A Frenchman believed to have close ties to disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has returned to China to help the probe into the country’s biggest political scandal in decades, Cambodian police said yesterday.
Architect Patrick Devillers, arrested in Phnom Penh last month at Beijing’s request, was freed on Monday and he boarded a flight for Shanghai the following day “by his own will,” deputy national police chief Sok Phal said.
“He said he is going there to be a witness,” the official said, adding that China had asked for his release. “The French embassy supported this 100 percent.”
Embassy officials in Phnom Penh did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while a spokesman at the French embassy in Beijing declined to speak on the matter.
While his exact role is unclear, Devillers, 52, is understood to have been a close business associate and friend of Bo and his wife, Gu Kailai (谷開來), key figures in a political drama that has drawn worldwide attention.
China had requested Devillers’ extradition and his arrest on June 13 for unspecified offenses, sparking a diplomatic tussle between Beijing and Paris, which warned Cambodia not to send the architect anywhere without a clear legal basis.
Last week, Cambodian government officials said that Beijing had promised to grant Devillers, who was never formally charged with anything, legal immunity in return for cooperating with its investigations.
That announcement came a day after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met with Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) in Beijing, though it remains unclear whether Devillers’ case was discussed.
The Bo scandal, which first came to light in February, has exposed deep divisions within the Chinese Communist Party ahead of a crucial, once-in-a-decade leadership transition, analysts say.
Bo, the former leader of the southwestern city Chongqing, is being probed for corruption, while Gu has been detained for suspected involvement in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood last year.
Bo had been widely tipped for promotion to the top echelons of the party before the scandal spectacularly derailed his political career.
Devillers is believed to have first crossed paths with the couple in the 1990s, when Bo hired him to do some architectural work in Dalian.
According to media reports, the Frenchman also set up a short-lived firm with Gu in Britain in 2000.
The Financial Times reported late last month that Devillers, through a front company, helped Bo’s family acquire two luxury apartments now worth more than US$3 million in London in 2002 and 2003.
Devillers lived on-and-off at one of the properties until 2010, according to the report.
After divorcing his Chinese wife, with whom he has a son, Devillers settled in Cambodia about five years ago, becoming a low-key, but well-liked member of the expatriate community in Phnom Penh.
China has huge sway in Cambodia and the allies have an extradition treaty that allows suspects to be held for up to 60 days, although Phnom Penh had said it would need to see evidence of Devillers’ wrongdoing before handing him over.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
ROYAL TARGET: After Prince Andrew lost much of his income due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he became vulnerable to foreign agents, an author said British lawmakers failed to act on advice to tighten security laws that could have prevented an alleged Chinese spy from targeting Britain’s Prince Andrew, a former attorney general has said. Dominic Grieve, a former lawmaker who chaired the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) until 2019, said ministers were advised five years ago to introduce laws to criminalize foreign agents, but failed to do so. Similar laws exist in the US and Australia. “We remain without an important weapon in our armory,” Grieve said. “We asked for [this law] in the context of the Russia inquiry report” — which accused the government
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
RSS