City profile

Guo Wengui

Steve Bannon’s arrest on fraud charges has shone an intriguing light on his life since President Trump cast the “former Svengali” aside in 2018, said Josh Glancy in The Times: it seems he’s been travelling the world calling for populist revolutions, on a “quest for relevance and funding”. His latest backer is Guo Wengui – an “exiled Chinese billionaire” who reportedly shares his “loathing of the Communist regime in Beijing”. Bannon might have looked “as though he had just come off a long Grateful Dead tour” when arraigned in New York last week. But he was actually “summering” on Guo’s 151ft yacht the Lady May, off the coast of Connecticut, when law enforcement swooped.

Guo is an intriguing figure, said Forbes. He is said to have started out as a civil servant in China’s Shandong Province before building a real-estate empire – but was forced to flee the country in 2015 over fears of corruption charges when shares in Founder Securities, the company that is the main source of his wealth, were frozen. Guo reckons it was all a put-up job. But Interpol reportedly issued a red notice for his arrest in 2017. Guo certainly hasn’t been slumming it while exiled in America. A member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, he’s also the proud owner of the sumptuous Lady May, which has five state rooms and a salon on a rotating platform so guests can “maximise the stunning views”, said Business Insider. Bannon probably won’t be reboarding the yacht any time soon, however – and if Guo got his way, he’d be shot of it too. “Lady May has been up for sale since 2016, with an asking price of $27.9m.”