He fled B.C. in 2015. Now he's been connected to 2 suspected biolabs in the United States
CBC
When Jesse Jia-Bei Zhu left British Columbia in 2015, the 62-year-old had a six-month jail sentence and a multimillion-dollar B.C. Supreme Court judgment hanging over his head — fallout from his thwarted plans for global domination of the lucrative bull semen industry.
Nearly a decade later, the wily entrepreneur's name has resurfaced in the U.S. in connection to equally bizarre — if unsettling — allegations involving a pair of biolabs in California and Nevada stocked with vials of potentially hazardous substances.
Questions have swirled around Zhu since authorities stumbled across a suspected laboratory last weekend in a Las Vegas home he proposed as a place to live while awaiting trial for distributing adulterated COVID-19 tests throughout the United States.
Zhu — who is both a Chinese and Canadian citizen — lost that application for release.
Instead, he remains in the pre-trial jail cell where he has lived since his arrest in 2023 following the discovery of a separate biological lab in Fresno County, Calif., full of test mice and vials of liquids containing labels like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
It’s the same correctional facility from which Zhu — who claims he's innocent of all allegations — continues to battle efforts by corporate giant XY LLC to collect on B.C. Supreme Court judgments totalling more than $270 million for stealing valuable bull sexing technology.
Evidence cited at those trials may provide some insight into the problems Zhu faces today.
“The law is strong,” Zhu said at one point in an email quoted in one of the searing rulings against him.
"But the outlaws are ten times stronger."
CBC News has reviewed court documents related to Zhu in both Canadian and U.S. courts. The records shine a light on the complex path that put him in the headlines in both countries.
The Canadian proceedings also raise questions about the way companies connected to Zhu obtained government grants and perpetrated what one judge said was "arguably a fraud against the Canadian government" by tying investment to immigration.
According to U.S. court documents, Zhu moved to Canada from China in 1988, living in B.C. and travelling extensively back and forth to the United States before he left Canada for good in 2015 — when he was recorded flying into Los Angeles, his last recorded border-crossing.
Around the same time, a lawyer for Zhu told a B.C. Supreme Court judge his client was "afraid of setting foot in this jurisdiction for fear that he will be arrested" — in relation to a six month sentence for civil contempt of court related to the XY LLC lawsuit.
The contempt ruling followed a $8.5 million decision against Zhu and the web of companies he was found to have used to obtain XY LLC's confidential technology allowing for the separation of female and male chromosomes in bull sperm.
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