During the World Cup soccer final in New Jersey last month, Zach Witkoff, co-founder of President Trump’s cryptocurrency company, took in the action from a luxury suite. Joining him was a man who had made the president, and all the company’s co-founders, much richer.
Two years earlier, the man, Guren “Bobby” Zhou, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under investigation there for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small crypto start-up.
Then seemingly out of nowhere, he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from Mr. Trump’s company, World Liberty Financial, dropping a total of $100 million through a new firm called Aqua 1. He kept quiet about it for months, other than speaking briefly as “Mr. Bobby” from Aqua 1 during a little-noticed audio stream on X.
“We’re very proud to be a major player in the World Liberty, which is Trump’s family’s crypto venture,” he said.
Under World Liberty policy, as much as $75 million of that money was distributed to a company controlled by the president and his three sons. The money also benefited the family of Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special peace envoy and the father of Zach Witkoff.
In any prior era, a windfall for the president of that size from a foreigner with no public signs of access to that level of wealth would have certainly gone against norms and might have spawned a congressional investigation.
Instead, the curious case of Mr. Zhou illustrates the ease with which buyers with unknown backgrounds and motivations can use the anonymity of cryptocurrency to shower Mr. Trump with money. The president’s recent financial disclosure form shows that he collected $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, the majority of it from anonymous sources.
It is not clear how closely World Liberty scrutinized Mr. Zhou’s past, but the money laundering investigation in England was publicly available information, as were portions of Mr. Zhou’s troubled business history.
A court record filed last November accuses Mr. Zhou of participating with five other people in a money laundering effort beginning in 2019. Mr. Zhou has not been charged. British officials said late last month that their investigation remained active.
His transaction with World Liberty raises questions as to how he was able to access so much money, and how fully the company followed anti-money laundering laws. Such laws require businesses, in certain situations, to document the source of their customers’ funds before accepting the money.
Patrick Prinz, the chief operating officer of Recoveris, a Switzerland-based firm that investigates digital asset crimes, said a combination of the red flags described to him by The New York Times should have triggered the documentation requirement: Mr. Zhou’s business failures, his sudden access to wealth, the size of the transaction and the investigation.
David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty, said in a statement that the company had followed all applicable laws and regulations. “World Liberty maintains a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards,” he said.
Mr. Wachsman declined to say whether the company was aware of the source of the funds used in the purchase. He said the company disputed The Times’s “characterization of Mr. Zhou,” but did not cite any specifics.
A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said Mr. Trump had no conflicts of interest and “only acts in the best interests of the American public.”
Mr. Zhou did not respond to numerous messages to him and his company. Reuters first identified Mr. Zhou as the person behind Aqua 1.
Even now the source of the money that Mr. Zhou paid to World Liberty remains a mystery.
But a deep examination of his career by The Times — through dozens of interviews with former associates, reviews of confidential documents and an analysis of court records and other publicly available information — shows a curious arc. A man who seemed to be constantly asking for money from others had a significant change in fortune just after his crypto company burned through $7.6 million and he decamped from London to the United Arab Emirates in the summer of 2024.
Many former associates would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared being pulled into the investigation in England or worried about the risk of violating libel laws in the Emirates that make defamation a potential crime, even if true.
They describe Mr. Zhou as a high-octane charmer with a British accent, persuasive enough to sell ice in a snowstorm, as one said. But all were stunned to learn that after his departure from London, he was able to purchase $100 million in anything.
Several business professionals told The Times that they had refused to get involved with Mr. Zhou after researching his background. World Liberty, on the other hand, welcomed his company with open arms.
“We’re excited to work hand-in-hand with the team at Aqua 1,” said Zak Folkman, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, in a statement on X.
‘Overly Ambitious’
For most of his adult life, Mr. Zhou worked far from technology and high finance.
Raised in Shanghai, he moved to England in 2005 to attend graduate school. While living in student housing at the University of Lancashire, he launched a business to distribute hardwood flooring that his father milled back home.
