In plain sight: how an alleged Chinese spy tried to build an Australian business empire

As the private plane circled western New South Wales, where Australia’s lush seaboard makes way for its dusty heart, the men on board were keen to make a deal.

Chunsheng Chen and his five companions were on their way to a tyre recycling plant just outside the town of Warren.

The plant transformed old car and truck tyres into oil, carbon and steel using a process that was closely guarded by its operators, Green Distillation Technologies.

Chen, the company was told, was a billionaire Hong Kong businessman, who could invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their company to fund a series of plants internationally.

He had requested the tour three days earlier, during a meeting in a Melbourne office with the owners of GDT. During the same meeting, he agreed to provide full documentation about his identity and business assets within two weeks, according to multiple people who attended the meeting, so that these owners could independently verify who they were dealing with.

But after the tour of Warren in June 2017, the GDT owners never heard from Chen again.

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Investors were known to emerge and recede without notice, so the owners had little cause to think of Chen again. Until two years later, when the gruff and stocky man in the brown coat who visited Warren was outed as a suspected Chinese Communist party spy.

Kumar Vaidyanathan, a director of the Australia-India Business Advisory Group, which organised a meeting that led to the Warren trip, did not know about the allegations regarding Chen until contacted by Guardian Australia.

“We always follow things down the rabbit hole to see where it will lead to, and that’s why this meeting took place,” Vaidyanathan said. “[But when] we were trying to do due diligence on this guy, everything went blank.”

Chen, who also used the name Brian, has previously denied the spying claims and did not respond to a request for comment from Guardian Australia. The investigation into him remains ongoing, but federal authorities do not expect he will return to Australia.

The journey to Warren, not previously reported, is one of several threads left behind by Chen when he departed Australia under the cloud of an Australian federal police and Asio investigation last year.

Those threads include his attempted business dealings with GDT and Imunexus, a biotechnology company which shared an office building with the CSIRO, Australia’s national science research agency. Then there are the global projects Chen said he was funding as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, his personal relationships, and his connections to a local network of Chinese Australian businesses which experts say could have unwittingly provided the interference for him to perform espionage work.

Under examination are all facets of Chen’s life in Australia, including his ability to buy property, operate companies and legally remain in the country. He is alleged to have operated in plain sight in Australia since the mid-2000s, seemingly working in telecommunications, as a military technology salesman, a journalist and an expert in manufacturing within the painting industry.

‘The noise for intelligence work to hide in’

In 2010, Chunsheng Chen had an application for permanent residency sponsored by multimillionaire Melbourne businessman David Jiang.

Three years later, he was granted permanent residency. According to supporting documents, Jiang wanted to employ Chen as a production manager on a $250,000 salary as it was vital to the expansion of his then-$80m company, Australian Brushware Corporation.

The corporation’s brands include Monarch Painting, which sponsored the NSW Blues rugby league team and the Seven network’s show House Rules, and Kaboodle and Flatpax, kitchen and cabinetry brands stocked by Bunnings.

Documents relating to Chen’s 2010 visa application, including case notes filed by migration review tribunal staff, show that Jiang submitted a significant amount of supporting information.

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The documents were obtained under freedom of information laws by Guardian Australia. Many of the submissions by Chen and Jiang were redacted by the tribunal, as they contained private or business information.

An initial decision to deny the visa was overturned by the tribunal in 2013, largely on the strength of submissions by Jiang’s company regarding Chen’s suitability for the position given his English and Mandarin language skills and his manufacturing experience.

The application came at a key time for Chen – according to the tribunal, an Australian business visa he was issued in 2006 was due to expire in March 2010.

Documents tendered to the tribunal state that Chen was due to start the position at Australian Brushware Corporation on 1 January 2010.

Chen claimed in his application that he was working for a Melbourne telecommunications company at the time he was offered the role. But none of the documents released to Guardian Australia support this, and the company claimed it had never employed Chen.

