Alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo says he ‘did nothing wrong’ as he issues statement over links to Prince Andrew
The alleged Chinese spy with links to Prince Andrew has said he did “nothing wrong or unlawful” – as he was named publicly for the first time.
In a statement, Yang Tengbo added that the “widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue”.
Politics live: What we know so far about Yang Tengbo
Mr Yang at a Pitch@Palace event with Prince Andrew
It comes after the High Court lifted restrictions on naming the businessman, previously described as a “close confidant” of the royal, on Monday afternoon.
Until now he was only known publicly as “H6” after a court imposed an anonymity order.
Mr Yang said he asked his legal team to disclose his identity “due to the high level of speculation and misreporting in the media”.
Last week, he lost an appeal over a decision to bar him from entering the UK on national security grounds.
Mr Yang said: “I have done nothing wrong or unlawful and the concerns raised by the Home Office against me are ill-founded. The widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue.”
He claimed he was a victim of a “political climate” which had seen a rise in tensions between the UK and China.
“When relations are good, and Chinese investment is sought, I am welcome in the UK,” he said.
“When relations sour, an anti-China stance is taken, and I am excluded.”
Mr Yang has links to the Duke of York
Mr Yang was the founder-partner of Pitch@Palace China. The Pitch@Palace initiative was the Duke of York’s scheme to support entrepreneurs.
Pressure had been mounting for Mr Yang to be named after last week’s court ruling.
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, had threatened to use parliamentary privilege to reveal his identity in the House of Commons.
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Parliamentary privilege allows MPs to speak freely during parliamentary proceedings without fear of legal action.
Guy Vassall-Adams KC, for Mr Yang, told the High Court that threats to name his client in parliament were part of the reason he decided to apply to lift the anonymity order.
He said: “There has been an enormous amount of media reporting in relation to this story, and particularly in relation to the relationship between my client, H6, and Prince Andrew, as well as a huge amount of speculation about the identity of my client.”
Lifting his anonymity, Judge Mr Justice Chamberlain said: “It seems to me that these proceedings now serve no further purpose.”
Yang Tengbo with Theresa May and her husband Philip
Yang pictured with former prime ministers
Mr Yang was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020, and was told by royal aide Dominic Hampshire he could act on the duke’s behalf when dealing with potential investors in China, a tribunal heard in July this year.
On Friday, Prince Andrew said he “ceased all contact” with the Chinese businessman.
In a statement from his office, the Duke of York said he had cut ties following “advice” from officials but insisted the pair had never discussed anything of a “sensitive nature”.
Mr Yang had previously also been pictured alongside former prime ministers – including David Cameron and Theresa May.
Both Lord Cameron and Lady May’s spokespeople told Sky News at the weekend they meet and are photographed with many people each year.
A spokeswoman for Ms May said: “Baroness May and her husband, Sir Philip, are photographed at numerous events in any given year.
“As such, she doesn’t remember when or where this particular photograph was taken or the man in question.”
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Who is alleged Chinese spy?
A source close to Lord Cameron said: “David Cameron was leader of the Conservative Party for over a decade and PM for six years.
“He met thousands of people in that time at hundreds of functions and events. We don’t have any further information about this individual.”
China ‘UK’s most prominent security threat’
The anonymity lift came shortly before former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith raised an urgent question in the Commons about the Chinese spying group Mr Yang is said to belong to, the United Front Work Department (UFWD).
Sir Iain said Mr Yang was “not a lone wolf” and one of around 40,000 members of the UFWD.
He called for China to be put on the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme (FIRS), which was established under the Conservatives but is yet to be implemented.
The scheme would require those involved in promoting the interests of other countries to declare themselves – but it won’t commence until the summer, Home Office minister Dan Jarvis has confirmed.
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Sir Iain said there is “no need for delay”, and that the new Labour government must “accept now that China is our most prominent security threat”.
Mr Jarvis acknowledged the case of Mr Yang “does not exist in a vacuum” and the UK is facing a breadth of “pernicious and complex” threats from foreign states.
He echoed comments made by Sir Keir Starmer earlier, who defended his approach for a “pragmatic” relationship with Beijing despite saying it posed a “challenge”.
Yang statement ‘not worth paper it’s written on’
Professor Anthony Glees, an intelligence and security expert from the University of Buckingham, told Sky News that Prince Andrew “unbeknown to himself” has “been a risk to our national security”.
He said Mr Yang’s statement is “not worth the paper it was written on” and that hostile states using “long-term penetration” lasting decades is common.
He added: “In fact, there is an intelligence law in China that says that every member of the Communist Party of China has a duty to accept intelligence tasking if the state demands it of them.”
Lord Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, also told Sky News he was “not quite sure where cooperation has got us” with regards to the UK’s approach to China.
He said that while he doubted Mr Yang held “huge influence” over anyone significant, his case was nevertheless “an indication of the extent to which” alleged agents can access places of power in the UK.
And he said the UFWD was an organisation that “has got lots of people in this country trying to influence policymakers”.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “China has always acted in an upright and honest manner and has never engaged in any deception or interference, so it is not worthwhile to refute this kind of groundless speculation which is based on one’s own judgement.”
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report
Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.
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