RSS Feed
August 24th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Last September, Communist party investigators announced that Mr Bo “had
or maintained improper sexual relationships with a number of women”.
The circumstances of Mrs Gu’s flight to Britain helps in part to explain why,
despite the wife of one of China’s
most important leaders, she chose in 2000 to base herself in a shabby
three-bedroom apartment in an office block in Poole, Dorset.
Gu Kailai’s video statement in court on Friday
Public records show that she lived there with her confidant, Patrick
Devillers, a French architect, while her son Guagua, then 12, enrolled at
Papplewick.
At the time, it was unheard of, and politically suspect, for the child of a
Communist party chief to go to a foreign prep school.
Mr Bo’s testimony came after a witness claimed he overheard a phone call
between the couple in which Mr Bo explicitly promised to embezzle £500,000
from a government project to support his wife.
“Your law firm has been shut down, you always complain, so here is some
money to solve your problem,” Mr Bo was alleged to have said down the
line.
But the politician again picked apart the accusation. “Not even the
stupidest corrupt official would do this. Would I say something this
sensitive over the phone?” he asked the court. “When people speak
with me I first request they switch off their phone. I am still a rather
cautious person.”
In a statement, he said his wife had funded their son’s education and expenses
and that she had been a wealthy lawyer. “You can go through the
records. Gu Kailai had at least £2 to £3 million pounds at that time,”
he said.
However, while he denied being aware of the £500,000 embezzlement, he did
accept that it had eventually shown up in his wife’s bank account.
“I lacked alertness […] I let it slide. It was more than a decade ago and
it had already gone into her account, leading to the personal use of public
money,” he said. “I am willing to accept responsibility for this,
I am deeply ashamed and regretful about this incident.”
Li Zhuang, a lawyer who was imprisoned by Mr Bo in Chongqing, said Mr Bo’s
tactic of feigning total ignorance of the lavish amounts being spent all
around him, would not save him.
“This is a weak tactic,” he said, adding that a key moment had come
when Mr Bo admitted to having watched a slide show of photographs of his
family’s villa in the south of France.
“This admission, plus all the evidence and statements have formed a chain
strong enough to convict him for accepting this house from Xu Ming (a
billionaire family friend)”.
However, other lawyers said that while careful efforts had been made to make
Mr Bo’s trial seem real, there were several violations of due process.
“A lot of the evidence presented in court was procured by the Party’s
internal committee,” said Mo Shaoping, a prominent rights lawyer. “That
is illegal. The prosecutors should collect its own evidence.”
He added: “In theory, witnesses are supposed to testify in court.
Documents should only be used when witnesses have been questioned by the
defence. But sadly 90 per cent of witnesses in China do not testify in court”.
Mr Bo has complained that much of the documentary evidence against him is “peripheral”
while the meat of the prosecution case has been made by witness statements
that were likely to have been obtained under duress.
“I sympathise with Gu Kailai,” said Mr Bo. “She is a relatively
vulnerable woman and the situation she was in meant she was going to be
sentenced to death unless she cooperated. And who should she accuse?”
Of the 10 statements so far shown to the court from his wife, only one came
before her conviction for Mr Heywood’s murder last August.
Liu Renwen, the director of the Criminal Law faculty at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, said: “Whether the witness is a convicted criminal or
in detention is not a problem. Sometimes we do need to take it into
consideration, for example, whether the witness is under pressure or not.
But when the evidence chain is complete, you cannot say that the identity of
the witness affects their testimony.”
Meanwhile, the prosecution claim that Xu Ming, a Dalian businessman, paid for
Bo Guagua to bring a group of 40 students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government to China in 2011 was disputed by several of the students.
“I financed my trip to China. The trip was student led and organised;
each participant was responsible for individual arrangements,” said
Tameca Tillard, now the managing director of the Coalition for the
Improvement of Bedford Stuyvesant.
Each delegate paid for their own travel, said Zhuoyan Zhang, who now works in
South Africa. “There were four organisers sponsored by the Ash Center
of Harvard Kennedy School,” she added.
“I paid for the China trip entirely myself. The payment was channelled
through a Harvard Student Club and thus seemed to have followed all proper
procedures,” said Daniel Bertoli.
Additional reporting by Adam Wu
Views: 0
Posted in 
