Alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo denies claims and criticises ‘political climate’

Businessman Mr Yang became a “close” confidant of the Duke of York and has also been pictured with senior politicians including Lord David Cameron and Baroness Theresa May.

In a statement after a High Court judge lifted an order granting him anonymity he said: “Due to the high level of speculation and misreporting in the media and elsewhere, I have asked my legal team to disclose my identity.

“I have done nothing wrong or unlawful and the concerns raised by the Home Office against me are ill-founded. The widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue.”

Mr Yang last week lost an appeal over a decision to bar him from entering the UK on national security grounds.

Mr Yang was known in the legal case only as H6 until the anonymity order was lifted on Monday.

He is listed as a director of Hampton Group International, a business consultancy which claims to act as a bridge between China and the rest of the world.

The 50-year-old worked as a junior civil servant in China before heading to the UK in 2002 to study and he was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2013.

Mr Yang – also known as Christopher Yang – was the founder-partner of Pitch@Palace China.

The Pitch@Palace initiative was the Duke of York’s scheme to support entrepreneurs.

Mr Yang was first excluded from Britain by then-home secretary Suella Braverman in 2023, when the Home Office said he was believed to have carried out “covert and deceptive activity” for the Chinese Communist Party.

The businessman suggested he was a victim of increasingly hawkish views on China under the Conservative administration at the time.

“The political climate has changed and unfortunately, I have fallen victim to this,” Mr Yang said.

“When relations are good, and Chinese investment is sought, I am welcome in the UK. When relations sour, an anti-China stance is taken, and I am excluded,” he said.

Judges at a specialist tribunal in London last week ruled Mrs Braverman had been “entitled to conclude” that he “represented a risk to the national security” after he launched an appeal against the decision.

The businessman had brought a case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) after his initial exclusion in 2023 but his appeal was dismissed.

In his statement, Mr Yang hit out at the process which led to his ban from entering the UK.

“I have been excluded from seeing most of the evidence that was used against me under a process which is widely acknowledged by SIAC practitioners as inherently unfair: decisions are made based on secret evidence and closed proceedings, which has been described as ‘taking blind shots at a hidden target’,” Mr Yang said.

“On their own fact finding, even the three judges in this case concluded that there was ‘not an abundance of evidence’ against me, their decision was ‘finely balanced’, and there could be an ‘innocent explanation’ for my activities. This has not been reported in the media.”