A Change of Guard

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Wednesday 20 June 2012

French Architect Arrested in Chinese Inquiry

A French architect with ties to disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has been arrested in Cambodia, the French embassy said Tuesday, in a new twist to China's biggest political scandal in decades.

By KEITH BRADSHER 
Published: June 19, 2012 

HONG KONG — A French architect who worked closely with a disgraced Chinese official and his wife has been arrested in Cambodia, the French government said late Tuesday, in a development that could trigger further diplomatic friction in a domestic Chinese political dispute that has already embroiled the United States and Britain.
Bernard Valero, the spokesman for the French foreign ministry, said at the ministry’s daily news conference in Paris on Tuesday that the architect, Patrick Devillers, had been detained in Cambodia.
“We of course will offer our consular protection, and we are in direct contact with the Cambodian authorities regarding the ins and outs of this arrest,” he said. “We are obviously following the ongoing investigation very closely.”
News services in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, quoted Touch Narouth, the police chief there, as declining to identify any charges against Mr. Devillers but saying that he had been arrested on behalf of China.
Mr. Devillers is one of two foreigners known to have had business ties to Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced Chinese official, Bo Xilai, who was jockeying to enter the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee before he was purged this spring.
The other foreigner was Neil Heywood, a British businessman who died last November in a hotel room in Chongqing, in western China. The Chinese government has detained Ms. Gu as a suspect in Mr. Heywood’s death, saying that there are strong grounds for suspecting that Mr. Heywood was murdered.
The Chinese government has not made any public comment so far about Mr. Devillers.
Mr. Bo has been removed as party secretary of Chongqing and suspended as a member of the Politburo, and is being held for interrogation in an investigation into “serious disciplinary violations.” One question is whether he tried to prevent his police chief, Wang Lijun, from investigating the death of Mr. Heywood. Mr. Wang fled to the American Consulate in Chengdu in early February, where he remained for a day before being released into the custody of Chinese security officials from Beijing.
Mr. Devillers had remained in Cambodia despite being warned strongly and repeatedly by friends that he was in danger there, in part because of the Cambodian government’s close connections to the Chinese government, which is its largest creditor and aid donor. Mr. Devillers may have stayed because he began living with a Cambodian woman soon after moving to Phnom Penh nearly six years ago and has a kindergarten-aged child with her, said a friend who insisted on anonymity because of the diplomatic tussle over Mr. Devillers.
The friend added that he did not know if Mr. Devillers had ever signed a marriage document with the woman. It is common for expatriate men to enter long-term relationships with Cambodian women by seeking the approval of the woman’s family and local elders rather than signing paperwork and formally entering into marriage. The friend also did not know whether the woman or the child had acquired French citizenship.
When a New York Times reporter met Mr. Devillers at his home in Phnom Penh on May 5, he declined to provide any comment on the record about his work in China for Mr. Bo or his wife, Ms. Gu.
Mr. Devillers has immersed himself for many years in the study of Taoism, a mystical philosophy with deep roots in Chinese culture, and the most famous Taoist text, the Dao De Jing, also known as the Tao Te Ching.
In an e-mail on May 16, he provided a single 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 would 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.”
Calls to Mr. Devillers’s mobile phone in Cambodia on Tuesday evening were not answered.
An expert on Cambodian laws said that Cambodia concluded an extradition treaty with China in 2000, one of a handful of countries with which Cambodia has such agreements.
Cambodia does not have an extradition treaty with France, the expert added. News of the arrest of Mr. Devillers comes six days after a visit to Phnom Penh by He Guoqiang, one of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the pinnacle of the Chinese Communist Party and the top decision-making group in China. Mr. He is also the head of the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, one of several bodies that is likely to be involved in the investigation of Mr. Bo.
When Ms. Gu established a company in Britain in 2000 to choose European architects for projects in China, Mr. Devillers was her business partner and they both used the same address, an apartment in Bournemouth on the southeastern coast of England.
