Chen Zhi: the kingpin of a global conspiracy

(Image credit: TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP via Getty Images)

They’d make a great band name. But Chen Zhi and the Prince Group are in fact a global scourge – combining two of the worst malaises of the age: people trafficking and cybercrime. Now Western authorities are getting tough, says The Guardian. In a grand swoop last month – dubbed “the largest action ever in Southeast Asia” – the US and UK sanctioned Chen and 146 other businesses connected to his Prince Group, accusing the company of detaining trafficked workers in “scam compounds” across Cambodia – and compelling them to “engage in a range of fraudulent schemes” that have sucked billions of dollars from victims globally.

The Chinese-born kingpin, Chen Zhi, 38 – also known as “Vincent” – has also been charged with wire-fraud conspiracy and money laundering, but “remains at large”. It could prove hard to pin him down. Chen is thought to have bought citizenship in Cyprus and the South-Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, as well as holding Cambodian nationality. Within Cambodia his power has grown. His rapid ascent to wealth has won him political influence, including reported roles advising the authoritarian former prime minister Hun Sen and his successor and son Hun Manet.

“Chen Zhi isn’t a mob boss as we traditionally conceive of them – he is (or rather was) the polished face of a state-protected criminal economy,” Jacob Sims, of Harvard University’s Asia Centre, told CNN. The “baby-faced tycoon” has risen to “the highest echelons of power in his adopted home” where “he bestows scholarships and runs philanthropy programmes, while overseeing one of the country’s largest and best-connected conglomerates”. At the height of his power, Chen and associates were making $30 million every day from their sprawling transnational criminal organisation, according to US prosecutors.

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Who is Chen Zhi?

Born in 1987 in Fujian, a province in southeastern China, the now-removed website of Chen’s Singapore family office described him as a “young business prodigy” who cut his teeth setting up internet cafes and gaming centres in the provincial capital of Fuzhou, says Bloomberg. Chen subsequently renounced his Chinese citizenship, turned up in Cambodia and “began splashing enormous amounts of cash”, says CNN. His first investments from 2011 onwards were in real estate – Cambodia’s cities are dotted with Prince’s skyscrapers. But over the next decade, the group’s interests grew to span entertainment, finance and even an airline.

Assets across the region – including a Singaporean car-loan firm, and two listed companies in Hong Kong – are now on the sanctions list, says Bloomberg. Yet it seems Chen, who is married with three children and reportedly living in Singapore, didn’t see the threat coming. “As recently as the day the US charges went public,” his family office was advertising for a personal assistant for inflated pay of as much as $5,000 a month. The contrast with conditions in a cybercrime empire stretching to at least “10 forced labour camps” couldn’t be greater, says CNN. The US indictment describes “vast dormitories, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire” where incidences of violence and coercion were “frequent”.

These operations have hitherto gone largely unchallenged in Cambodia due to the “complete dismantling” of the country’s civil society and independent media. The question now is whether the US and UK can use their leverage to dismantle the lucrative industry. “This is the first time Washington and London have hit the architecture – the elite ownership, the laundering conduits, and the money itself – at the very top,” says Sims. Time will tell whether they can succeed – and catch Chen Zhi.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.