Mochtar Riady

Mochtar Riady is an Indonesian of Chinese descent who built the Lippo Group; according to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, citing Forbes, he found it necessary to "Indonesianize" his name, which had been Li Mo Tie. He first met Jackson Stephens and Witt Stephens of Little Rock in 1976, when he was looking into buying Bert Lance's share of the National Bank of Georgia; that purchase fell through, and in 1978 the two families formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong.¹ The Riady and Stephens families later controlled Worthen Bank in Little Rock together.¹²

Clinton

The Riadys gave more than 450,000 dollars to the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties in the 1992 election cycle.³ Shortly after Bill Clinton took office, Mochtar Riady wrote to him advocating, among other things, most-favored-nation trade status for China, and thanked him "for the personal time he spent with the Riady family on Inauguration day 1993." He and John Huang asked Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to meet Shen Jueren, chairman of China Resources.¹ In June 1994 Hong Kong China Limited, a Lippo company, engaged the former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell as a consultant "for a fee of $100,000.00 per year," and in September 1994, after meetings in a Hong Kong office building bearing the Lippo name, Hubbell traveled to Jakarta, where he "met Mochtar Riady, head of the Riady family business, and the United States Ambassador to Indonesia." James Riady introduced Hubbell there as a close friend of the president and told him to get Clinton to play golf in Bali during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.³

In 1998 the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, in its report on the 1996 campaign-finance investigation, stated: "James and Mochtar Riady have had a long-term relationship with a Chinese intelligence agency." It also noted that they had known Clinton since the mid-1980s, when they held a controlling interest in Worthen Bank.⁴ His son James Riady pleaded guilty in January 2001 to violating federal election law.⁵

Hong Kong Chinese Bank

After a defalcation at Worthen Bank in 1986 and the regulatory review of its assets that followed, the Riadys, according to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, "traded their interest in the Worthen Bank for the Stephens' interest in the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, and also traded their interests in other joint ventures." In late 1992 China Resources, described by the committee as "a Chinese Government owned company which is a joint venture partner with the Lippo Group," bought 15 percent of that 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." In 1993 Riady and Huang also arranged a meeting between Shen Jueren of China Resources and Vice President Al Gore.⁶