Mike Forsythe 傅才德Verified account

In mid-2017, HK media reported about the mysterious rapid rise of Chua Hwa Por (Cai Huabo), how he amassed a fortune, and wrote that he was said to be married to the daughter of Li Zhanshu, an ally of Xi Jinping's poised to enter the elite Politburo Standing Committee. (3/x)

Next Magazine, published by Jimmy Lai, who was arrested this week under the new National Security Law (Li Zhanshu is the chairman of the NPC, China's rubber-stamp legislature that imposed the law on Hong Kong) published a piece. So did @yammeiching at the SCMP. (4/x)

Here is the Next Magazine article. @JimmyLaiApple is out on bail, his media company is still publishing, and this article is still available. Unfortunately SCMP pulled Shirley Yam's article.(5/x) https://hk.nextmgz.com/article/2_529498_0 …

It was written in a breezy way and didn't have documentation. The headline was in the interrogative - "How’s the Singaporean investor in the Peninsula’s holding company linked to Xi Jinping’s right-hand man?” - but it SEEMED accurate. So we set out see if we could nail it. (7/x)

The NYT method is try to get documentation carved in stone. Obvious you say? No, I mean ACTUAL stone. Tombstones that document the family tree. @DavidBarboza2 started this for his 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into Premier Wen Jiabao's family wealth. (8/x)

It's a good tombstone. It shows all of Li's siblings (he is 栗战书, fifth from right on top row). The stone lists all of their spouses too. It is great because Chinese tombstones often omit daughters since traditionally they cease to be in the family when they get married. (10/x)

So yay for the Li family progressive tombstone. But alas, Li Qianxin's generation is not yet memorialized, so we don't have this carved in stone. She is 栗潜心。Back to the drawing board. (11/x)

Enter Deutsche Bank. In late 2019 the team at @SZ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, who we knew well from working alongside them on the @ICIJorg projects like the #PanamaPapers , reached out. They had a trove of documents from the bank. We <heart> troves of documents. (18/x)

These were internal investigations done by outside law firms, responding to an SEC inquiry. Emails, spreadsheets galore. The docs show that a woman named Li Qianxin, aka Naomi, identified as the daughter of Li Zhanshu, was pushing the bank to hire her little sister. (19/x)

22/x - now we were confident we had the story. Getting from 99.9 percent sure to 100 percent sure involved @jotted talking to sources, filling out the details on Ms. Li's Hong Kong life. She details it here in this thread.https://twitter.com/jotted/status/1293506061631012864 …

24/x - OK Folks. Now the thread is going to get crazy. So I'm on book leave. I'm writing a book about McKinsey (much more on that later). I need to get back to that ASAP so I need to get this off my chest NOW. Are you ready? This is gonna get nuts. And this is NOT in the article

25/x - So you may ask yourself, WHY was Naomi Li Qianxin making recommendations to Deutsche Bank on who to hire? What was her position? Well, a few days after the Deutsche Bank article ran, she was promoted to chairwoman of China Construction Bank International (建银国际）

CCBI's partner was a Beijing company, Qinchuan Dadi (秦川大地投资有限公司）, formed a few weeks after the Communist Party Congress in 2007 that elevated Xi Jinping to the Politburo Standing Committee and marked him as the future party boss. (28/x)

Buckle up! So the owners of Qinchuan Dadi were a couple, who controlled it through a jumble of companies called Yuanwei that were based in Shenzhen, the power base for Xi Jinping's late father, Xi Zhongxun. (30/x)

Of course all these Xi Jinping references are apropos of something, for the couple were none other than Qi Qiaoqiao, the older sister of Xi Jinping, and her husband Deng Jiagui. (31/x)