Select Committee Finds JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley Bankrolled Chinese Military-Linked Companies Despite Forced Labor and National Security Warnings
Ottawa cleared a multibillion-dollar acquisition by a Chinese mining conglomerate the same month Washington was subpoenaing Wall Street banks for financing it.
WASHINGTON – A powerful bipartisan congressional committee released an explosive investigative report Thursday that found America’s largest financial institutions helped companies tied to the Chinese Communist Party’s military apparatus and forced labor system raise billions in global capital markets — proceeding with the deals even after federal warnings, incomplete due diligence responses, and internal identification of significant national security risks.
The committee’s core finding is, by its own account, simple: the United States government formally designated a foreign company as linked to China’s military, and months later, several of America’s largest banks helped that company raise billions on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange anyway.
“Each bank made the choice to disregard the U.S. government’s Chinese military company designation in order to make millions of dollars,” the report states. “If doing the deal once was not troubling enough, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are also doing a second offering for the same Chinese military company to raise billions more.”
The report frames the broader stakes in terms that cut to the heart of the post-Cold War financial order.
“In a world shaped by geopolitical rivalry, those same markets can also become witting, or unwitting, conduits for strategic risk — linking American capital to the ambitions of foreign adversaries,” it states. “The question is no longer whether finance and national security intersect, but whether existing guardrails are sufficient to prevent U.S. institutions from enabling activities that undermine American national security interests.”
In a finding with direct implications for Canada, the report also flagged Wall Street’s role in underwriting Zijin Mining Group — a company whose Canadian subsidiary has made major acquisitions in Toronto-listed miners after Ottawa quietly approved a national security review of the deals, even as Washington was moving to cut the conglomerate off from American capital markets.
