MCLC: Bo trial

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bo trial 
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/23/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/world/asia/bo-xilai-trial-china.html

Testimony at Chinese Ex-Official’s Trial Ties Briton’s Killing to Demand
for Money
By EDWARD WONG and JONATHAN ANSFIELD

JINAN, China — Prosecutors in the trial of Bo Xilai, the former senior
Communist Party official, presented testimony on Friday that tied the
murder in 2011 of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, to compensation he
was said to be demanding from the Bo family for his management of a villa
on the French Riviera.

Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted a year ago for the murder of Mr.
Heywood and sentenced to a life term in prison. The death of Mr. Heywood
was first made public in March 2012, and the ensuing scandal led to the
downfall of Mr. Bo, who was a Politburo member and party chief of the
municipality of Chongqing at the time, and said to be a candidate for one
the top party posts. Mr. Bo, whose trial began Thursday, is charged with
taking bribes, embezzlement and abuse of power; the last charge is an
accusation that he tried to obstruct an investigation into Mr. Heywood’s
murder, presumably to protect Ms. Gu.

As on Thursday, the trial’s opening day, officials released information
about the hearing through updates on a court microblog account.
Transcripts released via the microblog on Thursday showed Mr. Bo taking a
defiant stand in the court and lashing out at the witnesses, in a display
of the showmanship that helped propel him to the top ranks of the party.

But a person briefed on the proceedings said Friday afternoon that that
day’s transcripts had been less comprehensive. Those transcripts, for
example, revealed less testimony from Mr. Bo.

And party authorities seemed to be making their case against Mr. Bo in the
state media, not just in the court. After Mr. Bo’s bold defense on the
first day of the trial, state news organizations issued a chorus of
commentaries that said the evidence against him on the corruption and
embezzlement charges was overwhelming. The commentaries lauded the trial
as fair and open while ridiculing Mr. Bo’s efforts to refute the evidence
and effectively prejudging him.

“Confronted with the facts, Bo’s attitude was to flaunt his cunning and
use a hundred kinds of denial,” said a commentary on the Web site of the
Guangming Daily, a party newspaper. “The documents are there in black and
white and the evidence is overwhelming. Bo Xilai’s self-defense collapsed
instantly before the evidence, so that his sophistry was futile and
laughable.”

The trial is likely to end on Saturday, and a verdict is expected within a
couple of weeks.

Though less voluminous overall than on the trial’s opening day, the
transcripts released on Friday did include some instances in which Mr. Bo
criticized the prosecution’s main witnesses, including his wife, Ms. Gu,
who appeared in a video recording talking about the family’s finances.
“How much of it is believable?” Mr. Bo said of Ms. Gu’s testimony. “She
has become crazy, and she often tells lies. She was mentally unstable and
under enormous pressure from the investigators to inform on me.”

Testimony for much of Friday centered around the villa, in Cannes, which
documents in France showed was owned by a Frenchman, Patrick Devillers, a
friend of the Bo family. According to testimony from Mr. Devillers and
others read aloud in court on Friday, Mr. Devillers was a frontman in the
purchase of the villa by Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, who bought the villa
more than a decade ago with $3.2 million from a young tycoon, Xu Ming.
Prosecutors said Ms. Gu used different people in the French property
management company as fronts to hide her ownership of the villa. Neil
Heywood, a business associate of the Bo family, was brought in to hold Ms.
Gu’s shares in the villa in 2007, and then removed in 2012. Prosecutors
said he then demanded 1.4 million British pounds, or $2.2 million, from
Ms. Gu and threatened her son, Bo Guagua; she poisoned Mr. Heywood in
November 2011 because of the threats.

The story spun by prosecutors on Friday was somewhat different from the
one that officials presented in the August 2012 trial of Ms. Gu. There,
officials said Mr. Heywood demanded 14 million British pounds, mostly as
compensation for a failed property project in Chongqing. He made threats
to the son to get that money, those prosecutors said, and that made Ms. Gu
fearful. At the time, accounts of Ms. Gu’s trial, which was closed to the
public, were posted online and relayed to journalists by people who had
been allowed into the courtroom.

