Stephens Finance Ltd.

Stephens Finance Ltd. was a Hong Kong finance company established in 1978 by Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group and the Arkansas financiers Jackson and Witt Stephens. According to a 1998 report of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Mochtar Riady had first met the Stephens brothers in 1976, when he was "looking into buying Bert Lance's share of the National Bank of Georgia"; that deal fell through, and the friendship produced Stephens Finance two years later and "several other joint projects before Lippo and Stephens acquired a substantial stake in Worthen Bank of Arkansas in 1983."¹

John Huang was executive vice president at Stephens Finance under James Riady before moving to Little Rock as vice president for the Far East at the Worthen Bank, and was later appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Economic Policy in the International Trade Administration of the Commerce Department.¹ The committee's account of these ventures rested chiefly on depositions of James Riady in Stephens Group, Inc. v. United States (1993), of the Little Rock lawyer C. Joseph Giroir (1997), and of Arthur Vernon Weaver (1997). The Riadys later traded their interest in Worthen for the Stephens family's interest in the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, and traded their interests in other joint ventures.¹

The National Bank of Georgia that Riady had considered buying from Bert Lance was sold instead, at a closing in January 1978, to Ghaith R. Pharaon; the Federal Reserve concluded in 1991, according to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, that Pharaon had borrowed at least part of the purchase money, "with BCCI as his partner in the transaction from the beginning."²³