Following publication of a report titled “Taiwanese tycoon used girlfriend to hide tons of money” in Blitz on October 9, 2022, which was first published by the Organized Crime And Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), on November 4, 2022, this newspaper received an email from James Christopher who claims to be the “authorized representatives of Credit-Suisse”. In this email, James Christopher wrote:
“Your platform is hosting the fake content of Credit-Suisse. We represent Credit-Suisse and they have bought this to our attention. Credit-Suisse has not authorized the hosting of this content. Please remove this content from your platform as soon as possible as they are violating Credit-Suisse’s copyrights. This creates confusion among our client’s customers. Our client doesn’t own this site. We request this domain name be unregistered and removed on priority”.
In the report, it was first revealed by the Organized Crime And Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that Credit Suisse has revealed how girlfriend of Taiwanese tycoon Sun Daocun, a known proxy for his business affairs, may have shielded his wealth from confiscation by hiding it at the Swiss banking giant.
Detailing Suisse Secrets OCCRP on its website said:
Suisse Secrets is an international investigation into one of the world’s wealthiest and most important banks.
More than 163 journalists from 48 media outlets in 39 countries across the world spent months analyzing bank account information leaked from Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest lender. The leak included more than 18,000 accounts that held in excess of US$100 billion at their peaks. It is the only known leak of a major Swiss bank’s client data to journalists.
Switzerland is a well-known destination for money from all over the world, in part because of its banking secrecy laws. There is nothing inherently wrong with having a Swiss bank account. But banks are supposed to avoid clients who earned money illegally or were involved in crimes — and reporters identified dozens of corrupt government officials, criminals, and alleged human rights abusers among Credit Suisse account holders.
Despite their notoriety — which, in some cases, would have been obvious from a quick Google search — Credit Suisse maintained relationships with some of these clients for years, though it is possible that some accounts were ordered frozen by law enforcement.
The Suisse Secrets project investigates these account holders, whose exploitation of Swiss banking secrecy is a prime example of how the international financial industry enables theft and corruption. Given Credit Suisse’s numerous pledges to reform its due diligence practices over the years, the project highlights the need for increased accountability in this sector.
A suspicious representative of Credit-Suisse
James Christopher, who claims to be the “authorized representative” of Credit-Suisse did not provide any address or phone number in the email he sent to this newspaper. His website Hosting Abuse Reporting is shown to be parked by GoDaddy, which can only multiply anyone’s suspicion about the very integrity of James Christopher. It can be asked – as to why Credit-Suisse has appointed someone as its “authorized representative” who does not have any physical address or phone number.
It can also be asked – who this James Christopher really is? Is he representing Taiwanese actress Yen Ling-Ning, the girlfriend of Sun Daocun, who left her showbiz career to bear three children with the magnate during a long affair between the 1980s and 2000s?
The mischievous Taiwanese actress Yen Ling-Ning
Data from the Suisse Secrets project — an investigation into 18,000 leaked Credit Suisse accounts led by Süddeutsche Zeitung and OCCRP — reveals Yen Ling-Ning set up three accounts and filled them with tens of millions of Swiss francs.
Yen Ling-Ning opened the first of these accounts in 2007, a few years after police began investigating Sun over his role in the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars from Pacific Electric Wire & Cable (PEWC) Limited, a company his father founded and he inherited managerial control over.
The Suisse Secrets Investigation
Suisse Secrets is a collaborative journalism project based on leaked bank account data from Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse.
The data was provided by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared it with OCCRP and 46 other media partners around the world. Reporters on five continents combed through thousands of bank records, interviewed insiders, regulators, and criminal prosecutors, and dug into court records and financial disclosures to corroborate their findings. The data covers over 18,000 accounts that were open from the 1940s until well into the last decade. Together, they held funds worth more than $100 billion.
“I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the source of the data said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders. This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue”.
Yen Ling-Ning, a former actress in Taiwan who retired from show business shortly after starting a relationship with Taiwanese tycoon Sun Daocun, has no known source of personal or family wealth, or any other professional activity that could explain the large sums held in the newly discovered Swiss accounts. She’s also known to have been used by Sun Daocun to hide assets in at least one other instance, which led a Taiwanese court to fine him.
PEWC, Taiwan’s first cable wire manufacturer, had ridden the wave of the dotcom bubble to become a billion-dollar company by the year 2000. Together with Taiwan Mobile Co Ltd, an affiliate company that Sun co-founded in 1997 as a spin-off from PEWC, it began diversifying into new industries, from high-speed railways to luxury hotels, coffee shops, and even satellites.
But by 2003, PEWC began reporting heavy losses after pouring money into bad investments. It was delisted from Taiwan’s stock exchange the following year, at great cost to some 340,000 investors who had enthusiastically bought shares during its bull run.
PEWC didn’t just suffer from poor decision-making. After a whistleblower claimed senior managers at the company had engaged in malpractice, Taiwanese authorities began to investigate the alleged embezzlement of huge sums from PEWC accounts.
They found that the company’s former chief financial officer, Hu Hongjiu, set up over 140 PEWC subsidiaries overseas and took US$572 million in bank loans guaranteed by PEWC that were then embezzled and laundered through bank accounts in places as far away as Vanuatu, according to a Taiwan Ministry of Justice document that compared the PEWC case to the infamous Enron scandal in the US.
In total, PEWC lost at least US$700 million to theft and embezzlement, according to Taiwanese authorities.
Sun, who was not the chief architect of the scheme but played a significant role, had declared bankruptcy in 2004, shortly after the scandal emerged, and stepped down from Taiwan Mobile Co Ltd, although he reportedly continued to act as a vice-chairman of PEWC until 2009.
In November 2004, prosecutors indicted Sun Daocun, Hu Hongjiu, and four other company managers. PEWC also filed a civil lawsuit against Sun and other defendants.
Even though he was bankrupt and being chased by PEWC and its creditors, Sun Daocum and his love interests continued to enjoy luxurious lifestyles, with media coverage over the following decade highlighting his taste for flashy cars, expensive shopping trips, and luxury real estate. Local media dubbed him “Taiwan’s richest bankrupt person”.
His girlfriend Yen Ling-Ning even owned a luxury Los Angeles mansion that reportedly sold for nearly US$20 million in 2019, OCCRP has learned.
After several years of litigation and appeals, in September 2017 Taiwan’s Supreme Court upheld Sun’s convictions for document forgery and embezzlement, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. Shortly after being released in January 2020, he was convicted of another charge of misappropriating funds from private foundations controlled by PEWC. In March 2020, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and was jailed in April 2021. He was released on bail to receive medical treatment later that year, but died in November at the age of 72.
Taiwanese courts had, in 2018, ordered Sun Daocun, Hu Hongjiu, and other former senior executives from PEWC to pay the equivalent of over US$250 million in compensation to investors. However, the decision has since been appealed and remains stuck in legal limbo, complicated further by Sun’s death.
