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December 23, 2014

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Disgraced official’s luxury villa on sale for US$8.5m

By Li Qian | December 23, 2014, Tuesday | Print Edition

A LUXURY villa in France, a bribe given to disgraced Chinese senior official Bo Xilai, is being advertised for sale at 6.95 million euros (US$8.52 million).

Bo, 65, ex-Party chief of southwest China’s Chongqing City and a former member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, was sentenced to life in prison in September last year on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.

He was found guilty of stealing 5 million yuan (US$803,450) of state funds and covering up the murder of British citizen Neil Heywood by his wife Bogu Kailai. He was also found to have taken bribes totaling 20.44 million yuan either personally or through family members between 1999 and 2012.

The bribes included the villa bought by Xu Ming, chairman of Dalian Shide Group Co Ltd, for Bo’s wife through shell companies managed in part by Heywood, the Ji’nan Intermediate People’s Court in east China’s Shandong Province found.

The villa is on Boulevard des Pins in the prestigious La California district in Cannes where the average price of a house is up to 6,000 euros a square meter, according to yesterday’s Global Times. Fine & Country, the company advertising the villa for sale, says it is located on a 4,000 square meter plot with “beautiful Mediterranean gardens and superb sea views.”

The interior boasts 400 square meters of living space on three floors, including five bedrooms and a separate studio apartment. It also has a swimming pool and pool house.

The Chinese newspaper said the villa was managed by a French-registered company called Residences Fontaine Saint Georges. Its current legal representative is Jiang Feng-Dolby, a former China Central TV presenter and a friend of Xu’s, it said. Her predecessors were Heywood and French architect Patrick Devillers.

The company managed the daily operation of the villa while its sole shareholder, Luxembourg-registered Russel International Resorts Co Ltd, owned it, the newspaper said.

At Bo’s trial, it was said that Xu bought the villa for Bo’s family and, to hide the connection, he and Devillers created companies to act as manager and owner.

The newspaper said that this arrangement had made it difficult for China to confiscate the villa and more cooperation was needed with French authorities if any progress was to be made in this regard.

Bo was investigated for suspected serious discipline violations in April 2012. In September 2012, he was implicated in the murder of Heywood at the trial of Wang Lijun, ex-police chief and vice mayor of Chongqing, who was charged with bending the law for selfish ends, defection, abuse of power and bribe-taking. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Bogu was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in August 2012.

The court found she and her son Bo Guagua had disputes with Heywood over economic matters. He had threatened Bo Guagua in e-mails, which made Bogu fear for her son’s safety. She poisoned Heywood with cyanide.

Nation


 

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