New huge investigation from me & partners @OCCRP and @GuardianAus.
This picture, which has never been seen before, shows Donald Trump Jr. and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump's "peace envoy" meeting in Singapore last October with Jacky Sui (in glasses), one of the main people behind AB, a new blockchain network.
AB and the Trump+Witkoff family's World Liberty Financial partnered last year to integrate WLFI's stablecoin, USD1, on AB's blockchain.
The agreement came just months after AB announced another unrelated "flagship project": a crypto-themed resort in Southeast Asia.
It turns out that that the resort, in the tiny, impoverished country of Timor-Leste, involved people sanctioned by the U.S. for alleged ties to the world's biggest cyber fraud and human trafficking syndicate, the Prince Group.
We spent MONTHS digging into this, unraveling a trail of people and documents that went from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, Singapore to Hong Kong. It features Frank Lin, a karaoke-loving but secretive businessman who traveled the world by private jet with one of China's biggest movie stars, Fan Bingbing, and who built warm ties with Timor-Leste's Nobel Peace Prize winning president.
Also showing up in this story Boris Tadic, the former president of Serbia, and Ireland's former taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
Also worth saying up front: AB denies any connection to the Prince Group. Lawyers for World Liberty said: "Claims attempting to link World Liberty Financial with sanctioned individuals are unfounded and untrue."
"[World Liberty] has no relationship or association with any of these sanctioned individuals or the Timor-Leste project.”
From last June up until early this year, AB promoted on its websites and online what it called a "blockchain theme resort" near Timor-Leste's capital Dili.
The project was billed as a place where the brightest minds in crypto could gather to innovate, and which would contribute 5-10% of its profits back to charity.
Frank Lin traveled to the country with Fan Bingbing to promote the project and meet members of the local elite.
But what we found is that the local company set up to implement the project, AB Digital Technology Resort LDA, was 60% owned by Yang Jian, a Cyprus passport holder who ended up being sanctioned by the U.S. last October for his role in an allegedly Prince Group controlled resort project in Palau.
Also working with him in Timor-Leste were two other people sanctioned at the same time over the Palau project: "Kimi" Yang Yanming and "Vivian" Shih Ting-yu.
Also holding shares in the project was Zhao Chen, the wife of Hu Xiaowei AKA Chen Xiao'er, Prince Group's purported number two.
AB removed the three sanctioned people from the project in October, but kept promoting the resort on their websites and social media until earlier this year, when reporters started making their inquiries.
World Liberty and AB announced their collaboration in November. World Liberty's lawyers told us they did due diligence into AB but was not made aware of the resort or the people behind it.
Lin, who says he is the person who introduced World Liberty to AB and its "initiator" Jacky Sui, said: “I have always despised those who run scam compounds.”
Read the full story here: occrp.org/en/investigati…
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