This story was co-reported with Documented.
Mayor Eric Adams this week described the Chinese billionaire who pleaded guilty to federal charges of making more than $10,000 in illegal donations to three political candidates as one of the “thousands upon thousands of people” he met during his 2021 campaign for mayor.
Adams has not disputed a report that he was one of the three recipients of the campaign donations fraudulently made by 56-year-old billionaire Hui Qin. But Adams’ ties to Qin and Qin’s now-former wife, Emma Liu, are deeper than a single meeting on the campaign trail, publicly available records indicate.
According to a bio posted on the site of an arts and culture nonprofit she chairs, Liu, to whom Qin was married for more than a decade, was tapped by the mayor’s office to serve on Adams’ Asian Affairs Advisory Council.
The advisory council was formed in 2022 under the leadership of Adams’ director of Asian Affairs, Winnie Greco, whose two homes in The Bronx were raided last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That probe also targeted a Queens shopping mall where THE CITY and Documented had discovered evidence of other illegal donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
Adams friend Robin Mui, publisher of the Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily newspaper and chair of a fundraising group behind Adams’ and Greco’s long push for an ornamental “friendship archway” in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, serves on the Asian Affairs Advisory Council and also on the board of the arts group Liu founded and chairs, CivilizASIAN.
Liu and Qin divorced in China in 2021, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit he filed against Liu earlier this month, but continued to share households, including two penthouse apartments at the Plaza Hotel that Qin said he purchased for a combined $61.7 million in 2017 and 2019.
They both donated $1,000 to Adams’ mayoral campaign in March 2021, city Campaign Finance Board records…
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