Court names alleged Chinese spy linked to Prince Andrew

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The alleged Chinese spy linked to Prince Andrew has been publicly named as Tengbo Yang after a judge lifted an anonymity order on Monday.

The 50-year-old Chinese national has been banned from entering Britain on national security grounds since March 2023. MI5 has alleged that Yang — who advised UK companies spanning GSK and McLaren — worked for a group gathering intelligence on behalf of the Chinese state.

Yang had challenged the ban from the Home Office, an appeal that was rejected last week by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, and on Monday hit out at his treatment.

“The widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue,” he said. “The political climate has changed and unfortunately I have fallen victim to this. When relations are good and Chinese investment is sought, I am welcome in the UK. When relations sour, an anti-China stance is taken, and I am excluded.”

Yang had developed business links to Prince Andrew and access to a network of other senior British political and business figures, primarily through his company Hampton Group International, which said it focused on “investing in, consulting on and enabling opportunities between China, the UK and the rest of the world”.

The commission’s ruling found that Yang “had been in a position to generate relationships with prominent UK figures and senior Chinese officials that could be leveraged for political interference purposes by the CCP [Chinese Communist party] . . . or the Chinese State”.

MI5 had alleged Yang was a member of the Chinese Communist party working for the United Front Work Department, which gathers intelligence.

The judges found there was “not an abundance of evidence of the UFWD links” but there was an inconsistency between some of the evidence and Yang’s “claims that he had no connections to anyone in politics in China”.

Yang previously worked with UK drugmaker GSK to manage the fallout of a bribery scandal in China, according to people familiar with the matter. 

GSK did not comment.  

The pharmaceuticals group was introduced to Yang by Sir Ron Dennis, the former chief executive of McLaren, one of the people said. Dennis declined to comment. McLaren did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The anonymity order was reviewed during a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice on Monday, ahead of MPs threatening to use parliamentary privilege to name the individual in the House of Commons.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has granted an urgent question on Monday afternoon tabled by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a leading Tory China hawk.

Yang, previously known only as H6 in the court documents, had already been named on social media and some overseas news sites and on Monday said he had asked his legal team to release his identity owing to “the high level of speculation and misreporting in the media and elsewhere”.