The documents also make no mention of a company which Chen was operating in Australia at the time – Prospect Time International Investment. His partner in the business from 2004 to 2009 was a man named Wang Zhenhai.

Guardian Australia has confirmed that the Jiangs were also former business partners of Wang. David and his wife Michelle both appear to have had different interests in separate companies with Wang prior to Australian Brushware Corporation sponsoring Chen’s visa application.

Wang has been reported as having ties to the United Front Work Department, a foreign-influence body of the CCP described by Chinese president Xi Jinping as an “important magic weapon”.

Wang did not respond to a request for comment from Guardian Australia. He told the Nine network last year that he was a “long-time” family friend of Chen, and denied that Chen was a Chinese operative. He also told Nine last year that he took the Prospect Time position because company law required companies to have one Australian citizen as a director for it to be registered.

David and Michelle Jiang did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Guardian Australia.

Guardian Australia does not suggest any wrongdoing by Wang or the Jiangs.

But Chen’s extensive business and personal networks highlight a broader issue being grappled with by federal authorities: how and to what extent could a network of legitimate Australian businesses and community groups be used as cover by someone like Chen to carry out alleged CCP intelligence-gathering capabilities?

Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Alex Joske, a CCP-influence expert whose work has been cited by the US house intelligence committee, said a key focus of United Front department figures was to maintain legitimate relationships with Chinese-Australian businesses.

He said people who became business partners or employed others with links to the department or CCP activities could be more likely to do it for personal than party reasons.

“What we don’t know about United Front work is how it overlaps and integrates with intelligence work,” Joske said.

He told Guardian Australia that within these United Front networks there will likely be people working for the intelligence networks.

“United Front work … is the noise for intelligence work to hide in.”

Clive Hamilton, a professor at Charles Sturt University who researches CCP foreign interference, told Guardian Australia: “There’s a vast network of United Front and party-linked people throughout the community, particularly in Melbourne, and it’s quite dizzying when you look into the linkages.

“The CCP have been building that for a long time, and there’s been no resistance. It’s only in the last three years really that attention has turned to it.”

Both experts agreed – without commenting specifically about Chen – that the creation of seemingly legitimate business empires could be an important cover for anyone acting on behalf of the CCP.

The threat of foreign interference has become a key focus of intelligence and enforcement agencies in the US, UK and Europe, as it became clear that shifting resources to combat terrorism after the September 11 attacks left significant knowledge gaps.

In Australia, the AFP commissioner, Reece Kershaw, has said he plans to expand the joint taskforce, which currently has 65 officers, and would seek to recruit more Mandarin speakers.

Mike Burgess, Asio’s director general, told a Senate estimates hearing in October that there were more foreign agents and their proxies operating in Australia than at the height of the cold war, but did not go into further detail, declining to even name the countries responsible.

“The problem is simple. You’ve got foreign governments who covertly direct people to develop relationships, to try and curry favour, and one day they will call in that favour,” he said.

“Some good people may not even understand they have been influenced in a way that is counter to our national interests.”

Meanwhile, almost a year after leaving Australia, Chen appears to be back in business.

His website, which was not available for several months after he was publicly outed as a suspected spy, has recently been relaunched.

But there have been some changes: there no longer appears to be any reference to the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, nor to several projects he claimed to be doing in Portugal.

Entries regarding other potential Prospect Time ventures, the Australian companies GDT and Imunexus, remained.

“Being a responsible corporate citizen, Prospect Time International Investment Ltd assumes an indispensable role in the waste-to-energy industry,” the website states.

“Prospect Time is discussing cooperation opportunities as well as joining force [sic] with the renowned Australian recycling and waste to energy recovery company, Green Distillation Technologies Corporation Limited – where Prospect Time’s Chairman and Chief Executive, Mr Brian Chen, paid a visit in mid 2017.”

Despite Chen and his entourage being told not to take any photos at the Warren plant, he is pictured in a hard hat, standing before the GDT employee who led the tour, listening intently.