A worried Tommy Du holds a picture of his father, jailed in China. Photo: Kate Geraghty
AN AUSTRALIAN cardiac surgeon has been jailed in China after his local partner allegedly stripped him of the business he founded and listed it on the stock exchange.
The case of Du Zuying, who was a heart and lung transplant specialist in Melbourne and Sydney, is perhaps the most startling in a series of murky prosecutions of ethnic Chinese Australians since the 2009 arrest of Rio Tinto iron ore executive Stern Hu.
The company Dr Du founded, China Biologic Products, supplies blood plasma products to Chinese hospitals and is now worth almost $300 million.
Dr Du in Sydney in th 1990s after securing citizenship.
Neither the Australian government nor Dr Du's family were initially notified of his detention, the first of several apparent breaches of China's procedural laws and treaty obligations with Australia.
The case raises questions about whether Australian ministers and bureaucrats are systematically discouraging publicity of politically awkward ''consular'' cases in China.
Diplomats urged the Du family to exercise "extreme caution" before approaching the media, and the case stayed hidden from public view for nearly two years.
Du Zuying at his graduation from Melbourne University in 1992. Photo: Kate Geraghty
Dr Du was detained in Beijing on February 9, 2011, as he was about fly to Australia to see his wife, Gong Jinxiu, and twin sons Tommy and Bruce.
"I waited four or five hours at Sydney Airport after the signal board said the flight had landed," said Tommy Du, 30.
The family learnt that Dr Du had been detained but did not receive official confirmation for nearly two weeks.
The family arrived in Australia in 1989 and obtained citizenship in the early 1990s.
Dr Du developed a powdered form of blood plasma protein that he hoped would help alleviate an acute shortage of blood for emergency transfusions in poor areas of rural China.
It might have been one of Australia's most successful
biotech ventures if not for a series of opaque transactions that transferred his majority shareholding to his Chinese business partners.
Dr Du's Beijing lawyer, Huang Kaiguo, is acting without payment because he is appalled at the treatment of "a great scientist".
Dr Du was taken from Beijing to Tai'an city in Shandong province, where the company has its production headquarters. His representatives allege city officials were paid multimillion-dollar bribes to jail him when he won a crucial court case in another jurisdiction that would have allowed him to reclaim his business.
The sequence mirrors that of two other Australian entrepreneurs serving prison sentences in Guangzhou, Matthew Ng and Charlotte Chou.
"This is China's reality," said Dr Du's lawyer. "Show me an official and I'll show you a bribe taker."
Australian consular officials have visited Mr Du in Tai'an regularly but were unable to attend the key event of his court trial due to scheduling conflicts.
On October 27, 2011, Dr Du asked Australian consular officials to tell his son: "I think it's time you contacted the media in Australia.'' But consular officials discouraged it.
A DFAT spokeswoman denied the department had discouraged media contact. ''Consular officers offer no advice one way or the other,'' she said.
In December 2011, Tommy Du wrote to Australia's ambassador in Beijing, Frances Adamson, urging her to make representations. He did not receive a reply.
On January 6 this year, Dr Du was jailed for four years for embezzlement relating to two old corporate loans in 2002 and 2003. In his defence, he said the first loan was above board and repaid within a month, while the second was made without his knowledge.
In March, Foreign Minister Bob Carr rejected a plea from the family to raise the matter with senior Chinese officials. "It is inappropriate for the Australian government to seek to interfere in the legal processes of other countries," he said in a letter.
Senator Carr visited Beijing in May and raised concerns about the three high-profile cases previously been revealed by Fairfax Media - Stern Hu, Matthew Ng and Charlotte Chou - but not Dr Du.
Fairfax Media understands no Australian official or politician has raised Dr Du's case outside routine consular channels, even though a verdict on his January appeal had been due seven months ago.
In Shandong, the provincial High Court judge in charge of Dr Du's case, Zhang Yuntong, said Chinese procedural law required a verdict to be handed down six or 10 weeks after an appeal, depending on circumstances.
Judge Zhang said he had forwarded to police separate allegations about the true identity of the man who most benefited from the opaque transactions that stripped Dr Du of his company.
Dr Du, his lawyer and a now-defunct short-selling research firm called Worthless Pennies say Mr Lam was previously known as Lin Ziping, a retired colonel in the People's Liberation Army Air Force.
In 1999, a PLA Air Force tribunal sentenced Lin Ziping to six years' jail for his role in smuggling phones and evading 334 million yuan in tax, an offence that would disqualify him from corporate office.
Earlier this year Lam Tung, or Lin Ziping, stepped down as chief executive of the New York-listed company and its Chinese subsidiary, Shandong Taibang Biological Product, after the companies were unable to deny the allegations.
The board of directors, chaired by Mr Lam's wife, Siu-Ling Chan, had established a ''special independent subcommittee'' that eventually told the US Securities and Exchange Commission it could neither ''confirm nor exclude'' the possibility Mr Lam was the convicted criminal Lin Ziping. In other words, the company failed to establish the identity of its chief executive and its chairwoman could not confirm the identity of her husband.
At corporate headquarters in Tai'an, the new chairman and chief executive, David Gao, declined to answer questions from Fairfax Media.
An executive said Mr Lam and his wife had stepped down from all positions, disposed of their shares, and had not been in contact since.
China Biologic, the NASDAQ parent company, still lists Ms Chan as a director, however, and documents filed in July state the couple control a combined 41.5 per cent of shares.
With SANGHEE LIU
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