NYT: Trump's World Liberty Financial Took $100M From UK Money-Laundering Suspect Bobby Zhou; SEC Has Not Acted

A New York Times investigation reported August 9-10 that World Liberty Financial’s Aqua 1 vehicle accepted $100 million in token purchases from a fund controlled by Guren “Bobby” Zhou — a businessman arrested in Britain in 2021 on suspicion of money laundering, never charged, with British officials confirming the investigation remained active as of late July 2026. The Times’ review of court records, confidential documents, and interviews with Zhou’s former associates found a history of failed ventures (including a British flooring retailer that entered restructuring owing about $5 million to Zhou’s father’s company, and a crypto project, Caduceus, that burned $7.6 million before its token became worthless) and a sudden reversal of fortune after Zhou relocated from London to Abu Dhabi in 2024. Under WLFI’s distribution policy, up to $75 million of the $100 million could have flowed to entities controlled by Trump and his three sons, with some funds potentially benefiting the family of Steve Witkoff — a Trump administration special envoy and father of WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff. The SEC, led by Trump appointee Paul Atkins since April 2025, has brought no enforcement action despite repeated watchdog conflict-of-interest filings on WLFI’s fundraising. World Liberty said it followed all applicable laws and regulations.

This extends the pattern of foreign and legally-compromised money flowing into Trump-family crypto ventures with limited scrutiny that this corpus has tracked from WLFI’s founding — Tahnoon’s $500M UAE stake (2025-01-17–tahnoon-uae-buys-49-percent-wlfi-500m), the Binance/Zhao pardon that followed a $2 billion MGX-to-WLFI stablecoin deal (2025-10-23–trump-pardons-binance-founder-zhao-after-2-billion-deal), and the $2.3 billion in crypto income tied to WLFI documented alongside the national bank charter push (2026-06-09–trump-family-2-3b-crypto-income-wlfi-national-bank-charter). Zhou differs from those cases in one respect: he is not a state actor or a regulated exchange executive but an individual under active foreign criminal investigation, making this the most direct instance yet of suspected-criminal proceeds flowing into a sitting president’s family business with no visible domestic regulatory response.