Lack of Disclosures Raises Questions About Who Controls Chinese Conglomerate<br />For example, two of HNA’s senior executives in the United States — Daniel Chen, the son of Chen Feng, HNA’s co-chairman, and Chen Guoqing, the younger brother of<br />that same co-chairman — say they have worked simultaneously for HNA and PAC, as vice chairman and chief executive, according to online biographical sketches.<br />And in two different court cases involving HNA’s subsidiary, Hainan Airlines, company executives and longtime business partners have acknowledged, under oath,<br />that PAC was at one time an affiliate of HNA or its subsidiary, Hainan Airlines.<br />Even before George Soros, a billionaire, made a large investment in Hainan Airlines, Chen Guoqing moved to the United States to set up the Pacific<br />American Corporation (originally called Hainan American) to help the fledgling Chinese airline buy engines and spare parts in the overseas market.<br />And if a company sets up a structure to obscure this, it’s an even bigger red flag.”<br />At PAC, one of the top executives is Chen Guoqing, 61, the younger brother of HNA’s co-chairman, Chen Feng.<br />And as Hainan Airlines grew from a state-backed airline into a sprawling conglomerate, with airports, hotels, shipping<br />and logistics services, PAC began venturing into other businesses, including managing corporate jets, investing with HNA in a Chinese leasing company and selling a European hotel chain to HNA, according to regulatory filings in China and Singapore.<br />“Hainan Airlines is an affiliate of Pacific American Corporation,” Zhu Yimin, the chief executive of Hainan<br />Airlines said in a 2004 statement submitted in a bankruptcy case, Dornier Aviation v. Hainan Airlines.<br />In the early 1990s, around the time the older Mr. Chen was setting up Hainan Airlines as a joint stock company, his younger brother began registering a series of companies in Beijing<br />and Hainan Province that would soon do business with the airline.
