James Riady

James Riady   (businessman)
Born	1957 Jakarta
Nationality	Indonesian
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Parents	Mochtar Riady
Member of	WEF/Global Leaders for Tomorrow/1993
Perpetrator of	Riadygate
Indonesian billionaire businessman with long-standing ties to the Clintons.

James Tjahaja Riady born 1957 in Jakarta) (also known as Lie Zen) is an Indonesian businessman and the deputy chairman of the Lippo Group, a major Indonesian conglomerate. One of the most prominent Chinese Indonesian businessmen, he is the son of Mochtar Riady, who founded Lippo Group. Lippo ceded its control of Lippo Bank to Khazanah of Malaysia in 2005. He has long-standing ties to the Clintons.

Andre Vltchek was referring to people like Riady when he wrote:

In the most populous Muslim nation on earth, Indonesia, Muslims were sidelined, their ‘unreliable’ political parties banned during the dictatorship, and both the politics (covertly) and economy (overtly) fell under the strict control of Christian, pro-Western minority. To this day, this minority has its complex and venomous net of anti-Communist warriors, closely-knit business cartels and mafias, media and ‘educational outlets’ including private religious schools, as well as corrupt religious preachers (many played a role in the 1965 massacres), and other collaborators with both the local and global regime.

Early life

Riady studied at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Business activities

Riady's entry into the American business community began in 1977, when he was persuaded by Arkansas banking moguls W. R. Witt and Jackson T. Stephens, and founders of Stephens Inc., one of America's largest investment banks outside of Wall Street, to become partners in the Stephens's Worthen Banking Corporation, after the younger Riady was sent by his father, Mochtar Riady, to set up a banking presence in the United States.

In 1983, the Riadys formed another Little Rock company, Lippo Finance and Investment, with the help of $2 million in financing guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. As a nonresident alien, Riady was not allowed to chair a company capitalized by the SBA, so he hired President Carter’s former SBA administrator, Vernon Weaver, to chair Lippo Finance for him. Mochtar Riady was also interested in helping Jimmy Carter's former budget director, Bert Lance, sell stock he held in the National Bank of Georgia, though the deal never materialized. Through their dealings with Stephens Inc. the Riadys made the acquaintance of the then-Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton.

After Worthen, James Riady bought the Bank of Trade in California, the oldest Chinese-American bank. Not long afterwards, the U.S. federal government issued cease-and-desist orders for "hazardous lending" and for violations against the money-laundering statutes. Riady then promptly sold the bank.

James Riady moved to Los Angeles and established Lippo Bank with the help of Taiwanese banker John Huang. Again the bank lost a lot of money, made a number of bad loans, and violated laws of money laundering^[1].

Together with Jim Guy Tucker he established a company called AcrossAsia Multimedia Ltd. Tucker, another former Arkansas governor, had been forced to vacate the governor's mansion in 1996 due to alleged fraud in the Whitewater scandal. The two had met through Little Rock's Second Presbyterian Church. With AcrossAsia Multimedia they wanted to build the largest cable TV infrastructure in Indonesia using a company called Kabelvision. The venture was unsuccessful^[2].

The Riady family recently acquired the tallest skyscraper in the western US, Los Angeles' US Bank Tower, for $367.5M through OUE, a Singapore-listed entity that it controls.

James Riady established ties with Johnny Rayati in 2018 to enter the cannabis business in Washington state.

Clinton finance scandal

Corruption controversies have marked Riady's business career. In the 1996 presidential campaign, James Riady was a major campaign contributor to the Democratic Party. In 1998, the United States Senate conducted an investigation of the finance scandal of the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign. James Riady was indicted and pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations by himself and his corporation. He was ordered to pay an 8.6 million U.S. dollar fine for contributing foreign funds to the Democratic Party, the largest fine ever levied in a campaign finance case.

New York Times columnist William Safire has raised the possibility that Mochtar Riady and his associates may have connections to Chinese intelligence. Another possibility is that Riady could be tied to Indonesian dictator Suharto, or the CIA.

KPPU bribery scandal

In 2008, Riady's close business associate Billy Sindoro, an executive of Riady's Jakarta-based First Media, was filmed handing bribes to officials of Indonesia's anti-monopoly agency, the KPPU. Riady and First Media were then in a business dispute with a Malaysian company and the KPPU was deliberating that dispute. Sindoro was later found guilty of corruption. In December 2008, the Riady-owned Jakarta Globe published a sympathetic portrait of Sindoro in prison where he lamented he would not be able to spend Christmas with his family.

Obama Visa Waiver

In January 2010, the Washington Post revealed how the 'disgraced' Riady had received a visa waiver by the Obama Administration to re-enter the US, despite having been banned by the Bush administration. Riady's old friend, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed she had no knowledge of the visa waiver. A State Department official, embarrassed by the Post's revelation, said "the reality of his past remains a significant obstacle for future travel to the United States." Riady received a waiver from a rule that forbids entry to foreigners guilty of "a crime involving moral turpitude," a term that government lawyers generally interpret to include fraud.

James Riady lives with his family in Lippo Village, Karawaci, surrounded by security aides. He has been berated by the media because of his involvement in the campaign financing scandal. Hendardi, an Indonesian human rights activist, once stated that Riady's "major achievement was to export corruption to the U.S."^[3]

Evangelical activities

Since converting to Christianity in 1990, Riady has been an avid evangelical. He has established foundations, charities and Christian-inspired schools to spread the message in Muslim-majority Indonesia. Inevitably, his zeal has clashed with conservative Islamic elements in the country.

 

An event carried out

Event
Riadygate

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
WEF/Annual Meeting/2011	26 January 2011	30 January 2011	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2229 guests in Davos, with the theme: "Shared Norms for the New Reality".
WEF/Annual Meeting/2012	25 January 2012	29 January 2012	Switzerland	2113 guests in Davos
WEF/Annual Meeting/2013	23 January 2013	27 January 2013	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2500 mostly unelected leaders met to discuss "leading through adversity"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2014	22 January 2014	25 January 2014	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2604 guests in Davos considered "Reshaping The World"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2016	20 January 2016	23 January 2016	World Economic Forum Switzerland	Attended by over 2500 people, both leaders and followers, who were explained how the Fourth Industrial Revolution would changed everything, including being a "revolution of values".
WEF/Annual Meeting/2017	17 January 2017	20 January 2017	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2950 known participants, including prominently Bill Gates. "Offers a platform for the most effective and engaged leaders to achieve common goals for greater societal leadership."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland	"The reality is that we are in a Cold War [against China] that threatens to turn into a hot one."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2020	21 January 2020	24 January 2020	World Economic Forum Switzerland	This mega-summit of the world's ruling class and their political and media appendages happens every year, but 2020 was special, as the continuous corporate media coverage of COVID-19 started more or less from one day to the next on 20/21 January 2020, coinciding with the start of the meeting.
WEF/Annual Meeting/2022	22 May 2022	26 May 2022	World Economic Forum Switzerland	1912 guests in Davos
WEF/Annual Meeting/2023	16 January 2023	20 January 2023	World Economic Forum Switzerland	The theme of the meeting was "Cooperation in a Fragmented World"

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References

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