Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine

Author:Miranda Devine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

13

The Super Chairman

“At the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence, we have our old friends.”

—Professor Di Dongsheng, Renmin University vice dean of International Studies, November 28, 2020

Who was the mysterious “Super Chairman” who promised to plough $100 million seed capital into Hunter’s first big deal in China? Why was his identity such a secret that his American partners referred to him as SC? And why, as Hunter wrote confidentially to his friend and partner Devon Archer, “does the Super Chairman love me so much?”

“It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name,” he wrote in a jubilant email on September 23, 2011.

Hunter was cock-a-hoop. He had just pulled off the deal of his lifetime. Or, more accurately, his smooth new partner Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, had engineered a partnership with the Chinese state that Hunter believed would make him very rich, without having to do much more than glad-hand a conga line of powerful bosses, as he had done in Beijing on a quick trip the previous year.

“Keep this between us please,” Hunter wrote to Archer. “But bottom line is, if I/you and me get around 7% of this fund it could be in many ways the end all be all [sic]. I don’t believe in lottery tickets anymore, but I do believe in the Super Chairman…. I know Michael [Lin] can be overly optimistic but if we were 20% owners of a…Super Chairman backed fund, I think the sky’s the limit.”

Archer replied: “This is smelling more and more real. I do believe in the Super Chairman as well and I [am] starting to believe this is how things actually do go down on the mainland…. Wow.”

They had reason to be optimistic. The Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund (BHR), in which Hunter would become a director and shareholder, would be backed by Chinese state-owned enterprises worth a combined $8 trillion, including the Bank of China, the Postal Savings Bank, China Life, and the National Council of Social Security.

By 2019, BHR would have $2.5 billion in funds under management. It made acquisitions around the world, from coal mines and dairy farms in Australia to American firms with military technology and artificial intelligence applications, as part of President Xi’s imperial Belt and Road Initiative.

The BHR partnership was struck between four parties: On the Chinese side were Bohai, which was controlled by the country’s most powerful financial institution, the Bank of China, and another big asset manager, Harvest Fund Management. On the American side were Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca and the Boston-based Thornton Group, which joined forces to form Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the “RST” in “Bohai Harvest RST.”

Hunter would own 10 percent as one of nine directors of the new US-China joint venture, known as BHR Partners. As his father closed in on the White House, Hunter removed himself as a director of BHR in the fall of 2019, but he still owned 10 percent, through his firm Skaneateles, LLC, in July 2021, according to China’s National Enterprise Credit Information database.

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