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. Mr. Devillers’s father, Michel Devillers, said in an interview that his son set up the fund to sell real estate to Chinese investors, but there has been no public evidence so far that Chinese money actually went into the fund.
China has many legal restrictions on overseas investments by its citizens and particularly scrutinizes foreign investments by public officials.
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Frenchman Close to Chinese Official's Wife Arrested
BEIJING—Police in Cambodia have arrested a French architect who was close to the wife of Bo Xilai, the ousted Chinese Communist Party leader, in the latest twist in a case that has triggered the worst political crisis in China in more than two decades.
Patrick Henri Devillers was arrested about two weeks ago in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, the city's police chief, Touch Naruth, told The Wall Street Journal. He said he couldn't give more details as the case was in the hands of the national police's immigration department.
France's Foreign Ministry confirmed that a French citizen had been arrested in Cambodia, but declined to identify him and said it was trying to find out what he was accused of. China's Foreign Ministry didn't answer telephone calls.
Mr. Devillers, who is about 52 years old, had close ties to Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, who the Chinese government said is in custody as a murder suspect in the death in China last year of Neil Heywood, a British business consultant also close to the Bo family.
It wasn't clear whether the Frenchman's arrest was related to the parallel investigations into Ms. Gu and her husband, who was dismissed as Communist Party chief of Chongqing city in March and from his remaining Party posts in April.
But if the arrest turns out to be related to the Bo affair and Beijing were to try to have Mr. Devillers extradited, that could cause diplomatic tensions with Paris. In 2009, Cambodia bowed to a extradition request by China, Cambodia's largest bilateral creditor and foreign investor.
Messrs. Devillers and Heywood were part of a small circle of friends and advisers around Ms. Gu in the 1990s when they lived in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, where Mr. Bo was mayor from 1993 to 2001, said people who knew all four of them.
Ms. Gu and Mr. Devillers were consulting partners for Horas Consultancy, which advised businesses investing in Dalian and elsewhere in China in the 1990s, according to that firm's publicity material.
When Ms. Gu moved to Britain in 2000 so her son, Bo Guagua, could go to a private boarding school there, Mr. Devillers appears to have moved there, too, and to have shared an apartment with her in the southern seaside city of Bournemouth.
Ms. Gu, using the name Horus Kai, and Mr. Devillers are both listed as directors of a company called Adad Ltd. that was set up in the town of Poole in 2000 and dissolved in 2003, according to British public records.
In those documents, Ms. Gu and Mr. Devillers both list the same apartment in Bournemouth as their residential address and people who knew them at the time said they saw them together in Bournemouth.
It isn't clear how long Mr. Devillers had been living in Cambodia, but he left China several years ago, said people who knew him there.
Bernard Valero, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman, declined to comment on whether China was trying to have the arrested French citizen extradited.
The French government was in contact with Cambodian authorities "to determine what exactly he has been accused of," he said.
"We are bringing him every assistance possible within the framework of the Vienna Convention," he said. "We are in contact with his family and we are making sure if he needs a lawyer, he has one."
A person who answered the telephone at the home of Mr. Devillers's father, Michel, hung up without leaving time for questions.
Mr. Devillers's arrest came shortly before He Guoqiang, the Chinese leader overseeing the investigation into the Bo case, visited to Phnom Penh last week, during which he met Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Mr. He is a member of the party's nine-man Politburo Standing Committee—the top decision-making body—and heads its Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which investigates party officials for corruption and other abuses.
In 2009, Cambodia deported 20 asylum seekers from China's mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, which inhabits the northwestern region of Xinjiang, bordering Pakistan and Central Asia.
That move came days before China's vice president, Xi Jinping, began a visit to Cambodia, and was quickly followed by a $1.2 billion economic-assistance package from Beijing. China denied the package and the deportations were linked.
—Sun Narin in Phnom Penh
and Geraldine Amiel
and David Gauthier-Villars
in Paris
contributed to this article.
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Cambodia Arrests Frenchman Linked to China Scandal

