Sen. Daine Feinstein and Jiang Zemin reportedly visited each other regularly in the 1980s….In 1986 Feinstein and Jiang designated several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations, one named Shanghai Pacific Partners. Feinstein’s husband served as a director. His financial position was relatively small, less than $500,000 on one project, the only such position in China the Feinstein family held when Feinstein entered the Senate in 1992.
‘They said that Feinstein’s consistent support for China’s interests cannot help but benefit her husband’s efforts to earn profits there.’
That project, however, which Blum’s firm participated in alongside PRC state-run Shanghai Investment Trust Corp., was one of the first joint ventures between San Francisco and Chinese investors, reportedly “cited by Chinese officials as a testament to the friendly business ties between Shanghai and San Francisco that Feinstein had initiated.” Subsequently Blum’s investments in the Middle Kingdom mushroomed.
In May 1993, Feinstein expressed her strong support on the Senate floor for continued trading with China. Contemporaneously, her husband was seeking to raise up to $150 million from investors, including himself, for a variety of Chinese enterprises.
In August 1993, Feinstein and her husband visited Beijing for extensive meetings with Chinese leaders at President Jiang’s invitation….Blum’s Newbridge Capital reportedly invested more than $400 million into East Asian businesses, at least $90 million of which was “invested in companies whose profits are pegged to the burgeoning mainland China market, according to the companies themselves,” and several of which were partly owned or founded by the Chinese government….In 2004, Newbridge Capital purchased an 18 percent stake in Shenzhen Development Bank, the first time a foreign company took effective control of a Chinese lender….Feinstein also (5-19-1996) argued against tying China’s most-favored-nation trading status to human rights improvements. In an argument that reads as not only beyond naïve, but demonstrates an offensive moral equivalency, Feinstein added: “Chinese society continues to open up with looser ideological controls, freer access to outside sources of information and increased media reporting.”…
In 2010 Feinstein also challenged the Obama administration’s $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, calling it a “substantial irritant” to U.S.-China relations.
Similarly, in late 2015, Feinstein effectively sought to defend the CCP from criticism, on a purportedly pragmatic basis, in fighting legislation from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have named the street running in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize-winning anti-Communist writer and human rights activist, had at the time been held in jail for seven years by the Chinese government for criticizing the regime.
When Cruz sought unanimous consent for the bill on the occasion of President Xi Jinping’s U.S. visit, Feinstein blocked it. A month later, when Cruz reintroduced the measure, citing a statement co-authored by Feinstein and her Democrat colleague Pat Leahy calling for Xiaobo’s release, Feinstein again blocked the legislation.
Finally, in February 2016, the bill cleared the Senate in a unanimous voice vote, though it died in the House amid a veto threat from the Obama administration.
……………………………………………………………...................................…….
9-12-2017
Jian Yang, left, with Senior Colonel Wang Liwei, defence attaché, at an event held at the Chinese embassy in Wellington to mark the 88th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army in 2015
New Zealand’s national intelligence agency has investigated a China-born sitting member of parliament in connection with the decade he spent at leading Chinese military colleges.
Jian Yang, an MP for New Zealand’s ruling National party, spent more than 10 years training and teaching at elite facilities including China’s top linguistics academy for military intelligence officers, the Financial Times has learnt. https://www.ft.com/content/64991ca6-9796-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b
http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/08/sen-dianne-feinsteins-ties-china-go-way-deeper-alleged-office-spy/.............................................................................................................................................
2-19-2019
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, left, and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi shake hands during their meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. (How Hwee Young/Pool Photo via AP)
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/china-iran-meet-amid-efforts-to-preserve-nuclear-deal................................................................................................................
6-14-2017 Trump holds 30 percent ownership of an office building in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, for which four lenders, including the state-owned Bank of China, provided a $950 million loan in 2012....In February 2017 in its first major real estate transaction after Trump’s inauguration, the Trump Organization sold a $15.8 million penthouse apartment in Trump Tower to Chinese-American business executive Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by the name Angela Chen and has been directly linked to a front group for Chinese military intelligence through the misleadingly innocuous-sounding China Arts Foundation....the China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation, a state-controlled company in China also known as Sinosure, is reportedly investing $425 million in one of Trump’s resorts in Indonesia, specifically for a theme park to be built by another Chinese state-owned company. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/news/2017/06/14/433915/trumps-conflicts-interest-china/
......................................................................................................................................
8-15-2016 A lawsuit claimed that the business group, Bayrock, underpinning Trump Soho was supported by criminal Russian financial interests. While its initial claim absolved Trump of knowledge of those activities, Trump himself later took on the group’s principal partner as a senior advisor in the Trump organization.
“Tax evasion and money-laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model,” the lawsuit said of the financiers behind Trump Soho. The financing came from Russian-affiliated business interests that engaged in criminal activities, it said. “(But) there is no evidence Trump took any part in, or knew of, their racketeering.” Journalists who’ve looked at the Bayrock lawsuit, and Trump Soho, wonder why Trump was involved at all. “What was Trump thinking entering into business with partners like these?” Franklin Foer wrote in Slate. “It’s a question he has tried to banish by downplaying his ties to Bayrock.”
But Bayrock wasn’t just involved with Trump Soho. It financed multiple Trump projects around the world, Foer wrote. “ (Trump) didn’t just partner with Bayrock; the company embedded with him. Bayrock put together deals for mammoth Trump-named, Trump-managed projects—two in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a resort in Phoenix, the Trump SoHo in New York.”
But, as The New York Times has reported, that was only the beginning of the Trump organization’s entanglement with Russian financiers. Trump was quite taken with Bayrock’s founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan.
“Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo,” the Times reported. “The other development partner for Trump SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.”
Trump was eager to work with both financial groups on Trump projects all over the world. “Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections,” the Times wrote. “In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed ‘numerous deals all over the world’ and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him. ‘Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,’ Mr. Trump said . ‘And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.’” The Times also reported that federal court records recently released showed yet another link to Russian financial interests in Trump businesses. A Bayrock official “brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians ‘in favor with’ President Vladimir V. Putin,’” the Times reported. “The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a ‘strategic partner,’ along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.” http://time.com/4433880/donald-trump-ties-to-russia/
......................................................................................................................
No comments:
Post a Comment