Firms involved in alleged China visa scam
The Australian 12:00am March 2, 2019
Anthony Klan
EXCLUSIVE Two companies with links to China’s Communist Party have allegedly been used to obtain permanent residency visas for Chinese nationals smuggled into Australia as highly paid corporate executives.
Company and immigration documents appear to show the companies have abused a loophole that allows foreigners to obtain permanent residency via 186 employer sponsorship visas, if they are coming to work for an Australian company in a position paying a salary of at least $180,000.
The loophole also allows foreigners to bypass English-language requirements and worker skill verifications.
The Weekend Australian has obtained “employment contracts” and associated Department of Immigration visa approvals relating to a number of Chinese citizens that appear to show the companies, both run by Chinese nationals, have engaged in the alleged visa scam.
One of the companies is the ASX-listed ASF Group; the other is Marine Parade Holdings, run by Chinese national and Gold Coast property developer Jian Zhong Yang.
ASF Group, which has operated from harbourfront offices at Sydney’s Circular Quay for more than a decade despite consistently booking multi-million-dollar losses, allegedly created employment contracts with bloated salaries for at least two Chinese nationals. This led to them and four others being granted permanent residency visas soon afterwards.
ASF Group “employment contracts” for the two alleged employees, obtained by The Weekend Australian, state each earned annual salaries of $182,000.
The employment contracts — each nine pages long, written on the ASF letterhead and signed in March and April 2013 — state that the company, through its administration arm ASF Corporate, appointed Yiming Du and Rongxin Han to the positions of “corporate general manager” and “policy and planning manager” respectively. However, as a listed company ASF Group is legally required to include the names and salaries of all “key management personnel” in its audited financial reports. Neither Mr Du, Mr Han, their salaries nor their roles appears in any of these audited financial accounts.
This is despite the men’s claimed $182,000 salaries being higher than those paid to several of the nine people who are listed by ASF Group as its “key executives”.
ASF Group had been in exclusive negotiations with the Queensland Labor government to build a $3 billion casino, hotel, cruise ship passenger terminal and multi-apartment tower for almost three years until August 2017 when the state government walked away from the deal — costing taxpayers more than $12m in damages.
The move came after The Weekend Australian revealed the company’s accounts showed it had just $6m in equity and more than $92m in losses and was, according to its auditor, in danger of collapse.
The Weekend Australian also reported that the company would not say who the proposed ultimate funder of the $3bn project was, despite saying it had large amounts of money to invest.
ASF Group executive director Louis Chien did not respond when asked whether Mr Du and Mr Han had ever been employed by ASF Group, or if they had, what their positions were and whether they were ever paid the $182,000 annual salaries the ASF Group contracts claimed.
“You are in receipt of confidential information which should be returned to us,” Mr Chien wrote to The Weekend Australian in an email. “Any breach of confidential information will be subject to legal action.’’
Mr Chien said only the ASF Group “board of directors” had responsibility for “planning, directing and controlling the activities of ASF Group”.
ASF Group fully controls 27 subsidiaries, and the group or its directors and associates control at least another four other ASX-listed companies.
Visas granted to Chinese businesspeople have been under scrutiny since late last year when political donor Huang Xiangmo had his citizenship application rejected and his residency visa cancelled, effectively blocking him from returning to Australia. He had been living in Sydney and was chairman of Yuhu Group, which is developing a $1.4 billion Jewel triple towers apartment development at Surfers Paradise.
Documents obtained by The Weekend Australian show Australian-registered, private property development company Marine Parade Holdings, which is owned and controlled by Mr Yang, obtained permanent visas for two Chinese nationals it claimed to have employed. Both were given the title of “corporate general manager”, and identical salaries of $185,000.
The company’s applications for permanent residency for the alleged new executives, lodged within five weeks of each other in 2014, were made despite Marine Parade Holdings having just five other employees at the time.
An internal “personnel statement” for Mr Yang’s unlisted Marine Parade Holdings, dated April 11, 2014, shows that the company had five employees, all of whom were employed full time.
The two existing executives, a “director/marketing assistant” named Kaiyuan Yang, who is understood to be related to Mr Yang, and Ran Pang, a “financial assistant”, each had stated annual salaries of $45,767 — barely a quarter of the $185,000 salaries for the two new employees.
Immigration department documents obtained by The Weekend Australian show that the visa application of one of the alleged new executives, Xiaohua An, now 54, was rejected by the department in August 2014 because it “failed to meet all the criteria” of an employer-sponsored nomination.
This included the fact that the small size of Marine Parade Holdings meant it did not need “a full-time paid corporate general manager”. It also found Mr An did not meet the starting requirement of already holding a 457 skilled temporary work visa.
Weeks later, on September 24, Mr An was granted a permanent residency visa.
On September 12, fellow alleged Marine Parade Holdings “corporate general manager” Guiying Jia was also granted a permanent residency visa.
The pair were accompanied by four associates, understood to be two partners and two dependants. They were also granted permanent residency visas.
Mr Yang declined to respond to written questions regarding those visa applications and Marine Parade “employees”. One of his companies said it was unable to do so due to “privacy” concerns.
Mr Yang made headlines in 2014 for developing the $85m, luxury 25-level Sanbano tower on Marine Parade in Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, which sold apartments with asking prices starting above $2m. The tower was dubbed “the Palazzo Versace of the southern Gold Coast”.
The previous year, Mr Yang took control of Kaili Resources, a near worthless “mining exploration” company listed on the ASX, whose only assets are a handful of tenements in Western Australia and Queensland. The company is incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda. The majority shareholder of Kaili Resources Limited is an entity called Treasure Unicorn Limited, which is fully controlled by Mongolia Yitai Investment Co Ltd, a Chinese coal company that is an arm of China’s Communist Party. Its major operating arm, the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchange-listed Mongolia Yitai Coal Co Ltd, stated in its 2015 annual report that one of its four corporate principles was “the enhancement of the leadership of the Communist Party of China to the enterprise”. [So the big “linked to the Communist Party” “gotcha” line is that a private, (British) tax-haven-listed shell company is using corporatese gobbledygook to imply association with and/or get close to to the Chinese government? Please. Given the usual high standard of Mr Klan’s work, I suspect that this grasping at straws is the work of his editors. }
Like ASF Group, Kaili Resources has consistently delivered losses to shareholders, reporting a loss of $712,107 last financial year and a loss of $625,320 the year before.
A spokesman for Kaili Resources did not respond to questions about the alleged visa scam, but denied any wrongdoing and said the company was not connected in any way to ASF Group.
However, Kaili Resources and ASF Group are closely connected: they have had shared directors, Kaili Resources Limited owns 100 per cent of a subsidiary called ASF Kaili Resource Pty Ltd, and Kaili Resources Limited used to operate from ASF Group’s Circular Quay offices.