Hiring of Former Senior Government Officials In other countries (such as Australia, UK

108 Hiring of Former Senior Government Officials In other countries (such as Australia, UK, France, and Germany), former senior government officials routinely take positions with Chinese companies. This pattern appears less pronounced in the United States. A prominent exception is the law firm Dentons, which merged with the Chinese law firm Dacheng in 2015°° and employs numerous former government officials, including former ambassadors, members of Congress, mayors, and generals.*! Earlier in 2018, Bloomberg News reported on the Imperial Pacific casino, a Chinese-owned company operating in the American territory of Saipan. Its large transaction volumes have raised concerns about potential money laundering. It has also made millions of payments to family members of the territory’s governor and, at one time, counted the former governors of three states as well as the former directors of the CIA and FBI as members of its board or advisors.* State and Local Politics Many states do not have prohibitions against foreign contributions in local races.*? One of the most notable examples of an individual contributor comes from Virginia, where in 2013 and 2014, Wang Wenliang, a Chinese industrialist who was expelled from China’s national legislature in 2016, contributed $120,000 to Governor Terry McAuliffe’s campaign.** Chinese firms are also involved in lobbying at the state and local level, another means of acquiring legitimate influence. While the quality of data reporting and aggregation for local and state-level lobbying is not always as robust as that at the federal level, this project was able to identify more than $1 million in state-level lobbying expenses over the past decade by Chinese firms. BYD Motors, which produces buses for public transit in the United States, Huawei, and Wanda America Group were among the biggest spenders on lobbying. A 2017 complaint with the Federal Election Commission against the California subsidiary of Dalian Wanda is illustrative of the potential for exploitation granted by the US- subsidiary exception. The FEC found that Lakeshore, a Chicago real estate company whose principals are US citizens, was the source of the money that funded a local ballot initiative in California that would have blocked a Wanda competitor from expanding. Wanda acknowledged that the money for the measure had come from Lakeshore, with which Wanda does business, in the form of a $1.2 million loan. In its conclusion, the FEC did not rule on whether foreign restrictions applied to ballot measure activity. Further, it argued that even if those restrictions did apply, because “none of the funds at issue appear to originate with a foreign national” (i.e., they came from Lakeshore); that because the Wanda deputy manager who was listed as the principal officer of the Ballot Measure Committee was an American citizen (the general manager is a Chinese national); and that the funds originated in and would be paid back by revenues generated Corporations HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020567