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The Chinese government has announced that a British consultant who disappeared from public life five years ago will be found guilty in 2022 of “illegal provision of information” to foreign parties.
Asked about the case on Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that a court in Beijing had sentenced Ian Stones to five years in prison in August 2022. The Stones lost their appeal in September last year.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “The Chinese court has ruled strictly in accordance with the law and fully protected Ian Stones’ legal rights.” Stones’ detention was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The secret detention and conviction will further heighten concerns among foreign executives about visiting or staying in China. The country’s powerful Ministry of State Security, known as MSS, has become increasingly aggressive in pursuing cases against foreign nationals amid heightened geopolitical tensions with the United States and its allies. The department’s powers were expanded last year with strengthened spying laws.
Chinese security officials have recently turned their attention to consultancies, raiding U.S. groups such as Bain & Company and Mintz, as well as specialized network provider CapVision last year. This month, the MSS accused Britain’s secret intelligence service, known as MI6, of using foreign consultants to spy on China.
Stones was arrested by state security authorities in the Chinese capital in late 2018, around the same time that the Chinese government arrested two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case. I was restrained.
Kovrig and Spavor were released in 2021 after Canada released Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese technology company Huawei, but Stones remained jailed. The British Foreign Office refused to publicize his case at the time.
Instead, senior British officials lobbied Chinese authorities privately on Stones’ behalf. This included the efforts of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s international affairs adviser David Quarry. The British embassy maintained regular contact with Stones during his imprisonment.
Britain’s Department for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development declined to comment on the matter on Friday.
James Zimmerman, a lawyer with Beijing-based Perkins Coie, said the case is another example of how “the administration of justice is an elusive, if not imaginary” practice in China. He said that.
“Being caught up in China’s criminal justice system is a gruesome and tragic experience for those who have to go through it,” he said.
One person who counts Stones as a friend said he was one of the first people stationed in Beijing after the city opened up in the late 1970s. Then one day he disappeared. “He disappeared. No emails, nothing. And the embassy didn’t tell me anything,” he said.
At the time of his detention, Stones was running Navicino Partners, a consultancy that advises clients on cross-border mergers and acquisitions and corporate restructuring. In his early 70s, he is a self-described “China veteran” who has lived and worked in China for more than 40 years, mainly in Beijing.
After studying at the University of Manchester and Ealing College of Higher Education in the early to mid-1970s, Stones went on to study Chinese at Beijing Language and Culture University. According to his LinkedIn page, he spent the next 20 years working in the China operations of major multinational companies in Europe and the United States, including BP, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and General Motors.
It is unclear what prompted the accusations against Stones, a fluent Mandarin speaker known in Beijing for his extensive connections with Chinese officials and state-owned company executives.
An online profile for the Conference Board, the think tank where Stones remained as a senior adviser, says Stones is “committed to developing government and research partner relationships” with many Chinese ministries.
The number of foreign nationals currently detained in China on suspicion of national security violations is unknown. Japan has detained 17 of its citizens since China passed an anti-espionage law in 2014, and five of them remain in custody, including an Astellas Pharma executive who was detained in March last year. announced.
Additional reporting by Tom Mitchell in Singapore