Australia names China state-owned lender firm in Parliament for deliberately bankrupting company
Aug 12, 2021
Canberra [Australia], August 12 : A Chinese state-owned lender firm was named in the Australian Parliament on Tuesday afternoon for deliberately bankrupting an Aussie company by misdirecting payments to take ownership.
Anthony Galloway, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald said that documents tabled in Federal Parliament revealed 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, reported The Sydney Morning Herald.
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 its sister company 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, said Galloway.
In a speech to Parliament tabling the documents, Wilson said if an Australian company was maliciously liquidated at the direction of a Chinese state-linked entity "this House would be rightly outraged".
"Speaker, documents have come into my possession that appears to indicate that there was a deliberate campaign to trigger the receivership of Sargon by China Taiping," Wilson said.
In an email to senior executives dated January 30, 2020, the China Taiping Insurance Holding's chief representative in Sydney, Domingo Xu, said it hired BlueChip to provide "relevant opinions and suggestions on media control", reported The Sydney Morning Herald.
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.
The internal documents also revealed that China Taiping and BlueChip Communication were in contact in late 2019 about Sargon Capital.