Bo Guagua, who has just started classes at Columbia Law School, did not
return an e-mail request for comment on Friday. Family members of Mr.
Heywood could not immediately be reached for comment.

The police expanded their security cordon around the courthouse by an
additional block on Friday and, by some eyewitness accounts, appeared to
dispatch plainclothes officers to intimidate leftist supporters of Mr. Bo
and assorted petitioners who had flocked to the courthouse and drawn the
attention of international news media. The crowds of onlookers that
hovered near the courthouse on Thursday had thinned out considerably by
Friday.

Although the official transcripts posted online on Thursday faithfully
reflected the bulk of the hearings, some colorful highlights were omitted,
according to the person briefed by witnesses in the courtroom, who also
has ties to justice officials.

In one exchange, after testimony from Ms. Gu was read in which she
described taking cash from a safe that she shared with Mr. Bo, Mr. Bo’s
court-appointed defense lawyer, Li Guifang, countered that the legal
validity of Ms. Gu’s account was questionable because she faced a possible
death sentence at the time. “So she could say anything to reduce her
sentence,” said the person briefed by witnesses. “He raised these doubts.”

At another point, Mr. Bo vented anger against Tang Xiaolin, a state
company manager who testified via video to having given Mr. Bo 1.1 million
renminbi, or $180,000, in bribes in appreciation for help with business
deals. According to the person briefed on the proceedings, Mr. Bo stated
that if Mr. Tang appeared in court, he would slap him across the face
harder than he had hit Wang Lijun — a reference to a run-in Mr. Bo had
with his former police chief in Chongqing before Mr. Wang fled in February
2012 to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, where he exposed evidence that Ms.
Gu had murdered Mr. Heywood.

Officials from the court, the police and state security held a meeting
late Thursday night in Jinan, according to a person familiar with the
situation, but determined that the situation was basically normal despite
the uproar 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/world/asia/china-watches-a-trial-unfold-
on-social-media.html?ref=asia> caused by Mr. Bo’s spirited defense.
“Yesterday people around the country and even inside the courtroom were
surprised by the degree of openness and Bo’s refutals of the charges, but
the authorities did not seem to think that was so unexpected and
considered the situation to be under control,” the person said. “The main
thing was to modify the propaganda, mainly out of Beijing,” he added.

It was clear that testimony Friday was vetted longer before being posted
than it had been on Thursday, and that Mr. Bo and his attorneys were given
fewer opportunities to rebut evidence, at least as shown to the public.

The court aired more than an hour of video testimony from Ms. Gu in which
she provided testimony on all three charges against Mr. Bo, though the
court only posted an 11-minute clip online, according to the person
briefed on Friday’s proceedings.

In the video that was made public, Ms. Gu spoke to an interrogator about
expensive items that Mr. Xu had bought for the Bo family, including
abalone, airplane tickets and a Segway-like vehicle that the son wanted.
Asked whether Mr. Bo knew about the purchases, Ms. Gu appeared equivocal
and said, “He should know, our relationship is very close.” Pressed
harder, she said, “Anyway, we all know.” She also said Mr. Bo helped Mr.
Xu acquire a local soccer team and get land for a hot-air balloon venture,
but did not mention any bribes paid specifically for those actions. In the
video, Ms. Gu, serving a prison sentence, sat at a desk in a short-sleeved
shirt, looking pale and much slimmer than she did at a court appearance a
year ago.

Mr. Bo denied any knowledge of payments by Mr. Xu, which some legal
scholars said was a good strategy. “Bo’s defense today is that he was
unaware of the bribes Gu took, which stands legally,” said Jiang Tianyong,
a liberal lawyer and rights defender. “If he was unaware and took no part
in the bribetaking, he has no responsibility, even if he is married to Gu.”

“Bo’s self-defense is very effective, even more effective than that by his
lawyers,” he added.

Outside of the courthouse on Friday, there was a clampdown in some corners
of Jinan, in a shift from a more open atmosphere on Thursday. The local
police tried to shoo away Chinese journalists from progressive state media
outlets who were not specifically accredited to cover the trial, though
foreign and some official media reporters appeared to work unimpeded.

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Patrick Zuo
contributed research from Jinan, and Mia Li contributed research from
Beijing.