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发帖数: 3 | 1 The New York Times
By DAVID BARBOZA
China’s ‘Diamond Queen’
It is no secret in China’s elite circles that the prime minister’s wife,
Zhang Beili, is rich, and that she has helped control the nation’s jewelry
and gem trade. But her lucrative diamond businesses became an off-the-charts
success only as her husband moved into the country’s top leadership ranks,
the review of corporate and regulatory records by The Times found.
A geologist with an expertise in gemstones, Ms. Zhang is largely unknown
among ordinary Chinese. She rarely travels with the prime minister or
appears with him, and there are few official photographs of the couple
together. And while people who have worked with her say she has a taste for
jade and fine diamonds, they say she usually dresses modestly, does not
exude glamour and prefers to wield influence behind the scenes, much like
the relatives of other senior leaders.
The State Department documents released by WikiLeaks included a suggestion
that Mr. Wen had once considered divorcing Ms. Zhang because she had
exploited their relationship in her diamond trades. Taiwanese television
reported in 2007 that Ms. Zhang had bought a pair of jade earrings worth
about $275,000 at a Beijing trade show, though the source — a Taiwanese
trader — later backed off the claim and Chinese government censors moved
swiftly to block coverage of the subject in China, according to news reports
at the time.
“Her business activities are known to everyone in the leadership,” said
one banker who worked with relatives of Wen Jiabao. The banker said it was
not unusual for her office to call upon businesspeople. “And if you get
that call, how can you say no?”
Zhang Beili first gained influence in the 1990s, while working as a
regulator at the Ministry of Geology. At the time, China’s jewelry market
was still in its infancy.
While her husband was serving in China’s main leadership compound, known as
Zhongnanhai, Ms. Zhang was setting industry standards in the jewelry and
gem trade. She helped create the National Gemstone Testing Center in Beijing
, and the Shanghai Diamond Exchange, two of the industry’s most powerful
institutions.
In a country where the state has long dominated the marketplace, jewelry
regulators often decided which companies could set up diamond-processing
factories, and which would gain entry to the retail jewelry market. State
regulators even formulated rules that required diamond sellers to buy
certificates of authenticity for any diamond sold in China, from the
government-run testing center in Beijing, which Ms. Zhang managed.
As a result, when executives from Cartier or De Beers visited China with
hopes of selling diamonds and jewelry here, they often went to visit Ms.
Zhang, who became known as China’s “diamond queen.”
“She’s the most important person there,” said Gaetano Cavalieri,
president of the World Jewelry Confederation in Switzerland. “She was
bridging relations between partners — Chinese and foreign partners.”
As early as 1992, people who worked with Ms. Zhang said, she had begun to
blur the line between government official and businesswoman. As head of the
state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, she began investing the state
company’s money in start-ups. And by the time her husband was named vice
premier, in 1998, she was busy setting up business ventures with friends and
relatives.
The state company she ran invested in a group of affiliated diamond
companies, according to public records. Many of them were run by Ms. Zhang’
s relatives — or colleagues who had worked with her at the National
Gemstone Testing Center.
In 1993, for instance, the state company Ms. Zhang ran helped found Beijing
Diamond, a big jewelry retailer. A year later, one of her younger brothers,
Zhang Jianming, and two of her government colleagues personally acquired 80
percent of the company, according to shareholder registers. Beijing Diamond
invested in Shenzhen Diamond, which was controlled by her brother-in-law,
Wen Jiahong, the prime minister’s younger brother.
Among the successful undertakings was Sino-Diamond, a venture financed by
the state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, which she headed. The
company had business ties with a state-owned company managed by another
brother, Zhang Jiankun, who worked as an official in Jiaxing, Ms. Zhang’s
hometown, in Zhejiang Province.
In the summer of 1999, after securing agreements to import diamonds from
Russia and South Africa, Sino-Diamond went public, raising $50 million on
the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The offering netted Ms. Zhang’s family about $
8 million, according to corporate filings.
Although she was never listed as a shareholder, former colleagues and
business partners say Ms. Zhang’s early diamond partnerships were the
nucleus of a larger portfolio of companies she would later help her family
and colleagues gain a stake in.
The Times found no indication that Wen Jiabao used his political clout to
influence the diamond companies his relatives invested in. But former
business partners said that the family’s success in diamonds, and beyond,
was often bolstered with financial backing from wealthy businessmen who
sought to curry favor with the prime minister’s family.
“After Wen became prime minister, his wife sold off some of her diamond
investments and moved into new things,” said a Chinese executive who did
business with the family. He asked not to be named because of fear of
government retaliation. Corporate records show that beginning in the late
1990s, a series of rich businessmen took turns buying up large stakes in the
diamond companies, often from relatives of Mr. Wen, and then helped them
reinvest in other lucrative ventures, like real estate and finance.
