Fresh image shows CCP-linked high roller shoulder-to-shoulder with Dutton

A foundation led by a casino high roller linked to the Chinese Communist Party has been sanctioned by the national charity regulator for failing to meet financial standards, as a new photo emerged showing its chairman with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

The regulator has revoked the foundation’s charity status after it failed to disclose its revenue or how it spent its funds, raising new questions over its chairman, Xie Xiongming, and his appearance at events to back the Liberals.

Xie Xiongming (far left) next to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton at an event promoting Liberal candidate Scott Yung (far right).

One day after Dutton’s office said he did not know Xie, a new photograph emerged showing the two men standing next to each other at a private gathering last Sunday to support the Liberal campaign to win the northern Sydney seat of Bennelong at the coming federal election.

Xie joined a group of Liberal supporters who walked with Dutton and the candidate for Bennelong, Scott Yung, through Sydney’s Chinatown to meet voters, making his way to the front to be photographed near the leader in an image previously reported by this masthead.

After the street walk ended, he attended a private Liberal lunch to support Yung, at one point standing alongside Dutton and posing for a photograph not previously reported.

A spokesman for Dutton said the opposition leader does not know Xie and was photographed with hundreds of people.

A Liberal Party spokesman for Yung said Xie was not a part of the campaign, nor was he a donor.

Xie is a former associate of controversial billionaire Huang Xiangmo – a political donor now barred from Australia on national security grounds – and was vice-president of the Australian Council for the Peaceful Promotion of the Reunification of China, named by federal authorities as a related entity of the Chinese state, run by the country’s Communist Party.

He also acted as a casino junket operator for several years and was charged in 2019 with holding a customer at knifepoint to demand $10 million in property, but the charges were dropped and he was paid $250,000 by the Department of Public Prosecutions to cover his legal costs.

In an unrelated civil case in 2020, a court heard that Xie had received a $1.5 million loan from a notorious casino junket operator and Chinese Communist Party influence agent Tom “Chinatown” Zhou, who has been jailed in China over corruption offences. Xie was almost stabbed to death in 2016 as part of a suspected triad Asian crime gang hit.

There is no suggestion Xie himself is a criminal or that the organisation that Xie now chairs is part of the CCP.

Xie has triggered concern within the Chinese community because his organisation, the Australia China Charitable Foundation, has a similar name to a respected not-for-profit group, the Australian Chinese Charity Foundation, founded in 1990 and chaired by Michael Tse, a Sydney medical director.

Xie chairs the Australia China Charitable Foundation, which is run from his home in Galston in the northern suburbs of Sydney and was registered as a charity in 2017 because it claimed it would address social welfare including Indigenous disadvantage.

But the foundation failed to comply with repeated requests from the regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-For-Profits Commission (ACNC) to disclose the money raised and the causes he funded and ceased to be registered in November 2022.

The foundation has attracted politicians and business leaders to its events, including a lavish dinner at Sydney Town Hall on January 30, but it did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Xie could not be reached for comment.

The ACNC told this masthead on Friday that it could not comment on whether it was investigating a charity, but confirmed the Australia China Charitable Foundation was no longer a registered charity because it was a “double defaulter” on financial disclosure.

“This means that it repeatedly failed to meet reporting obligations, despite several requests from the ACNC, and that is why its registration was revoked,” the regulator said.

The photograph of Dutton and Xie at the restaurant last Sunday was removed from the Facebook page of a Liberal supporter after this masthead asked about Xie’s appearance at Liberal functions.

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