Family of Wen Jiabao Holds a Hidden Fortune in China
“When I invested in Ping An I didn’t want to be written about,” Ms. Duan said,
“so I had my relatives find some other people to hold these shares for me.”
But it was an “accident,” she said, that her company chose the relatives of the prime minister as the listed shareholders — a process
that required registering their official ID numbers and obtaining their signatures.
Ping An said in a statement that the company did “not know the background of the entities behind our shareholders.” The
statement said, “Ping An has no means to know the intentions behind shareholders when they buy and sell our shares.”
While Communist Party regulations call for top officials to disclose their wealth and
that of their immediate family members, no law or regulation prohibits relatives of even the most senior officials from becoming deal-makers or major investors — a loophole that effectively allows them to trade on their family name.
Ms. Duan, who comes from the prime minister’s hometown
and is a close friend of his wife, said ownership of the shares was listed in the names of Mr. Wen’s relatives in an effort to conceal the size of Ms. Duan’s own holdings.
“But in a system like China’s, where corporate ownership
and political power are closely intertwined, shell companies magnify questions about who owns what and where the money came from.”
Among the investors in the Wen family ventures are longtime business associates, former colleagues
and college classmates, including Yu Jianming, who attended Northwestern with Winston Wen, and Zhang Yuhong, a longtime colleague of Wen Jiahong, the prime minister’s younger brother.
