The curious case of Guren “Bobby” Zhou shows the ease with which investors
with shady backgrounds and unknown motivations can funnel money to the president.
·
$100 Million
Investment: Guren
“Bobby” Zhou became a major buyer of tokens from World Liberty Financial,
a Trump family-linked crypto venture, through his company Aqua 1.
·
Background
Concerns: Zhou had
previously faced a money-laundering
investigation in Britain, while his earlier businesses had also
experienced failures. He has not
been charged in that investigation.
·
Source
of Funds Unclear: The origin
of the money used for the $100 million investment remains unexplained, raising questions
about due diligence and anti-money-laundering compliance.
·
Trump Family
Benefit: Under
World Liberty's policy, up to $75
million of Zhou's investment was distributed to a company controlled
by Donald Trump and his three sons, while the Witkoff family also benefited.
·
Crypto
Anonymity: The case
highlights concerns that cryptocurrency can allow investors with unknown backgrounds or sources of wealth
to transfer substantial funds.
·
Earlier
Business Failures: Zhou's
flooring businesses in Britain collapsed, while his later crypto venture Caduceus also failed after
millions of dollars were spent.
·
Questionable
Claims: Zhou's
Caduceus venture made announcements claiming backing from major companies and prominent
individuals; several organizations later said their involvement had been unauthorized or falsely represented.
·
Aqua 1
Connection: Blockchain
analysis linked Aqua 1 to wallets previously associated with Web3Port, a company connected
to Zhou.
·
Regulatory
Risk: Experts
said transactions involving the Trump family would normally warrant heightened anti-money-laundering scrutiny
because politically exposed persons face greater corruption and influence-peddling
risks.
·
Ongoing
Investigation: Two former
Zhou employees were later charged in the British money-laundering case; Zhou remains
uncharged,
and a trial for charged defendants is scheduled for 2028.
·
World Liberty's
Response: The company
said it maintains a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards and said
it followed applicable laws and regulations.
·
Key Concern: The episode raises broader questions about
KYC/AML controls, source-of-funds
verification, political exposure and transparency in large cryptocurrency
transactions involving politically connected businesses.
[ABS News Service/10.08.2026]
During the World Cup soccer final
in New Jersey last month, Zach Witkoff, co-founder of President Trump’s cryptocurrency
company, took in the action from a luxury suite. Joining him was a man who had made
the president, and all the company’s co-founders, much richer.
Two years earlier, the man, Guren
“Bobby” Zhou, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under
investigation there for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small
crypto start-up.
Then seemingly out of nowhere,
he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from Mr. Trump’s company, World Liberty
Financial, dropping a total of $100 million through a new firm called Aqua 1. He
kept quiet about it for months, other than speaking briefly as “Mr. Bobby” from
Aqua 1 during a little-noticed audio stream on X.
“We’re very
proud to be a major player in the World Liberty, which is Trump’s family’s crypto
venture,” he said.
Under World Liberty policy, as
much as $75 million of that money was distributed to a company controlled by the
president and his three sons. The money also benefited the family of Steve Witkoff,
the Trump administration’s special peace envoy and the father of Zach Witkoff.
In any prior era, a windfall for
the president of that size from a foreigner with no public signs of access to that
level of wealth would have certainly gone against norms and might have spawned a
congressional investigation.
Instead, the curious case of Mr.
Zhou illustrates the ease with which buyers with unknown backgrounds and motivations
can use the anonymity of cryptocurrency to shower Mr. Trump with money. The president’s
recent financial disclosure form shows that he collected $1.4 billion from his crypto
businesses last year, the majority of it from anonymous sources.
It is not clear how closely World
Liberty scrutinized Mr. Zhou’s past, but the money laundering investigation in England
was publicly
available information, as were portions of Mr. Zhou’s troubled business
history.
A court record filed last November
accuses Mr. Zhou of participating with five other people in a money laundering effort
beginning in 2019. Mr. Zhou has not been charged. British officials said late last
month that their investigation remained active.
His transaction with World Liberty
raises questions as to how he was able to access so much money, and how fully the
company followed anti-money laundering laws. Such laws require businesses, in certain
situations, to document the source of their customers’ funds before accepting the
money.
Patrick Prinz, the chief operating
officer of Recoveris, a Switzerland-based
firm that investigates digital asset crimes, said a combination of the red flags
described to him by The New York Times should have triggered the documentation requirement:
Mr. Zhou’s business failures, his sudden access to wealth, the size of the transaction
and the investigation.
David Wachsman, a spokesman for
World Liberty, said in a statement that the company had followed all applicable
laws and regulations. “World Liberty maintains a compliance program that meets or
exceeds industry standards,” he said.
