If you’ve been wondering about the meteoric rise of the Epoch Times newspaper over the recent years, let’s just say it likely wasn’t because of honest journalism. An article in British daily The Guardian reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has issued an indictment against the paper for voluminous money laundering, comprising the bulk of their profits over the recent years.
The U.S. Attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York claims that Bill Guan, the newspaper’s CFO, “conspired with others to participate in a sprawling, transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67 million of illegally obtained funds,” The Guardian quotes the DOJ prosecutors. The scheme allegedly included a bizarre combination of unemployment benefits and crime proceeds which were then “laundered” through a cryptocurrency platform, making its authors a profit of 70 to 80 cents on the dollar, the prosecutors said.
If true, this scheme was likely responsible for the enormous jump in the news daily’s profits. In October of last year, NBC News reported that the Epoch Times revenue had jumped a whopping 685% over two years.
What’s most notable about Epoch Times, however, is that it is connected with the Falun Gong cult, which has been for decades a major asset of the Anglo-American neocons to instigate attacks against China. For example, for years the Epoch Times’ publisher was the late Stephen Gregory, who was also the former head of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. Steve Bannon also has courted the Epoch Times and Falun Gong groupings in more recent years. EIR has covered much of this history previously.
The group’s founder, Li Hongzhi, is an anti-science mystic who claims that true believers can develop a “falun” in their lower abdomen, which “draws in energy from the universe, transforms it for you, and delivers it to whatever parts of your body may need this energy for development.”
