In his book Silent Invasion, Clive Hamilton paints an alarming picture of a Communist China determined to dominate the world – including Australia – by any and all means it can. Hamilton outlines China’s multi-pronged strategy: everything from plain old spying, to using international students and “Confucius Institutes” to influence universities, and leveraging trade and investment and “dark money”.
The latter especially have come to a head during the Wuhan pandemic. China has unleashed an unprecedented trade war to try and bully Australia. It is also using secretive deals and greedy Quislings in the Australian business community to undermine Australia’s sovereignty.
An Australian MP has tabled documents allegedly showing how a Chinese state-owned financier deliberately bankrupted an Australian company, so as to take it over. It also hired spin doctors to keep it all under wraps.
A Chinese state-owned financier bankrupted an Australian company by misdirecting payments as a deliberate attempt to take ownership, Parliament has heard.
Documents tabled in Federal Parliament on Tuesday afternoon reveal China Taiping Insurance Group last year engaged an Australian public relations firm to advise on “media control” as one of its entities launched a “takeover” of superannuation fintech Sargon Capital.
Sargon was placed into receivership by a subsidiary of China Taiping in January, 2020, after the Chinese backers claimed that payments for interest for the September and December quarters in 2019 were not made on time.
But internal documents from both Sargon and China Taiping appear to suggest that all payments were made weeks before receivers were called in. The documents have sparked allegations that the payments were deliberately redirected to present a failure to service debt, allowing for the appointment of an administrator and then a liquidator.
This is not just any company. It is not even just any Chinese company. It is a company owned by the Chinese government.
Documents tabled in parliament by Liberal MP Tim Wilson show China Taiping Insurance Holdings, whose parent company is 90 per cent owned by China’s Ministry of Finance, engaged the services of Australian public relations firm BlueChip Communication as it launched the takeover.
There is no suggestion that Bluechip Communication or its staff were aware of the claims about unpaid debts or were involved in any wrongdoing.
In a speech to parliament tabling the documents, Mr Wilson said if an Australian company was maliciously liquidated at the direction of a Chinese state-linked entity “this House would be rightly outraged”.
To try and hide its dark business dealings, China conducted a deliberate campaign of deception and propaganda. Documents show that the Chinese government was well aware that exposure of its connection would generate bad publicity.
The internal documents show the company wanted the media to refrain from referring to “China Taiping” but rather two other arms of the company – Taiping Trustees and Taiping Financial Holdings.
In an email to China Taiping on the same day, BlueChip Communication’s managing director Carden Calder said the “least desirable outcome is any negative mention of China Taiping or for China Taiping to be seen prominently to be driving this – to minimise risk we recommend immediate action”[…]
Documents from inside the China Taiping companies also reveal that they acknowledged receipt of the payment for the fourth quarter of 2019, despite later claiming that the payment had not been made.
The Age
As former Australian deputy PM John Anderson has said, “We should have never have lost our understanding of the simple fact that a communist is a communist. In the end, a communist will behave as a communist does”.
And as history shows, the Chinese Communist Party will do absolutely anything and everything to win at all costs. Whether it’s deliberately starving tens of millions of its own people or deliberately bankrupting an Australian company in order to secretively take it over.
The lesson by now ought to be blindingly obvious: deal with China at your peril.
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