NEW YORK — A Chinese billionaire once counted among the wealthiest people in China has been sentenced to 30 years behind bars in the United States after being found guilty of orchestrating a sweeping financial fraud.
Guo Wengui, who escaped China a decade ago and built a new identity as a U.S.-based critic of the Chinese Communist Party, received his sentence Monday from U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in a Manhattan courtroom.
Before the sentence was handed down, Guo was given an opportunity to address the court. He complained about his treatment while in jail, telling the judge he had fainted and collapsed at 5 a.m. that morning. He said hospital doctors recommended he remain there for care, but he was transported back to jail instead, during which he vomited multiple times. He said a doctor came to see him at the jail before he was brought to court.
Speaking through an interpreter, Guo told the judge: “When I came here, I said I have a stomach ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well.”
He also declared: “The reason I came to the U.S. was to destroy the CCP” — a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.
Judge Torres, in delivering the sentence, read aloud portions of letters she had received from victims who described watching their entire life savings disappear, and who spoke of developing deep fear, crippling anxiety, and even losing loved ones.
“Mr. Guo preyed on those seeking to bring democracy to China,” Torres said from the bench.
She went on to say that even now, Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists incredibly his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.” She also noted that he “has called upon supporters to harass and intimidate those who dare to speak out against him.”
Guo had developed a close relationship with conservative political strategist Steve Bannon, and the two announced a joint effort in 2020 aimed at toppling the Chinese government. Before his arrest and detention without bail three years ago, Guo lived in a high-end Manhattan apartment with views of Central Park and had become a member of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida.
Federal prosecutors had urged the court to impose at least a 30-year sentence, arguing that his “astonishing” fraud — which ran from 2018 to 2023 — “destroyed hundreds of lives” and left behind “a wreckage of victims and families who have been devastated financially, emotionally, and psychologically,” even as Guo claimed many of his followers still believed in him.
According to prosecutors, the money Guo took from victims bankrolled “a lifestyle of extraordinary excess and indulgence, a gilded life of mansions, yachts, race cars, designer clothes and luxury furnishings.”
A jury convicted him on nine of 12 criminal counts after a seven-week trial. Prosecutors said the case exposed how Guo deceived thousands of investors through fraudulent ventures that personally enriched him.
Guo’s defense attorneys argued in court filings that their client was himself a victim — targeted by the Chinese Communist Party through a “grand, pervasive, and life threatening” campaign against him. They alleged the party enlisted powerful figures in American business, entertainment, and politics to work against him.
The defense also argued that a lengthy sentence would only serve to validate China’s smear campaign and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life.” They pointed out that defendants in comparable cases typically received sentences of just two to four years.
Defense lawyers also noted that a court probation officer reported to the sentencing judge that Guo — also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok — bore physical scars and disfigurements from torture he said he endured in China, along with surgeries performed between 1993 and 2022 to address those injuries.
The Probation Department had recommended a 25-year sentence and cited what it called “astronomical losses” exceeding $1 billion suffered by victims.
The defense said Guo’s fortune was built after his family became the largest shareholder of China’s biggest publicly traded securities firm, but that he became a target of Chinese officials after exposing their alleged corruption. They said those officials then accused him of being a U.S. spy, eventually forcing him to flee to Hong Kong, then London, and finally New York in 2017.
Chinese authorities charged him with rape, kidnapping, bribery, and other offenses — all of which Guo denied, saying the accusations were fabricated to punish him for speaking out against senior Communist Party leaders.
Prosecutors say Guo persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to pour more than $1 billion combined into organizations he controlled, including his media company GTV Media Group Inc., as well as the so-called Himalaya Farm Alliance and the Himalaya Exchange.
The government described Guo as “entirely unrepentant” after taking advantage of U.S. asylum laws to build his life in America.
“He does not even offer the lip service of remorse or acceptance of any responsibility for the harms he caused so many individuals and their loved ones, some of whom have been pushed to consider suicide as a result of his crimes, and some of whom confronted him directly by bravely testifying at trial about how he brainwashed, cheated, and harmed them,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.