He eventually took over a flooring factory in Italy, a small website and a chain of 20 retail stores. A photograph in a local newspaper of one store showed a small, corrugated steel structure with bright green signs declaring “YOU SAVE MORE.”
In 2017, he heard that economic development officials from Wales would be visiting Shanghai on a trade mission and arranged a meeting. Mr. Zhou, then 32, told the group that he planned to open a flooring store within 25 miles of every Welsh resident.
“That struck me as perhaps overly ambitious and not really reflecting the way that Welsh life really works, in that we are quite a rural country,” said Ken Skates, then the minister of economic development for Wales.
Mr. Zhou’s plan would not come about. A year after the meeting, he placed his companies in administration, the British equivalent of bankruptcy restructuring. He sold the stores during that process at no gain, without repaying the $5 million that his books showed he owed his father’s company, according to court records.
An associate recalled Mr. Zhou saying, before his company collapsed, that he would be receiving $10 million from a Chinese company. The money did not arrive, and the associate came to doubt the commitment was ever real.
But Mr. Zhou’s partner in the Italian factory, an American named Thomas Corey Lewis, still believes Mr. Zhou had important connections in China and extraordinary powers of persuasion.
“He had the intellectual capacity to sit down and convince a board of smart people to fund him,” Mr. Lewis said recently.
About that time, Mr. Zhou lived in a modest 1,200-square-foot flat in Southampton, roughly a two-hour drive from London, records show. His wife and their young daughter had joined him from Shanghai. He played table tennis in a recreational league.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Zhou imported masks and tests from China, generating some income.
In 2020, he told one local newspaper that he was a partner in a boutique investment firm and a managing director of a financial institution called Valens Bank.
Records show that the investment firm had one unidentified employee, with assets of less than $1 million, and went dormant two years later. Valens, a small institution based in Frankfurt, told The Times in an emailed statement that Mr. Zhou never held a position with the company but had been a minority shareholder.
Mr. Zhou also launched a family office, a form of lightly regulated firm that handles investments, and in some cases personal affairs, of wealthy families. The office drew just one client, a recent immigrant from Singapore named Ander Tsui. Mr. Zhou told associates that Mr. Tsui had made significant money as an early crypto investor.
Mr. Tsui, who did not communicate in English, relied on Mr. Zhou to help him navigate life in London, former associates said.
The two began working together on a company they called Caduceus, with the goal of seizing on the latest craze in crypto.
‘Absolutely Unreal’
At a posh London nightclub in late 2021, Mr. Zhou danced in front of his investors and employees, waving a sign that read “Caduceus Xmas Party.” Servers chanted at him as they thrust champagne bottles strapped with sparklers above their heads.
That came after dinner at a high-end Chinese restaurant and lunch at a private social club.
“Absolutely unreal,” one attendee wrote on Facebook with videos from the day.
The splashy affair, and others like it, were part of Mr. Zhou’s marketing efforts to sell digital tokens to fund the Caduceus product: a tool for creating virtual “metaverses” where humans interact as avatars.
To lure investors, Mr. Zhou issued a string of announcements claiming the support of well-financed companies.
In February 2022, he took a group to the BRIT Awards, Britain’s biggest ceremony for popular music. Caduceus cosponsored an after-party on the Dixie Queen, a replica of a 19th-century paddle steamer that cruises the Thames. Mr. Zhou invited acquaintances, including an executive of China Merchant Securities (UK), the London subsidiary of a state-owned financial services firm in China.
The following morning, Mr. Zhou issued a news release announcing that China Merchant Securities (UK) would form a $1 billion venture fund for projects based on Caduceus technology.
China Merchant Securities (UK) demanded that Mr. Zhou’s companies stop using its name, according to an email reviewed by The Times. But Mr. Zhou persisted.
Michael Butler, head of compliance for China Merchants Securities (UK), told The Times in an email that the company was not involved in any such fund or in Caduceus. “The use of the firm’s name, and the listing of an individual as connected to the project, were unauthorized and materially false,” he wrote.
