{"id":16380,"date":"2023-12-20T19:55:40","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T14:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/australia-hands-first-ever-foreign-interference-conviction-to-ccp-operative\/"},"modified":"2023-12-20T19:55:40","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T14:25:40","slug":"australia-hands-first-ever-foreign-interference-conviction-to-ccp-operative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/australia-hands-first-ever-foreign-interference-conviction-to-ccp-operative\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia hands first-ever foreign interference conviction to CCP operative"},"content":{"rendered":"

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An Australian court on Tuesday recorded the first conviction under the nation\u2019s foreign interference laws with a jury finding a Vietnamese refugee guilty of covertly working for the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n

A Victoria state County Court jury convicted Melbourne businessman and local community leader Di Sanh Duong on a charge of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference.<\/p>\n

He is the first person to be charged under federal laws created in 2018 that ban covert foreign interference in domestic politics and make industrial espionage for a foreign power a crime. The laws offended Australia\u2019s most important trading partner, China, and accelerated a deterioration in bilateral relations.<\/p>\n

THE REAL DANGER OF DOING BUSINESS IN CHINA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Duong, 68, had pleaded not guilty. He was released on bail after his conviction and will return to court in February to be sentenced. He faces a potential 10-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors had argued that Duong planned to gain political influence in 2020 by cultivating a relationship with the then-government minister Alan Tudge on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n

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Australia has secured its first-ever conviction on foreign interference charges.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Duong did so by arranging for Tudge to receive a 37,450 Australian dollar (then equivalent to $25,800) in a novelty check donation raised by community organizations for a Melbourne hospital.<\/p>\n

Prosecutor Patrick Doyle told the jury the Chinese Communist Party would have seen Duong as an “ideal target” to work as its agent.<\/p>\n

“A main goal of this system is to win over friends for the Chinese Communist Party, it involves generating sympathy for the party and its policies,” Doyle told the jury.<\/p>\n

Doyle said Duong told an associate he was building a relationship with Tudge, who “will be the prime minister in the future” and would become a “supporter\/patron for us.”<\/p>\n

Duong\u2019s lawyer Peter Chadwick said the donation was a genuine attempt to help frontline health workers during the pandemic and combat anti-China sentiment.<\/p>\n

“The fear of COVID hung like a dark cloud over the Chinese community in Melbourne,” Chadwick told the jury.<\/p>\n

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP<\/strong><\/p>\n

“It\u2019s against this backdrop that Mr. Duong and other ethnic Chinese members of our community decided that they wanted to do something to change these unfair perceptions,” Chadwick said.<\/p>\n

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[ad_1] An Australian court on Tuesday recorded the first conviction under the nation\u2019s foreign interference laws with a jury finding a Vietnamese refugee guilty of covertly working for the Chinese Communist Party. A Victoria state County Court jury convicted Melbourne businessman and local community leader Di Sanh Duong on a charge of preparing for or …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}