The private detective hired by GlaxoSmithKline to discover who sent the sex tape smearing the company’s China boss issued a public warning only weeks before his own arrest that Beijing was imposing worrying new secrecy laws hampering corporate investigations.
Englishman Peter Humphrey is a highly regarded “old hand” in China, specialising in carrying out due diligence and fraud checks for western companies doing business in the notoriously corrupt country.
Glaxo hired Humphrey last spring after executives at the drugs giant were sent an email containing a video of China boss Mark Reilly having sex with his girlfriend. The brief was to identify the source of the email and would likely require various corporate documents to be scrutinised.
However, a few months into the investigation, Humphrey and his wife were arrested for “illegally buying and selling private information”. His investigation proved inconclusive.
Corporate intelligence executives in London have now pointed out that his arrest came just weeks after he wrote an article criticising the Chinese government’s clampdown on access to corporate filings on directors, shareholders and companies.
The piece warned of “sudden government action to suppress certain data”: the type of data which led to exposés by western investigators of alleged frauds at Chinese companies.
Humphrey wrote in Fraud Magazine, the journal for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, that similar scrutiny of public documents had led to revelations by news outlets including Bloomberg about the personal wealth of top government officials which “were making China’s ruling elite wobble”.
One Asia specialist investigator said: “Peter was always extremely careful but he clearly upset the wrong people — it’s a hazard of the job.”
