With promises of green cards and access to prominent U.S. politicians — including then-President Donald Trump — two New Yorkers enticed Chinese investors into giving them millions, filtering the foreign money into American political campaigns, all while skimming the funds to support their luxurious lifestyles, federal prosecutors said Monday, announcing fraud charges against the pair.
Sherry Li, 50, and Lianbo “Mike” Wang, 45, of Oyster Bay, a hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island, were arrested Monday, according to court records, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States, the Justice Department said in a statement.
The pair dangled green cards to Chinese investors, promising that if they invested in their feigned real estate project — which included plans for a sprawling school, the “Thompson Education Center,” and an amusement park in New York state — they would receive legal residency in the United States through the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, prosecutors said.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the program “sets aside EB-5 visas for participants who invest in commercial enterprises” in certain areas, particularly rural ones like Sullivan County, N.Y., where Li and Wang, naturalized U.S. citizens, had promised to develop the complex, saying they chose the location specifically because “it clearly fits within [USCIS’s] target area definition for the EB-5 program.”
Prosecutors said Li and Wang defrauded more than 150 investors as part of the scheme, raising about $27 million — including $16.5 million from people who were expecting a green card for their investment and $11 million from investors who thought the project’s parent company would go public.
They also presented a vestige of relationships with high-ranking Trump administration officials, issuing news releases about Li cozying up to politicians such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Trump at galas and breakfasts. They sold access to Trump fundraisers, prosecutors said, by filtering the Chinese money through the bank accounts of their businesses and bringing the investors as guests, with Li and Wang making the donations.
In one instance, they charged 12 non-U.S. citizens $93,000 per person, a haul of more than $1 million, to attend a June 2017 Trump fundraiser with the president before illegally donating $600,000 to the fundraising committee, the Justice Department alleged.
Beneath the facade, Li and Wang siphoned off the money to fund their lifestyles, the Justice Department said, using the investors’ money to pay for clothes, jewelry, housing, vacation travel and “upscale dining.”
The real estate project was a sham, too, the United States alleged, with the only funds actually put toward the project being used “merely to create and perpetuate the fiction that the [Thompson Education Center] Project was a viable development project that was actually under construction.” The project, which Li announced in 2013 as the China City of America, has yet to come to fruition. Its Facebook page categorizes it as a Chinese restaurant.
Prosecutors alleged in court documents that Li and Wang lied to investors by telling them they were “guaranteed to receive a green card in return for their investment,” that the project was already under construction, that the project’s parent company would go public on the New York Stock Exchange and that their “ties to high-ranking elected and government officials assured the [Thompson Education Center] Project of political support to attain regulatory approvals.”
None of that was true, prosecutors said.
Not a single investor received a temporary or permanent green card, prosecutors said. Instead, USCIS in 2017 started issuing “notices of intent to deny” applications for green cards “because USCIS did not find [the project’s] business plan credible.”
It is illegal for foreign nationals to donate money “directly or indirectly” to federal, state or local campaigns, or to a committee of a political party. It is also illegal for anyone to “solicit, accept, or receive” such contributions from a foreign national.
It was not immediately clear whether Li and Wang had legal representation. Overnight messages to a phone number and email address associated with Li’s company did not immediately elicit a response. Representatives for Trump, who was not named in the suit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement that Li and Wang had tricked investors “by misleadingly claiming that their fictitious project had the support of prominent politicians.” Furthermore, he said, “the defendants were able to perpetrate this fraud by then selling access to U.S. politicians" at fundraisers.
Peace said his office was “committed to protecting our democratic process from those who would expose it to unlawful foreign influence, and investors from the predatory fraudsters who would steal their money.”
The United States sought steep bail conditions for Li and Wang “in light of the serious risk of flight” that each posed, including limitations on their movements and the surrendering of passports and assets in the United States and China. Li and Wang hold dual U.S. and Chinese nationality, according to court documents, and the United States does not have an extradition treaty with China.