Weidong Guan was charged with three counts in a scheme that the Justice Department said caused revenue to surge for the company, which has promoted Donald Trump and conspiracy theories.
Listen to this article · 7:03 min Learn more
- Share full article
Weidong Guan, the chief financial officer of The Epoch Times, was arrested and charged with money laundering and bank fraud by the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday.
A top executive at The Epoch Times, a right-wing media company, has been arrested and charged with laundering at least $67 million in stolen money through company accounts in a multiyear scheme to lift financial returns.
A federal grand jury indicted Weidong Guan, also known as Bill Guan, on one count of money laundering, as well as two counts of bank fraud. The accusations say he lied to a financial institution about the source of the cash, some of which was allegedly pilfered through fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits. The money increased The Epoch Times’s revenue by nearly 400 percent in just one year, according to the Justice Department.
Mr. Guan, its chief financial officer, was arrested on Monday and the indictment, handed up on May 23, was unsealed. He entered a plea of not guilty. His lawyer, a federal public defender, declined to comment. If convicted, Mr. Guan faces a maximum sentence of 20 years for the money-laundering charge and 30 years for each bank fraud charge.
The Epoch Times is affiliated with Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China, and was for years an obscure, free print newspaper dedicated largely to criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. In recent years the outlet transformed itself into a prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump and his allies on the right.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Guan ran a “sprawling, transnational scheme” over four years to buy prepaid debit cards on the internet at a discount using cryptocurrency and then deposit the cards’ money into both personal and company accounts. The debit cards were loaded with illegally obtained funds, prosecutors said, some of which was fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits.
Damian Williams, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the charges represented the government’s “commitment to vigorously enforcing the laws against those who facilitate fraud through money laundering and to protecting the integrity of the U.S. financial system.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Source: nytimes.com