Mr. Wachsman declined to say whether
the company was aware of the source of the funds used in the purchase. He said the
company disputed The Times’s “characterization of Mr. Zhou,” but did not cite any
specifics.
A White House spokeswoman, Anna
Kelly, said Mr. Trump had no conflicts of interest and “only acts in the best interests
of the American public.”
Mr. Zhou did not respond to numerous
messages to him and his company. Reuters first
identified Mr. Zhou as the person behind Aqua 1.
Even now the source of the money
that Mr. Zhou paid to World Liberty remains a mystery.
But a deep examination of his career
by The Times — through dozens of interviews with former associates, reviews of confidential
documents and an analysis of court records and other publicly available information
— shows a curious arc. A man who seemed to be constantly asking for money from others
had a significant change in fortune just after his crypto company burned through
$7.6 million and he decamped from London to the United Arab Emirates in the summer
of 2024.
Many former associates would speak
only on the condition of anonymity because they feared being pulled into the investigation
in England or worried about the risk of violating libel laws in the Emirates that
make defamation a potential crime, even if true.
They describe Mr. Zhou as a high-octane
charmer with a British accent, persuasive enough to sell ice in a snowstorm, as
one said. But all were stunned to learn that after his departure from London, he
was able to purchase $100 million in anything.
Several business professionals
told The Times that they had refused to get involved with Mr. Zhou after researching
his background. World Liberty, on the other hand, welcomed his company with open
arms.
“We’re excited to work hand-in-hand
with the team at Aqua 1,” said Zak Folkman, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial,
in a statement on X.
For most of his adult life, Mr.
Zhou worked far from technology and high finance.
Raised in Shanghai, he moved to
England in 2005 to attend graduate school. While living in student housing at the
University of Lancashire, he launched a business to distribute hardwood flooring
that his father milled back home.
He eventually took over a flooring
factory in Italy, a small website and a chain of 20 retail stores. A photograph
in a local newspaper of one store showed a small, corrugated steel structure with
bright green signs declaring “YOU SAVE MORE.”
In 2017, he heard that economic
development officials from Wales would be visiting Shanghai on a trade mission and
arranged a meeting. Mr. Zhou, then 32, told the group that he planned to open a
flooring store within 25 miles of every Welsh resident.
“That struck me as perhaps overly ambitious and
not really reflecting the way that Welsh life really works, in that we are quite
a rural country,” said Ken Skates, then
the minister of economic development for Wales.
Mr. Zhou’s plan would not come
about. A year after the meeting, he placed his companies in administration, the
British equivalent of bankruptcy restructuring. He sold the stores during that process
at no gain, without repaying the $5 million that his books showed he owed his father’s
company, according to court records.
An associate recalled Mr. Zhou
saying, before his company collapsed, that he would be receiving $10 million from
a Chinese company. The money did not arrive, and the associate came to doubt the
commitment was ever real.
But Mr. Zhou’s partner in the Italian
factory, an American named Thomas Corey Lewis, still believes Mr. Zhou had important
connections in China and extraordinary powers of persuasion.
“He had the intellectual capacity
to sit down and convince a board of smart people to fund him,” Mr. Lewis said recently.
About that time, Mr. Zhou lived
in a modest 1,200-square-foot flat in Southampton, roughly a two-hour drive from
London, records show. His wife and their young daughter had joined him from Shanghai.
He played table tennis in a recreational league.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr.
Zhou imported masks and tests from China, generating some income.
In 2020, he told one local newspaper
that he was a partner in a boutique investment firm and a managing director of a
financial institution called Valens Bank.
Records show that the investment
firm had one unidentified employee, with assets of less than $1 million, and went
dormant two years later. Valens, a small institution based in Frankfurt, told The
Times in an emailed statement that Mr. Zhou never held a position with the company
but had been a minority shareholder.
Mr. Zhou also launched a family
office, a form of lightly regulated firm that handles investments, and in some cases
personal affairs, of wealthy families. The office drew just one client, a recent
immigrant from Singapore named Ander Tsui. Mr. Zhou told associates that Mr. Tsui
had made significant money as an early crypto investor.
Mr. Tsui, who did not communicate
in English, relied on Mr. Zhou to help him navigate life in London, former associates
said.
The two began working together
on a company they called Caduceus, with the goal of seizing on the latest craze
in crypto.
At a posh London nightclub in late
2021, Mr. Zhou danced in front of his investors and employees, waving a sign that
read “Caduceus Xmas Party.” Servers chanted at him as they thrust champagne bottles
strapped with sparklers above their heads.
That came after dinner at a high-end
Chinese restaurant and lunch
at a private social club.
“Absolutely unreal,” one attendee
wrote on Facebook with videos from the day.
