China Releases Mintz Employees After 2-Year Detention
China has released five employees of an American company investigation company, the Mintz group, two years after being arrested in the context of a repression by Beijing in foreign commercial consultancy.
“We understand that the employees of the Mintz Beijing group that have been detained, all Chinese citizens were all released,” said the company in a note on Tuesday.
“We are grateful to the Chinese authorities that our former colleagues can now be at home with their families,” said society.
The release of employees comes while China is trying to relaunch investments abroad to help revive the slow economy. Dozens of foreign managers, including Tim Cook by Apple and Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, are visiting Beijing this week to participate in a development forum. Foreign investments that slowed down a crash during Covid have not recovered in the last two years, since weak sales and the overall question in the Chinese economy have made it less attractive.
Several dozens of managing directors and other leaders of global companies had to meet the best leaders of China, Xi Jinping, Friday in the great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to a person with knowledge of the planning he spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The gathering would be the third time in 17 months in which Mr. XI met the leaders of multinational companies, also In San Francisco At the end of 2023, after a summit With President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outside the city.
The commercial forum also attended Senator Steve Daines del Montana, who said in An interview with the New York Times who was trying to lay the foundations for a meeting between President Trump and Mr. XI.
The employees of Mintz, who were not identified, were detained during a raid of the company’s Beijing office in March 2023. Later that year, China fined for about 1.5 million dollars to engage in “foreign statistical investigation activities without obtaining approval”, according to Chinese state media.
Mintz, who is based in New York and has offices all over the world, specializes in the work of Due Diligence – cross -country controls, tracking of activities and investigations of fraud and corruption – for customer companies before making investment decisions.
This type of work has become the objective of the government of Mr. XI, who seems to see the Due Diligence in Chinese supply chains and in Chinese business activities as a threat to national security and the socket of the Communist Party Party in power.
A month after Mintz’s office has been raised, the Chinese authorities visited the Shanghai offices of the United States Management Consulting Company Bain & Company and questioned their employees.
The repression of foreign consultations has also been seen as an response to the introduction by the Biden Administration of export controls on advanced US technology, such as semi -unducers, in China.
Berry Wang Reports contributed by Hong Kong.
