Hunting fugitives abroad needs int'l cooperation
- By Yao Meng
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, January 2, 2015
First, China and France do not have any formal deal regarding hunting fugitives or investigating their illegal properties in France. Not long ago, Robert Gelli, director of the Criminal Affairs Department of the French Ministry of Justice, said France is ready to help China track down corruption suspects who may be in France, and he does not rule out extraditing any it finds to Beijing.
But at the same time Gelli mentioned that cooperation is only possible if China agrees not to impose the death penalty on any of those extradited, and any extraditions would need to be signed by the French prime minister.
This means the French justice authorities cannot really meet China's requests to investigate Bo's property in Cannes, and the property's current holder is actually listing with a real estate agent.
Second, in a bid to cover up the property's link to the Bo family and to evade local taxes, the property's owner registered the property under a corporate name, which was in turn registered under the name of another company, distancing the actual property holder from the property itself. This poses many legal obstacles to investigators, too.
Legal papers in Cannes show that the property was directly purchased and then managed by one company, which was a subsidiary of a Luxembourg-registered company, which was in turn founded and controlled by a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
If China wants to clarify the identity of the villa's owner, it has to investigate the three companies' equity situations. Apart from this, without actual evidence, a Chinese court's testimony is not sufficient to link the property with the Bo family in the French legal system, meaning that seizing the property in Cannes is practically impossible.
Taking this one step further, if Chinese judicial agencies want to prove Bo's ownership of the property, they will have to prove that Bo has shares in the holding company that bought it. This explains how much difficulty China will have to go through to present hard evidence before formally requesting that the French government help with the investigation.