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia June 19, 2012 (AP) Cambodian police have arrested a Frenchman reportedly linked to a politician at the center of China's biggest political scandal in years.
Cambodian authorities informed the French Embassy in Phnom Penh of the arrest of Patrick Devillers, embassy spokeswoman Laurence Bernardi said Tuesday. She said no reason was given and the embassy was seeking an explanation from the Cambodian government.
It was unclear whether Devillers' arrest was related to China's ongoing investigation into Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party chief of the Chinese city of Chongqing who was dismissed in April.
Bo's ouster came after his former police chief fled to a U.S. consulate and divulged suspicions that Bo's wife Gu Kailai was involved in the death last November of a British businessman, Neil Heywood.
Bo has since been subject to a wide-ranging investigation into unspecified malfeasance, while his wife has been named a suspect in Heywood's murder.
Several businesspeople and former government officials with links to Bo have reportedly been detained for alleged corruption and abuse of power.
News reports have said that Devillers was closely linked to Bo, Gu and Heywood. It is not clear if he is accused of any crimes in China or elsewhere.
Phnom Penh police chief Gen. Touch Naruth confirmed Devillers' arrest but declined to provide further information.
Calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry rang unanswered Tuesday night.
Devillers, an architect, had helped Bo rebuild the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian when he was the city's mayor in the 1990s, The New York Times reported last month.
The Frenchman and Gu were partners in setting up a company in Britain in 2000 to select European architects for Chinese projects and both gave the same address of an apartment in the English city of Bournemouth, the newspaper said.
It cited an unidentified friend of Devillers as saying the architect left China in 2005 and has been living in Cambodia more or less continuously for about six years.
China has considerable influence in Cambodia, having provided millions of dollars in aid over the past decade.
In 2009, Cambodia deported 20 members of the Uighur ethnic minority group who said they were fleeing ethnic violence in China's far west and wanted asylum.
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By Prak Chan Thul and John Irish
PHNOM PENH/PARIS (Reuters) – A French architect connected to China’s biggest political scandal in two decades has been arrested in Cambodia, police and diplomats said on Tuesday.
Patrick Henri Devillers, 52, is one of two Westerners in China known to have had close business ties to the family of deposed Chinese politician Bo Xilai. He also had a close personal relationship with Bo’s wife, who is accused of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood.
“There was an arrest of this French man in relation to a crime in China,” said Touch Narouth, police chief in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. He declined to further elaborate.
The purge of Bo Xilai, the ambitious and charismatic party secretary of the inland port Chongqing, comes during a sensitive transition to the next generation of Communist Party leadership. It has laid open a world of wealth and intrigue rarely glimpsed by the Chinese public.
Neither Bo nor his wife, Gu Kailai, have been seen in public since he was stripped of his post in mid-March.
Devillers first met Bo’s wife in the 1990s in China’s northeastern port city of Dalian, where he was an architect and she was the mayor’s wife. His name was later linked with hers in business ventures in Europe.
Sources briefed on the investigation have said Heywood, who also knew Gu from Dalian in the 1990s, was murdered after he demanded too large a cut when Gu requested his help in transferring money overseas.
Devillers denied any role in money laundering in a recent interview with French newspaper Le Monde in Cambodia, where he owns a modest property.
The spokeswoman at the French embassy in Phnom Penh confirmed Devillers had been arrested.
“We are offering our consular services, are in contact with Cambodian authorities and are following the investigation,” added Bernard Valero, the Foreign Ministry spokesman in Paris, adding that Paris was seeking confirmation of why the man had been arrested.
Devillers and Gu listed the same address in the British resort town of Bournemouth in 2000 – the same year as he left his wife in China to return to Europe. Devillers and his Chinese wife divorced in 2003.
In 2006 Devillers created a Luxembourg-based company, D2 Properties, using the address of Gu’s former law partner in Beijing. D2 Properties took minority stakes in a number of boutique properties in France, Monaco, Martinique and Geneva developed by Devillers’ father, a real estate investor.
The father’s firm, Rainans Investissements, owns 2 percent of D2 Properties, according to a Rainans financial statement.
Before D2 Properties was formed, Gu and Devillers had been co-directors of a UK-based firm, Adad Ltd. Registered in 2000 and dissolved in 2003, its business purpose was unclear.
It was not immediately clear whether Devillers would be extradited to China. Cambodia has cooperated with China in past extraditions, notably the deportation of 20 Uighurs, members of a minority group in Western China, who had sought asylum from the United Nations in Phnom Penh in 2009.
(Writing By Lucy Hornby; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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