On April 1, 2022, Mr. Zhou’s Caduceus announced another major supporter: the Bin Zayed Group, which was founded by Sheikh Khaled Zayed Saquer Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. The announcement called the Bin Zayed Group a “lead investor” in a $4 million round of funding.
Caduceus marketing materials from that spring obtained by The Times listed Midhat Kidwai, a top executive with the Bin Zayed Group, as a member of Caduceus’s three-person advisory board.
During a meeting with his small staff, Mr. Zhou told them to point out the involvement of the Bin Zayed Group to make investors “feel comfortable,” according to material reviewed by The Times.
“Bin Zayed is definitely not stupid, right?” he said, in explaining why his staff members should mention the affiliation, according to the material.
Mr. Kidwai told The Times that he had met Mr. Zhou socially in London, but had never entered into any business with him or with Caduceus.
“It appears Mr. Zhou’s representations to investors regarding our involvement were unauthorized and materially false,” a statement from the Bin Zayed Group said.
Mr. Zhou also announced that a British pop star would perform a virtual concert using Caduceus technology, that a cricket legend had signed with the company to release digital tokens and that a rugby Hall of Famer had joined his board.
None of it came to fruition.
A spokeswoman for the rugby star, Lawrence Dallaglio, told The Times that her client did not associate with Mr. Zhou “after completing thorough due diligence.”
The Caduceus token hit the market in June 2022. The price hit its all-time high of $2.24 on July 31, 2022. It plummeted to 22 cents three weeks later and continued a downward slide. It was effectively worthless by 2024.
Investors would not get their money back. Instead of a salary, the company’s few employees had worked for options on Caduceus tokens that they would never be able to exercise. Some insiders — including Tim Bullman, the head of management — said they also had bought tokens and so lost additional money.
In January of this year, token holders were sent an email, which The Times obtained, saying that the $4 million from the initial funding round, plus $3.6 million from Mr. Tsui, were gone and the project was effectively dead.
Sara Enzen, whom Mr. Zhou hired to run a company called LightCycle in the Caduceus universe, said however much was spent, it did not go to creating a viable business.
“We had nothing to show for that money, apart from Bobby’s lifestyle,” she said.
A Sudden Fortune
In February 2024, an otherwise unremarkable judgment in an immigration case was posted to a court website in London.
It said that the visa of a man named Guren Zhou had expired in 2018, and that his request to remain in the country had been denied for cause: He was among several people arrested in March 2021 on suspicion of money laundering. The court decision said prosecutors had not yet decided whether to charge him.
Not long after, Mr. Zhou packed up his wife and daughter, moved to Abu Dhabi, and started a new web of companies.
He created a business called Royal Privilege Group, with a mailing address at a shared office space, offering investment services and “bespoke experiences, enhancing well-being through elegance, indulgence and memorable moments,” according to its website.
The site showed some familiar faces from his London operation, but one new name hinted at access to sovereign wealth. Abubaker Al Khoori, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi Capital Group, the family investment office of the brother of the Emirati president, was listed as a member of Mr. Zhou’s advisory board.
In response to questions from The Times, Mr. Al Khoori said he had been invited to join the board by a mutual acquaintance, but Royal Privilege Group did not exist long enough to accomplish anything. He added that neither he nor Abu Dhabi Capital Group had provided any funds to R.P.G.
About the same time, a company that Mr. Zhou led in the Emirates took on greater significance: Web3Port, a venture fund for crypto start-ups that claimed to be partly funded by Royal Privilege Group.
Web3Port’s first major announcement was a whopper. Days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the company posted on X that it had made a $10 million investment in World Liberty and was planning more.
“Both sides are committed to building a ‘long-term partnership’ and exploring opportunities in investment, ecosystem development, and more,” the post said. “We’d also like to thank @realDonaldTrump for his crypto support!”
But Web3Port had a problem lurking in the background.
