Bo Guagua Tries to Defuse Sports Car Scandal

Bo Guagua

By ANDREW JACOBS and EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — As the Chinese capital heaves with speculation over a British businessman’s mysterious death, the downfall of a Machiavellian politician and the future of the ruling Communist Party, one incendiary question has been keeping the political classes awake at night: Did he or didn’t he drive a red Ferrari?

The person in question, Bo Guagua, whose parents are at the nexus of a seismic scandal roiling the party, issued a statement on Tuesday rejecting any connection with the luxury Italian sports car.

“I have never driven a Ferrari,” Mr. Bo, 24, wrote in a letter e-mailed to The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, where he is a graduate student.

The statement, which included a defense of his much-maligned academic record and a rebuttal of accusations that his education had been financed with soiled money, represented the first time that Mr. Bo had spoken publicly since his parents disappeared this month into the maw of China’s notoriously opaque justice system.

His mother, Gu Kailai, has been implicated in the murder of Neil Heywood, a British business associate; his father, Bo Xilai, faces “serious disciplinary violations” relating to his tenure as party chief of Chongqing, in China’s southwest. Analysts say long prison sentences are likely; capital punishment is not out of the question.

The connections between the staggering wealth of some close relatives and his father’s political power are under public and governmental scrutiny. His uncle, Bo Xiyong, resigned Wednesday as the $200,000-a-year executive director and vice chairman at Everbright International, a division of a giant state-owned Chinese conglomerate.

Although clearly a sideshow to the family’s overall predicament, the Ferrari question has figured prominently in a narrative that has blamed the younger Mr. Bo for drawing unnecessary attention to his father’s deep pockets as he was waging an anticorruption crusade in Chongqing and criticizing the gap between the grotesquely rich and the abjectly poor.

Those contradictions were thrown into sharp relief last year after word spread that the younger Mr. Bo used a red Ferrari to squire the daughter of the American ambassador around Beijing. Such a choice of vehicle seemed particularly unfortunate when paired with the many photographs, readily available on the Internet, that showed the young man in a dinner jacket and living it up at Oxford University while his father was preaching egalitarianism.

The chatter clearly angered the elder Mr. Bo, who made a point of challenging the story during a news conference last month. “Sheer rubbish,” he said of the Ferrari. “A few people have been pouring filth on Chongqing and me and my family.”

A few days later Mr. Bo — who had been angling for the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee — lost his job, a prelude to the more dire troubles that would soon follow.

In an e-mail exchange on Wednesday, Abby Huntsman Livingston, a daughter of the former ambassador in question, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., gave her perspective on the Ferrari account, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal but appeared to mystify the Huntsman family.

She said her sister Mary Anne did share a ride with the younger Mr. Bo after dinner one night but did not notice the make of the car. Ms. Livingston added that she and a friend of Mr. Bo’s were also at the dinner that evening. “He was a very nice person,” she wrote. “I can’t confirm that a Ferrari was involved because I didn’t see it.”

She did back up one thing Mr. Bo said: contrary to published accounts, he did not pick up her sister at the ambassador’s residence. “Not sure where the story originated from to be honest, nor does my family,” she wrote.

With his parents incommunicado, the foreign news media have been relentlessly focusing on Mr. Bo, especially his affinity for Champagne and first-class air travel, and the yearlong suspension from Oxford that stemmed from lagging grades.

Questions have also been raised about how his father’s $19,000 annual government salary could support an education that included Harrow, the $45,000-a-year British boarding school where he spent his adolescence.

In his statement, Mr. Bo said that scholarships and “my mother’s generosity” — savings from her time as a lawyer during the 1990s — had paid for his schooling. He also rattled off his grades, describing them as “solid,” and boasted about extracurricular activities that included the Oxford debate club and a nonprofit social networking venture he is working on at Harvard.

He also sought to directly address suggestions that he was excessively social.

“During my time at Oxford, it is true that I participated in ‘Bops,’ a type of common Oxford social event, many of which are themed,” he wrote. “These events are a regular feature of social life at Oxford, and most students take part in these collegewide activities.”

He ended his letter with a plea for privacy.

Rather than put an end to the speculation, the statement seemed only to fuel it. On Wednesday, the letter made the rounds on China’s popular microblog service, Sina Weibo, even though the search terms “Ferrari” and “Guagua” were blocked.

Reaction, for the most part, was less than sympathetic.

Some noted that Mr. Bo did not address news accounts that he drives a Porsche.

Others joked that perhaps the Huntsman sisters were ill equipped to know the difference between a Ferrari and, say, a Maserati or Lamborghini.

Then there were those who sought to parse the language Mr. Bo used in his denial.

“Of course he doesn’t drive the Ferrari,” one person wrote. “His chauffeur does.”

But another Weibo user came to his defense. “Ferraris have two seats,” the person wrote. “You obviously don’t know anything about cars.”

David Barboza contributed reporting, and Mia Li contributed research.

NYT