The splashy affair, and others
like it, were part of Mr. Zhou’s marketing efforts to sell digital tokens to fund
the Caduceus product: a tool for creating virtual “metaverses” where humans interact
as avatars.
To lure investors, Mr. Zhou issued
a string of announcements claiming the support of well-financed companies.
In February 2022, he took a group
to the BRIT Awards, Britain’s biggest ceremony for popular music. Caduceus cosponsored
an after-party on the Dixie Queen, a replica of a 19th-century paddle steamer that
cruises the Thames. Mr. Zhou invited acquaintances, including an executive of China
Merchant Securities (UK), the London subsidiary of a state-owned financial services
firm in China.
The following morning, Mr. Zhou
issued a news release announcing that China Merchant Securities (UK) would form
a $1 billion venture fund for projects based on Caduceus technology.
China Merchant Securities (UK)
demanded that Mr. Zhou’s companies stop using its name, according to an email reviewed
by The Times. But Mr. Zhou persisted.
Michael Butler, head of compliance
for China Merchants Securities (UK), told The Times in an email that the company
was not involved in any such fund or in Caduceus. “The use of the firm’s name, and
the listing of an individual as connected to the project, were unauthorized and
materially false,” he wrote.
On April 1, 2022, Mr. Zhou’s Caduceus
announced another major supporter: the Bin Zayed Group, which
was founded by Sheikh Khaled Zayed Saquer Zayed Al Nahyan,
a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. The announcement called
the Bin Zayed Group a “lead investor” in a $4 million round of funding.
Caduceus marketing materials from
that spring obtained by The Times listed Midhat Kidwai, a top
executive with the Bin Zayed Group, as a member of Caduceus’s three-person advisory
board.
During a meeting with his small
staff, Mr. Zhou told them to point out the involvement of the Bin Zayed Group to
make investors “feel comfortable,” according to material reviewed by The Times.
“Bin Zayed is definitely not stupid,
right?” he said, in explaining why his staff members should mention the affiliation,
according to the material.
Mr. Kidwai told The Times that
he had met Mr. Zhou socially in London, but had never entered into any business
with him or with Caduceus.
“It appears Mr. Zhou’s representations
to investors regarding our involvement were unauthorized and materially false,”
a statement from the Bin Zayed Group said.
Mr. Zhou also announced that a
British
pop star would perform a virtual concert using Caduceus technology,
that a cricket
legend had signed with the company to release digital tokens and that
a rugby
Hall of Famer had joined his board.
None of
it came to fruition.
A spokeswoman for the rugby star,
Lawrence Dallaglio, told The Times that her client did not associate with Mr. Zhou
“after completing thorough due diligence.”
The Caduceus token hit the market
in June 2022. The price hit its all-time high of $2.24 on July 31, 2022. It plummeted
to 22 cents three weeks later and continued a downward slide. It was effectively
worthless by 2024.
Investors would not get their money
back. Instead of a salary, the company’s few employees had worked for options on
Caduceus tokens that they would never be able to exercise. Some insiders — including
Tim Bullman, the head of management — said they also had bought tokens and so lost
additional money.
In January of this year, token
holders were sent an email, which The Times obtained, saying that the $4 million
from the initial funding round, plus $3.6 million from Mr. Tsui, were gone and the
project was effectively dead.
Sara Enzen, whom Mr. Zhou hired
to run a company called LightCycle in the Caduceus universe,
said however much was spent, it did not go to creating a viable business.
“We had nothing to show for that
money, apart from Bobby’s lifestyle,” she said.
In February 2024, an otherwise
unremarkable judgment in an
immigration case was posted to a court website in London.
It said that the visa of a man
named Guren Zhou had expired in 2018, and that his request to remain in the country
had been denied for cause: He was among several people arrested in March 2021 on
suspicion of money laundering. The court decision said prosecutors had not yet decided
whether to charge him.
Not long after, Mr. Zhou packed
up his wife and daughter, moved to Abu Dhabi, and started a new web of companies.
He created a business called Royal
Privilege Group, with a mailing address at a shared office space, offering investment
services and “bespoke experiences, enhancing well-being through elegance, indulgence
and memorable moments,” according to its website.
The site showed some familiar faces
from his London operation, but one new name hinted at access to sovereign wealth.
Abubaker Al Khoori, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi Capital Group, the family
investment office of the brother of the Emirati president, was listed as a member
of Mr. Zhou’s advisory board.
In response to questions from The
Times, Mr. Al Khoori said he had been invited to join
the board by a mutual acquaintance, but Royal Privilege Group did not exist long
enough to accomplish anything. He added that neither he nor Abu Dhabi Capital Group
had provided any funds to R.P.G.
