British businessman secretly held in China for ‘espionage’

A BRITISH businessman has been quietly detained in China since 2018 on charges of illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties.

The case of Ian Stones, who worked major US firms in the country for four decades before setting up his own consultancy, has been revealed by The Wall

Street Journal (WSJ). News of his incarceration has not been mentioned by Chinese or British authorities and is likely to stoke fears about the risks of working in China, which has an opaque legal system and recently dramatically expanded its counter-espionage laws. It also raises the possibility that other foreign workers may be behind bars in China with little attention being paid to their plight.

Mr Stones, believed to be about 70 and from the Greater Manchester area, worked in China for companies such as General Motors and Pfizer. He was jailed for five years in 2022.

He appealed against his conviction but it was rejected in September, the Chinese foreign ministry told the WSJ.

Laura Stones, his daughter, said neither the family nor the British embassy had been allowed to see the legal documents related to the case and she could not comment further. “There has been no confession to the alleged crime. However, my father has stoically accepted and respects that under Chinese law he must serve out the remainder of his sentence,” she told the newspaper. According to a report in the Financial

Times, Mr Stones is believed to have studied at the University of Manchester and Ealing College of Higher Education in the 1970s, before completing a Chinese language studies course at Beijing Language and Culture University.

He founded the Beijing-based investment management consulting firm Navisino Partners about 15 years ago and was also a senior adviser to the Conference Board, a New York-based business research firm.

Records of charges against him or his company are not publicly available and the silence around his case demonstrates how foreigners can simply disappear into China’s byzantine Communist party-controlled legal system.

Mr Stones is believed to have contributed to the book My Thirty Years in China which is described on Amazon as “a collection of autobiographies of select foreign pioneers of business and industry in China”. In an excerpt published on ChinaDaily.com in 2008, Mr Stones wrote about “the difficulties of dealing with customs” in China 30 years earlier.

He cites the bureaucracy of trying to collect and pay for a cabinet from Beijing customs, listing five lessons he learned in the process.

“I was told that my name and the story of my ‘bad attitude’ had spread all over Beijing customs,” he wrote. “The lady who told me advised I shouldn’t upset anyone if I needed to get help from customs in future. It was good advice.”

Revelations about Mr Stones’s case follow separate Chinese accusations earlier this month that MI6 recruited and trained a spy, identified only as Mr Huang, to steal secret government documents.

China’s ministry of state security alleged Mr Huang was recruited by MI6 in 2015 and had used his position in an unnamed overseas consulting agency to gather intelligence in China. It claimed he provided nine classified state secret documents, five secret level state secret documents, and three intelligence documents to the British Government.

The Telegraph has contacted the British Foreign Office for comment.