58/x: Turns out not only is Li Xiaopeng the model child, but he also married into a very respectable, highly educated family of scholars. His brother in law, Tang Qian （唐虔）, was for years the "E" in UNESCO - he was the deputy director general for education.
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59/x: So did I find any pot of gold registered to the wife or other family members? No I didn't. I spent a long time dissecting every unit of Huaneng (possibly the world's biggest carbon emitter), which Li Xiaopeng led for years.
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60/x: But I did find something. And it was interesting. Li Xiaopeng left Huaneng in 2008, but his wife then took a position as the Communist Party secretary of Huaneng's Hong Kong unit. Why?
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61/x: Here she is talking about the urgent need to study the lessons of the sixth plenum of the 17th Communist Party Congress in 2011. Bracing stuff!
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62/x: And then there are bits of the Huaneng empire that trace back to offshore accounts, including the soul-crushing PO Box 957 in the BVI, where so many princeling money trails end in a black hole. Like this one:
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63/x: But my searches for hidden wealth in THIS branch of the family came up with nothing. Absence of evidence doesn't mean there's not anything there, but I didn't find it. It is certainly worth running these names again through all the available global databases.
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64/x: I would certainly encourage a young reporter to do that. Those family names were hard to come by. That leaves the younger brother in the family. His tale very different, hard to separate rumor from truth. So we focused on a really interesting court case in Hong Kong.
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65/x: The testimony at that trial, if true, would put the youngest son, Li Xiaoyong, in an entirely different plane from his siblings. That case centers on a colorful man known as the Dream Bear.
Stay tuned for the last installment, coming soon!
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66/x: Hi folks, I'll wrap up this thread later tonight. Stay tuned! The last part is maybe the wildest part, as knows.
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68/x: So now and I will tweet about the third child of Li Peng, the son, Li Xiaoyong (李小勇）。 If his brother-in-law Liu Zhiyuan, his sister's husband, is the Fredo Corleone of the family, he is Sonny Corleone, but just the younger son. Li Xiaopeng? Michael Corleone.
69/x: Li Xiaoyong married the granddaughter of a Chinese general, Ye Ting. Her name is Ye Xiaoyan (叶小燕）。 They have a daughter, Ye Dandan who was a competitive ice skater.
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70/x: Li Xiaoyong has an alias, Zhu Feng, Zhu being the last name of his mother, 朱琳，Zhu Lin. This is common practice among the Communist elite. Xi Jinping's little brother in some filings uses his mother's last name, Qi (齐）。 They usually romanize it from Cantonese - Chai.
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71/x: There are tons of undocumented rumors about Li Xiaoyong's wealth, and reports he has a Singaporean passport. We're going to take a pass on those and look at another reporting thread. The story of Dream Bear. Over to you,
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88/x: And now for the grand finale. You've learned a little bit about the three families of Li Peng's children. In many ways they are very different. But their paths came together in May, 2008 in Shanxi, the coal capital of China.
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89/x: It was that month that Li Xiaopeng, the oldest of Li Peng's children, stepped down from Huaneng (China's biggest power producer and arguably the world's biggest corporate carbon emitter) and entered the Shanxi government. See:
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90/x: Meanwhile, Liu Zhiyuan, the husband of Li Peng's second child, Li XIaolin, was furiously striking multimilliondollar deals in 2008 in Shanxi for his coal-water slurry plans (mentioned higher up in this thread)
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92/x: Until May 2008, its venture in Shanxi was going well, and it was raising money on international markets, preparing for the IPO of the venture, called China Coal. Zhang Jingyuan had 60%, and Oriental Pearl, through an offshore holding company, held 40% .. see:
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93/x: But in May, 2008 things fell apart for Oriental Pearl. A board member, not the Dream Bear, but a second source, told us what happened, and it is dramatic.
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94/x: This is where we get back to the Godfather analogy, one more time. Humor me. Indulge me. You'll like this.
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95/x: So you may remember from the Godfather Part II how Michael Corleone brings Frank Pentangeli's brother over to the US from Sicily, and he shows up at Frank's Senate hearing. Frank gets the message: if he squeals on the Corleones, his brother is dead.
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96/x: The brother, Vincenzo, said nothing. He didn't have to.
youtube.com/watch?v=eUjjzw
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97/x: Well, that was the scene at the Shenzhen Marriott hotel on May 29, 2008. A couple of weeks earlier, Zhang Jingyuan had told this person that he wanted Oriental Pearl out of the joint venture.
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98/x: That day, our second source walked into the meeting room at the Shenzhen Marriott to negotiate with Zhang's people. He recognized Li Xiaoyong in the room. He knew, just like Frank Pentangeli knew, that he had lost the game.
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