About the same time, a company
that Mr. Zhou led in the Emirates took on greater significance: Web3Port, a venture
fund for crypto start-ups that claimed to be partly funded by Royal Privilege Group.
Web3Port’s first major announcement
was a whopper. Days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the company
posted on X that it had made a $10 million investment in World Liberty and was planning
more.
“Both sides are committed to building
a ‘long-term partnership’ and exploring opportunities in investment, ecosystem development,
and more,” the post said. “We’d also like to thank @realDonaldTrump for his crypto
support!”
But Web3Port had a problem lurking
in the background.
The company had been the market
maker, which involves setting buy and sell prices, for the token
offering of another crypto company, and its role had erupted into a
scandal in the industry press. By that spring, federal prosecutors in Northern California
had opened an investigation into the token offering, according to court records
in a civil case filed in Delaware.
Whether it was related or not,
a Web3Port entity filed for a name change in the British Virgin Islands. The new
name would be Aqua 1 GP Limited.
Two weeks later, Aqua 1, an entity
with no public history, announced it would buy $100 million worth of World Liberty
tokens. There was no mention of Mr. Zhou or Web3Port.
“Aligning with Aqua 1 validates
our blueprint for global financial innovation,” Mr. Folkman, the co-founder of World
Liberty, was quoted as saying in the announcement.
Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain
analytics firm, eventually determined that a wallet controlled by Web3Port had purchased
$20 million worth of World Liberty tokens in January and a second wallet likely
controlled by Aqua 1 had purchased $80 million in June. Arkham, which added the
analysis to its website, did not respond to requests for an explanation as to how
it had drawn the connection.
There is some outside evidence
to support Arkham’s analysis. One of the wallets it identified as controlled by
Web3Port had appeared in an email from Web3Port that was obtained by CoinDesk, a
crypto news site. Whoever created the wallet that Arkham linked to Aqua 1 attached
the label “aqua1” to it.
Beyond the issues raised by Mr.
Zhou’s history, the involvement of the Trump family would typically trigger “the
highest level of regulatory scrutiny available in the financial system,” said Mr.
Prinz, of Recoveris. That is because international anti-money
laundering laws classify the Trumps as “politically exposed persons” with a heightened
vulnerability to influence peddling, he said.
Last September, about 90 days after
the World Liberty announcement, two of Mr. Zhou’s longtime employees, including
a woman who had handled paying his companies’ bills for a decade, were charged in
the money laundering case in London. Another defendant, speaking to a Times reporter
in a courthouse hall after a hearing last month, said he had worked with Mr. Zhou
during the pandemic selling masks and Covid tests.
Mr. Zhou, who had already left
Britain, is the only one out of six people identified in the indictment who has
not been charged. One defendant has pleaded guilty, according to court officials.
Further details of the allegations have not been released. It is not clear whether
prosecutors will seek Mr. Zhou’s extradition. A trial for the charged defendants
is scheduled for 2028.
Mr. Zhou, meanwhile, issued more
announcements, using his connections to the Trumps as a marketing point.
In September, Aqua 1 announced
it had invested $20 million in a Canadian food ingredients company that was merging
with a U.A.E.-based cryptocurrency company. The crypto company claims access to
$1.3 billion in “sovereign wealth assets.” The announcement said Aqua 1 had “demonstrable
credibility” as the largest investor in World Liberty.
It is not clear that investment
happened, as the merger stalled.
In October, Mr. Zhou appeared as
the chief executive of Aqua Labs, a new umbrella name for his companies, to give
the opening speech at a crypto conference in Dubai.
He presented yet another new entity
as a tool for trading World Liberty’s stablecoin, which is called USD1. A large
image on the stage showed Mr. Trump and his three sons under the words, “The Power
behind USD1” and noted that World Liberty “has both political and compliance support.
USD1 is backed by the Trump family foundation WLFI.”
And in February, Mr. Zhou’s companies
issued a news
release announcing that Wesley K. Clark, a retired American general
and former NATO supreme allied commander, would appear at an event in Abu Dhabi
with Aqua Labs. The announcement called Mr. Zhou’s company “one of the largest strategic
investors in the space, including a $100M investment in the governance tokens of
Trump-backed World Liberty Financial.”
Mr. Zhou spoke at the event. General
Clark said he did not.
Mr. Zhou speaking in February at a conference
in Abu Dhabi hosted by Aqua Labs, a new umbrella name for his companies.
General Clark said in an interview
with The Times that his office had been approached about becoming involved in Mr.
Zhou’s company, but that he had declined after his team learned of the money laundering
investigation.
“We did a background search on
him,” General Clark said, adding that his team then told Mr. Zhou’s representatives,
“We’re not going to speak with you.”