Lippo Group

The Lippo Group is the banking, insurance, and property conglomerate of Mochtar Riady of Indonesia and his son James Riady. A Senate committee dated its business relationship with Stephens Inc. of Little Rock to 1977, and a House committee to a meeting between Mochtar Riady, Jackson Stephens, and Witt Stephens in 1976.¹

Arkansas

The two families formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong in 1978 and both bought into Worthen Bank in 1983. About 1987 the Riadys exchanged their Worthen shares for the Stephens interest in the Hong Kong Chinese Bank and turned to California, where they had bought the Bank of Trade and renamed it LippoBank. John Huang was the group's chief representative in the United States. In April 1993 C. Joseph Giroir, former managing partner of the Rose Law Firm, incorporated the Arkansas International Development Corporation with Lippo capital to develop joint ventures, and a second company of the same name followed in 1995. According to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, the Riadys paid Giroir between 350,000 and 600,000 dollars a year. Mark Middleton, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, also went to work for the group. Giroir helped draw up the list of those invited to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Jakarta in 1994, among them Webster Hubbell, to whom the Lippo company Hong Kong China Limited had paid 100,000 dollars that June. The House committee also found that the head of the group paid the college tuition of Hubbell's daughter.¹

BCCI Hong Kong

"Through the end of 1991, it seemed likely that Indonesia's Lippo Group would take over" the Hong Kong subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, two reporters for The Wall Street Journal wrote, "paying out as much as forty cents on the dollar. (The plan was scuttled in February 1992, when Hong Kong investigators discovered previously unrecorded claims of $145 million against the bank.)" They added: "The Riadys are very close to Stephens: together they controlled Stephens's Worthen Bank of Little Rock, Arkansas; one of them even lived in Little Rock for a few years."²

Prosecution

The companies Hip Hing Holdings, San Jose Holdings, and Toy Center Holdings were used in 1992 and 1993 to pass money from Jakarta to the Democratic National Committee. Huang pleaded guilty on August 12, 1999. On January 11, 2001, James Riady agreed to plead guilty to a felony and pay 8.61 million dollars, and LippoBank to 86 misdemeanor counts for contributions made from 1988 to 1994. The charge listed transfers from foreign Lippo companies to Huang's account in Hong Kong in 1990 and 1991, to the group's American subsidiaries from August 1992 to September 1993, and in cash to a Lippo executive in Hong Kong until May 1994. LippoBank had been sold to First Banks America about March 1, 2000.¹³

Banks

In late 1992, according to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, China Resources, "a Chinese Government owned company which is a joint venture partner with the Lippo Group," bought 15 percent of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, and it later "infused the failing LippoLand with tens of millions of dollars, effectively bailing the Riady family out of a precarious financial situation." The committee, citing sources of 1995 and 1996, reported that Lippo owned 59 percent of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, with 2.3 billion dollars in assets, and 70 percent of Hong Kong China Limited, with 1.2 billion dollars in assets.⁴ In 2001 CITIC Ka Wah Bank, controlled by the Chinese state investment company CITIC, agreed to buy the Hongkong Chinese Bank for about 4.2 billion Hong Kong dollars; the seller's parent was majority owned by Lippo CRE (Financial Services), a joint venture of the Riadys' Lippo China Resources and China Resources Enterprise.⁵

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's records for LippoBank show a bank chartered in San Francisco on November 15, 1961 as the Bank of Trade of San Francisco, renamed Bank of Trade on November 13, 1984, moved to Los Angeles on October 31, 1989, renamed Lippo Bank on January 18, 1990, moved back to San Francisco on March 26, 1998, and merged into the First Bank of California on May 31, 2000.⁶