The New York Times reports:

During the World Cup soccer final in New Jersey last month, Zach Witkoff, co-founder of President Trump’s cryptocurrency company, took in the action from a luxury suite. Joining him was a man who had made the president, and all the company’s co-founders, much richer.

Two years earlier, the man, Guren “Bobby” Zhou, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under investigation there for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small crypto start-up.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from Mr. Trump’s company, World Liberty Financial, dropping a total of $100 million through a new firm called Aqua 1. He kept quiet about it for months, other than speaking briefly as “Mr. Bobby” from Aqua 1 during a little-noticed audio stream on X.

“We’re very proud to be a major player in the World Liberty, which is Trump’s family’s crypto venture,” he said.

Under World Liberty policy, as much as $75 million of that money was distributed to a company controlled by the president and his three sons. The money also benefited the family of Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special peace envoy and the father of Zach Witkoff.

In any prior era, a windfall for the president of that size from a foreigner with no public signs of access to that level of wealth would have certainly gone against norms and might have spawned a congressional investigation.

Instead, the curious case of Mr. Zhou illustrates the ease with which buyers with unknown backgrounds and motivations can use the anonymity of cryptocurrency to shower Mr. Trump with money. The president’s recent financial disclosure form shows that he collected $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, the majority of it from anonymous sources.

It is not clear how closely World Liberty scrutinized Mr. Zhou’s past, but the money laundering investigation in England was publicly available information, as were portions of Mr. Zhou’s troubled business history.

A court record filed last November accuses Mr. Zhou of participating with five other people in a money laundering effort beginning in 2019. Mr. Zhou has not been charged. British officials said late last month that their investigation remained active.

His transaction with World Liberty raises questions as to how he was able to access so much money, and how fully the company followed anti-money laundering laws. Such laws require businesses, in certain situations, to document the source of their customers’ funds before accepting the money.

Patrick Prinz, the chief operating officer of Recoveris, a Switzerland-based firm that investigates digital asset crimes, said a combination of the red flags described to him by The New York Times should have triggered the documentation requirement: Mr. Zhou’s business failures, his sudden access to wealth, the size of the transaction and the investigation. [Continue reading…]