praying for this idiot to get sent back to china where they actually treat billionaires with the respect they deserve

A federal jury found that Guo Wengui defrauded investors, many his own fervent supporters, of hundreds of millions of dollars. He could face decades in prison.

Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who transformed himself from a Beijing insider into a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party and a favorite of the American right, was convicted on Tuesday of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Guo, also known as Miles Guo, was accused of using a number of schemes — club memberships, cryptocurrencies, a sale of private shares in his media company — to fleece his followers and maintain a lavish lifestyle. On the fourth day of deliberations, a jury in the Southern District of New York found him guilty on nine of 12 charges, including racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Set to be sentenced on Nov. 19, Mr. Guo could face decades in prison or the remote possibility of extradition to China. In a trial lasting almost two months, government prosecutors highlighted rambling videos Mr. Guo had made for his thousands of supporters, often guaranteeing no losses on their investments. The proceeds helped pay for a mansion in New Jersey, a Lamborghini roadster and a $100 million investment in a hedge fund. Prosecutors also drew on bank records, invoices and the testimony of Mr. Guo’s former employees and jilted investors, who had been drawn to a wealthy Beijing expatriate dedicated to ending the seven-decade rule of the Chinese Communist Party. “Is Miles Guo a real political activist or not? I don’t know, I don’t care, and neither should you,” Juliana Murray, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury on Thursday. “He’s an opportunist. He’s a fraudster.” The conviction is the end point of a remarkable trajectory for Mr. Guo, who made his original fortune in China building hotels and acquiring a brokerage company. Along the way, he allied himself with Ma Jian, a senior intelligence official in the country’s feared Ministry of State Security. Mr. Guo used his access to sensitive information to take down people who stood in his way, including a deputy mayor of Beijing who opposed his plans to build a massive office and hotel complex next to the site of the 2008 Olympic Games. Mr. Guo’s time in China came to an abrupt end in 2015, after Mr. Ma was detained by the government. Mr. Guo fled to America and bought a $68 million Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park, winning the approval of the building’s co-op board with the help of a recommendation letter from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Guo may be unique in that he thrived — until he didn’t — in two very different political systems. When he came to the United States, he cultivated political relationships to burnish his image, but this time it was with members of the American right, especially Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump. By early 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla. That year, Mr. Guo applied for political asylum and publicly accused senior Chinese leaders of corruption. China sought to extradite him, enlisting the support of a senior Republican official in a failed attempt to lobby the Trump administration. Beijing also leveled its own charges against him, including bribery and rape, aided by testimony from his former patron Mr. Ma. Mr. Guo, whose age has been described as anywhere from 54 to 57, did not take the stand in his trial. His lawyers argued that his businesses were legitimate and were designed to further his anti-Communist crusade. His efforts included running a Chinese-language streaming site and a Twitter-like social media platform, both popular with exiles. The three counts on which Mr. Guo was found not guilty were related to his media company GTV: wire and securities fraud, and “unlawful monetary transactions.” Mr. Guo was the leader of a “political enterprise of people banded together to bring down one of the world’s most powerful governments, and so that’s what they set out to do,” Sidhardha Kamaraju, one of Mr. Guo’s lawyers, said in closing remarks last week. “They started setting up the infrastructure to help carry that movement forward.” But prosecutors countered the portrayal of Mr. Guo as a principled anti-Communist leader with recordings, made by a former employee, of a heated conversation in 2021 about how to execute some planned money transfers. Mr. Guo could be heard screaming at his employees in Mandarin, yelling “scumbag” and “go to hell” and a string of other epithets. Prosecutors played the tape to jurors on Wednesday and again on Thursday to drive home the point. “That’s the boss of a criminal enterprise,” Ms. Murray said. Mr. Guo’s defense was also undermined by the behavior of his followers, so-called fellow fighters who were deployed far and wide to attack his perceived enemies, including a prominent Chinese dissident. They demonstrated outside the Cambridge, Mass., home of a government witness, the son-in-law of a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee for Mr. Guo, handing out inflammatory pamphlets with a Communist hammer-and-sickle. They also went to the school where the witness’s wife was a third-grade teacher. She was “really panicked, really upset, just really, you know, crying and unsettled and just kind of overcome with fear,” Daniel Copeland, the witness, told the court. Throughout the trial, prosecutors worked to associate Mr. Guo with Mr. Bannon, named a co-conspirator by the government but not indicted. Mr. Bannon had a $1 million consulting contract with one of Mr. Guo’s companies and had a hand in creating three organizations that were central to the government’s case. On multiple occasions, his picture was shown on screens placed in front of the jurors. Mr. Bannon, who recently began serving a prison term for contempt of Congress, declined to speak on the record about the trial.

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