According to corporate records and interviews, the businessmen often
supplied accountants and office space to investment partnerships partly
controlled by the relatives.
“When they formed companies,” said one businessman who set up a company
with members of the Wen family, “Ms. Zhang stayed in the background. That’
s how it worked.”
The Only Son
Late one evening early this year, the prime minister’s only son, Wen
Yunsong, was in the cigar lounge at Xiu, an upscale bar and lounge at the
Park Hyatt in Beijing. He was having cocktails as Beijing’s nouveau riche
gathered around, clutching designer bags and wearing expensive business
suits, according to two guests who were present.
In China, the children of senior leaders are widely believed to be in a
class of their own. Known as “princelings,” they often hold Ivy League
degrees, get V.I.P. treatment, and are even offered preferred pricing on
shares in hot stock offerings.
They are also known as people who can get things done in China’s heavily
regulated marketplace, where the state controls access. And in recent years,
few princelings have been as bold as the younger Mr. Wen, who goes by the
English name Winston and is about 40 years old.
A Times review of Winston Wen’s investments, and interviews with people who
have known him for years, show that his deal-making has been extensive and
lucrative, even by the standards of his princeling peers.
State-run giants like China Mobile have formed start-ups with him. In recent
years, Winston Wen has been in talks with Hollywood studios about a
financing deal.
Concerned that China does not have an elite boarding school for Chinese
students, he recently hired the headmasters of Choate and Hotchkiss in
Connecticut to oversee the creation of a $150 million private school now
being built in the Beijing suburbs.
Winston Wen and his wife, moreover, have stakes in the technology industry
and an electric company, as well as an indirect stake in Union Mobile Pay,
the government-backed online payment platform — all while living in the
prime minister’s residence, in central Beijing, according to corporate
records and people familiar with the family’s investments.
“He’s not shy about using his influence to get things done,” said one
venture capitalist who regularly meets with Winston Wen.
The younger Mr. Wen declined to comment. But in a telephone interview, his
wife, Yang Xiaomeng, said her husband had been unfairly criticized for his
business dealings.
“Everything that has been written about him has been wrong,” she said. “
He’s really not doing that much business anymore.”
Winston Wen was educated in Beijing and then earned an engineering degree
from the Beijing Institute of Technology. He went abroad and earned a master
’s degree in engineering materials from the University of Windsor, in
Canada, and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago.
When he returned to China in 2000, he helped set up three successful
technology companies in five years, according to people familiar with those
deals. Two of them were sold to Hong Kong businessmen, one to the family of
Li Ka-shing, one of the wealthiest men in Asia.
Winston Wen’s earliest venture, an Internet data services provider called
Unihub Global, was founded in 2000 with $2 million in start-up capital,
according to Hong Kong and Beijing corporate filings. Financing came from a
tight-knit group of relatives and his mother’s former colleagues from
government and the diamond trade, as well as an associate of Cheng Yu-tung,
patriarch of Hong Kong’s second-wealthiest family. The firm’s earliest
customers were state-owned brokerage houses and Ping An, in which the Wen
family has held a large financial stake.
He made an even bolder move in 2005, by pushing into private equity when he
formed New Horizon Capital with a group of Chinese-born classmates from
Northwestern. The firm quickly raised $100 million from investors, including
SBI Holdings, a division of the Japanese group SoftBank, and Temasek, the
Singapore government investment fund.
Under Mr. Wen, New Horizon established itself as a leading private equity
firm, investing in biotech, solar, wind and construction equipment makers.
Since it began operations, the firm has returned about $430 million to
investors, a fourfold profit, according to SBI Holdings.
“Their first fund was dynamite,” said Kathleen Ng, editor of Asia Private
Equity Review, an industry publication in Hong Kong. “And that allowed them
to raise a lot more money.”
Today, New Horizon has more than $2.5 billion under management.
Some of Winston Wen’s deal-making, though, has attracted unwanted attention
for the prime minister.
In 2010, when New Horizon acquired a 9 percent stake in a company called
Sihuan Pharmaceuticals just two months before its public offering, the Hong
Kong Stock Exchange said the late-stage investment violated its rules and
forced the firm to return the stake. Still, New Horizon made a $46.5 million
profit on the sale.
Soon after, New Horizon announced that Winston Wen had handed over day-to-
day operations and taken up a position at the China Satellite Communications
Corporation, a state-owned company that has ties to the Chinese space
program. He has since been named chairman. |
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