monday in a Manhattan courtroom packed with the self-exiled Chinese billionaire’s supporters.
Torres said his fraud cost more than 1,000 people worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars. Guo, she said, “preyed on those seeking to bring Democracy to China” so he could live lavishly. She also said he “takes no responsibility for his actions” and “has called upon supporters to harass and intimidate those who dare to speak out against him.”
Guo spent part of the hearing on his health. He said he had been taken to the hospital early that day and rejected a prosecutor’s portrayal of him as faking illness. He said he vomited repeatedly on the ride back to jail. “When I came here, I said: ‘I have a tummy ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well,’” he told the court through an interpreter. He wiped his mouth with a tissue more than once.
About the charges he said little. “The reason I came to the US was to destroy the CCP.”
The judge read from letters sent by victims, who described losing their life savings, feeling anxious and ashamed, and watching relatives turn on them. Wei Chen, who testified at trial, said the fraud “destroyed my life” and her family’s.
The case and the defense
A jury convicted Guo on nine of 12 counts after a seven-week trial. Prosecutors, who had asked for at least 30 years, said he persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to invest more than $1 billion in entities he controlled, including GTV Media Group Inc., the Himalaya Farm Alliance and the Himalaya Exchange. Their court papers described “mansions, yachts, race cars, designer clothes and luxury furnishings.”
Guo’s lawyers presented a different account. They wrote that the Chinese Communist Party had pursued him in a “grand, pervasive, and life threatening” way and had recruited elites in U.S. business, entertainment and politics to work against him. They said a probation officer had noted scars from torture in China and from surgeries between 1993 and 2022. Chinese authorities have accused him of rape, kidnapping and bribery; Guo says the allegations are false. The lawyers also said similar defendants received two to four years.
The government’s filing called him “entirely unrepentant” and said he took advantage of lax U.S. asylum laws. Before his arrest three years ago, he had lived in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park and had joined the Mar-a-Lago club. He and Steve Bannon announced a joint initiative to overthrow the Chinese government in 2020.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Monday it had noted the sentencing. It said Guo is wanted by Beijing and subject to an Interpol Red Notice.
