The Cambodian connections: Tracking Hidden Frenchman in China’s Political Drama

Peter Griffiths/Reuters

A French architect, Patrick Henri Devillers, listed an apartment in this building in Bournemouth, on England’s southeast coast, as an address, as did Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced Bo Xilai.

By KEITH BRADSHER Published: May 17, 2012 

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Throughout the drama this spring revolving around the dismissal of the ambitious Chinese official Bo Xilai and the investigation of his wife as a murder suspect, the most mysterious figure has been a French architect named Patrick Henri Devillers.  

When Mr. Bo rebuilt the Chinese city of Dalian as its mayor in the 1990s, Mr. Devillers, who had married into a prominent local family, helped him lay out the new street grid and design city landmarks. When Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, set up a company in Britain in 2000 to select European architects for Chinese construction projects, Mr. Devillers was her partner. Adding even more spice to the intrigue, both of them gave the same address, an apartment in Bournemouth, on the southeastern coast of England.

And when Mr. Devillers and his father set up a real estate company in Luxembourg in 2006 to hold tens of millions of dollars’ worth of European real estate, the address that Mr. Devillers put on the company’s registration documents was the same apartment in Beijing where Ms. Gu had based her law firm.

Those connections have produced a sometimes breathless swirl of international media coverage of Mr. Devillers for more than a month, made even more intense because journalists have struggled in vain to find him, searching across China and Europe. Even his appearance has been a mystery, as no photos of him have surfaced on the Internet.

But the man who reluctantly and quizzically opened his front gate to an unexpected and unwanted visitor on a recent night in Phnom Penh belied the image that has been painted of him.

Mr. Devillers, 51, has graying hair and stands with slightly stooped shoulders. A pair of reading glasses hung from a black cord around his neck. He has an occasional wry smile, and a calm demeanor that may stem from his years of close study of Taoism, a mystical philosophy with deep roots in Chinese culture.

Mr. Devillers declined to speak on the record at his modest home, a sparsely decorated but attractive two-story French colonial building that survived the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. After a subsequent exchange of e-mails, late Wednesday evening he allowed one comment to be attributed to him, a quote from the most famous Taoist text, the Dao De Jing, also known as the Tao Te Ching.

Mr. Devillers used the quote to summarize his contempt for the media interest in him, his denial that he has engaged in money laundering for anyone in China or been involved in any other wrongdoing, and his hope that the outside world will soon lose interest in him.

“Regarding our subject, I came on this quote from the Dao De Jing by Laozi which says: ‘Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself,’ “ Mr. Devillers wrote. “I believe this teaching to be full of wisdom and hope facts will unfold the truth of it.”

Mr. Devillers finds himself very reluctantly at the center of international attention because he is one of two Westerners known to have been close associates of Ms. Gu. The Chinese authorities have identified her as a suspect in the death last November of the other Westerner, a British businessman named Neil Heywood.

Mr. Devillers has not been accused by the authorities in China or anywhere else of any misconduct. The company that he set up with her in 2000 in Britain, Adad — a modified acronym of “architectural development” — lasted only three years and appears to have done very little business.

Giles Hall, a business executive who worked with Mr. Devillers and Ms. Gu in Britain, described Mr. Devillers as a charming and ebullient person who once offered the Hall family the use of an apartment that he had in Beijing. “He was very suave,” Mr. Hall said, and acted as the “negotiator” for Ms. Gu.

In March 2006, Mr. Devillers and his father, Michel Devillers, jointly set up a holding company, D2 Properties, in Luxembourg, seeding it with a number of real estate holdings as assets. That transaction prompted speculation that D2 Properties might have been used to help Ms. Gu or others in China move money out of the country while circumventing China’s fairly stringent capital controls.

Michel Devillers, in an interview at his home in Rainans, France, gave somewhat contradictory answers about D2 Properties. He said that his son had set it up with the intention of selling real estate to Chinese investors. But Michel Devillers also said that Patrick was incapable of following through on any business scheme whatsoever. “In business, he’s useless,” Michel Devillers said. “He’s an artist.”

Michel Devillers speculated that his son might have had a sexual interest in Ms. Gu, and that she might have wanted to use Patrick Devillers to set up financial schemes. Michel Devillers described his son as a globe-trotting “dandy,” who showed up only every few years in France and had not even told him where he lived.

Patrick Devillers has romanced various women over the years, including the Dalian woman he married and later divorced, but he never mentioned a romantic link to Ms. Gu, according to a friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does not want to be identified publicly as part of the controversy.

Although Luxembourg secrecy laws make it hard to track the financial activities of the Devillers, no evidence has surfaced so far that Chinese money went into D2 Properties or into Michel Devillers’ separate company, Rainans Investments.

Michel Devillers bought and sold real estate for decades, a period during which speculating in French real estate has often been enormously profitable; most of the assets in D2 appear to have come from him. It is common for European families with sizable real estate holdings to set up holding companies and trusts in more secretive jurisdictions like Luxembourg as part of estate planning, especially if the leader of a family suddenly develops a potentially life-threatening ailment. Patrick Devillers left China in late 2005 when his father had serious heart trouble, his friend said, and has been living more or less continuously in Cambodia for about six years.

In addition to his rented home in Phnom Penh, Mr. Devillers bought a small plot of land in 2009 in Kep, a seaside village a three-hour drive south. He built a bamboo one-bedroom cottage with a thatch roof for natural ventilation.

The cottage is inland, lying on a sunbaked dirt road across from a small farm; a similar plot of land on the same road is now on sale for $9,000. Mr. Devillers, who keeps an old Toyota compact pickup truck in Phnom Penh, drives a Chinese-made electric bicycle there.

“He’s not a crook, he’s not a shady businessman,” his friend said. “He’s more of a poet.”

Reporting was contributed by Ravi Somaiya from London, Sandy Macaskill from Bournemouth, England, and Scott Sayare from Rainans, France. Louise Loftus and Bernadette Murphy contributed research from Paris.