Hong Kong

Stephens, Riady and Lippo

Mochtar Riady of Indonesia's Lippo Group met Jackson Stephens and Witt Stephens of Little Rock in 1976 while looking for a stake in an American bank, and in 1978 the two families formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong. John Huang, sent to Hong Kong by Union Planters National Bank of Memphis in 1983, became in February 1985 at once vice president of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank and Far East manager of Worthen Bank, reporting to Riady in both. About 1987 the Riadys traded their Worthen shares for the Stephens interest in the Hong Kong Chinese Bank.¹ "Through the end of 1991, it seemed likely that Indonesia's Lippo Group would take over" the Hong Kong subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, "paying out as much as forty cents on the dollar"; the plan was dropped in February 1992, when Hong Kong investigators found 145 million dollars in unrecorded claims against the bank.² Huang had been sent to Beijing in 1991 to negotiate a joint bid for it with China Resources.¹

On June 23, 1994, James Riady had breakfast with Webster Hubbell, who had resigned as associate attorney general in April, met President Bill Clinton with Huang at ten, and had lunch with Hubbell; on June 27 Hubbell wrote to a director of Hong Kong China Limited, a Lippo company, offering his services for 100,000 dollars a year, and the money reached his account by that day.¹ The charge to which Riady pleaded guilty in 2001 listed transfers from foreign Lippo companies to Huang's account in Hong Kong in 1990 and 1991 and cash payments to a Lippo executive in Hong Kong until May 1994.³

Intelligence

John Gittinger of Psychological Assessment Associates, the CIA's contract personality-assessment firm, opened its branch office in Tokyo and later moved it to Hong Kong to serve the agency's stations in the Far East.⁴ The Nugan Hand Bank had a branch in Hong Kong and was alleged to have laundered the proceeds of Golden Triangle heroin through its Southeast Asian offices.⁵ Within a year of ALLTEL's purchase of Systematics, the Little Rock banking-software company, in May 1990, the subsidiary acquired Systems Limited, "an international banking software firm headquartered in Hong Kong."⁶ In the February 1987 raids on The Finders in Washington, the Customs agent Ramon J. Martinez reported finding a telex he described as a purchase order for two children in Hong Kong through a contact at the Chinese Embassy; no second investigator's record confirms that document.⁷ Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong in May 2013 with classified documents of the National Security Agency and met the journalists there in June.⁸