The company had been the market maker, which involves setting buy and sell prices, for the token offering of another crypto company, and its role had erupted into a scandal in the industry press. By that spring, federal prosecutors in Northern California had opened an investigation into the token offering, according to court records in a civil case filed in Delaware.
Whether it was related or not, a Web3Port entity filed for a name change in the British Virgin Islands. The new name would be Aqua 1 GP Limited.
Two weeks later, Aqua 1, an entity with no public history, announced it would buy $100 million worth of World Liberty tokens. There was no mention of Mr. Zhou or Web3Port.
“Aligning with Aqua 1 validates our blueprint for global financial innovation,” Mr. Folkman, the co-founder of World Liberty, was quoted as saying in the announcement.
Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics firm, eventually determined that a wallet controlled by Web3Port had purchased $20 million worth of World Liberty tokens in January and a second wallet likely controlled by Aqua 1 had purchased $80 million in June. Arkham, which added the analysis to its website, did not respond to requests for an explanation as to how it had drawn the connection.
There is some outside evidence to support Arkham’s analysis. One of the wallets it identified as controlled by Web3Port had appeared in an email from Web3Port that was obtained by CoinDesk, a crypto news site. Whoever created the wallet that Arkham linked to Aqua 1 attached the label “aqua1” to it.
Beyond the issues raised by Mr. Zhou’s history, the involvement of the Trump family would typically trigger “the highest level of regulatory scrutiny available in the financial system,” said Mr. Prinz, of Recoveris. That is because international anti-money laundering laws classify the Trumps as “politically exposed persons” with a heightened vulnerability to influence peddling, he said.
‘Demonstrable Credibility’
Last September, about 90 days after the World Liberty announcement, two of Mr. Zhou’s longtime employees, including a woman who had handled paying his companies’ bills for a decade, were charged in the money laundering case in London. Another defendant, speaking to a Times reporter in a courthouse hall after a hearing last month, said he had worked with Mr. Zhou during the pandemic selling masks and Covid tests.
Mr. Zhou, who had already left Britain, is the only one out of six people identified in the indictment who has not been charged. One defendant has pleaded guilty, according to court officials. Further details of the allegations have not been released. It is not clear whether prosecutors will seek Mr. Zhou’s extradition. A trial for the charged defendants is scheduled for 2028.
Mr. Zhou, meanwhile, issued more announcements, using his connections to the Trumps as a marketing point.
In September, Aqua 1 announced it had invested $20 million in a Canadian food ingredients company that was merging with a U.A.E.-based cryptocurrency company. The crypto company claims access to $1.3 billion in “sovereign wealth assets.” The announcement said Aqua 1 had “demonstrable credibility” as the largest investor in World Liberty.
It is not clear that investment happened, as the merger stalled.
In October, Mr. Zhou appeared as the chief executive of Aqua Labs, a new umbrella name for his companies, to give the opening speech at a crypto conference in Dubai.
He presented yet another new entity as a tool for trading World Liberty’s stablecoin, which is called USD1. A large image on the stage showed Mr. Trump and his three sons under the words, “The Power behind USD1” and noted that World Liberty “has both political and compliance support. USD1 is backed by the Trump family foundation WLFI.”
And in February, Mr. Zhou’s companies issued a news release announcing that Wesley K. Clark, a retired American general and former NATO supreme allied commander, would appear at an event in Abu Dhabi with Aqua Labs. The announcement called Mr. Zhou’s company “one of the largest strategic investors in the space, including a $100M investment in the governance tokens of Trump-backed World Liberty Financial.”
Mr. Zhou spoke at the event. General Clark said he did not.
General Clark said in an interview with The Times that his office had been approached about becoming involved in Mr. Zhou’s company, but that he had declined after his team learned of the money laundering investigation.
“We did a background search on him,” General Clark said, adding that his team then told Mr. Zhou’s representatives, “We’re not going to speak with you.”
Reporting was contributed by Jane Bradley, Michael Forsythe, Bradley Hope, Flávia Milhorance and Natan Odenheimer.
