A man accused of paying bribes in one of China’s biggest-ever military corruption scandals allegedly funneled at least 114 million Canadian dollars into banks in that country before investing more than CA$32 million in luxury Vancouver real estate.
Before moving from China to Canada in 2006, Chen Runkai told immigration officials that he made at most 41,000 Canadian dollars a year. His wife, he said, was employed as a clerk.
Despite their modest incomes, a series of money transfers poured CA$114 million into the Chen family’s Canadian bank accounts a few years later.
Chen, it turns out, is wanted for arrest by the Chinese government on charges of bribery for his alleged role in a major corruption scandal involving a senior military official, OCCRP and the Toronto Star have learned. Now, he’s fighting to stay in Canada, where his family has two mansions in Vancouver overlooking the Pacific.
He is the owner of a Tudor-style home with mountain and ocean views he purchased in 2016 for CA$15.6 million. It sits a few doors down from another mansion his daughter purchased in 2012 for about CA$14 million — without a mortgage — when she was 25, while listing her occupation as “student.”
Until now, Chen has been unknown to the public and referred to only as “Person A” in a case study by a British Columbia commission tasked with examining overseas money laundering in the province, and its links to surging property prices.
The Chen family’s investments in Canada add to mounting concerns about illicit overseas money flowing into the country’s overheated real estate markets, helping push already sky-high housing costs out of reach for many Canadians.
Amid public debate about billions of offshore money laundered through real estate in Vancouver — one of the world’s most expensive cities to own a home — the British Columbia government formed the Cullen Commission in 2019 to look into the issue. It is expected to deliver its final report to the government in June.
The Cullen Commission’s case study is heavily redacted and makes no reference to Chen, but OCCRP and Toronto Star reporters used publicly available documents from Canada and China to piece together his identity, along with that of his wife and daughter.
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