A businessman under investigation by Britain's National Crime Agency for suspected money laundering channelled $100 million (£74 million) into the Trump family's cryptocurrency venture, according to reporting published on Sunday by The New York Times, raising fresh questions about what checks were carried out on money flowing to a business owned by the sitting US president.
The money was routed through Aqua1 Foundation, an obscure entity that said it was based in the United Arab Emirates and which announced on 26 June 2025 that it had bought $100 million of governance tokens in World Liberty Financial — at the time the largest known purchase of the tokens. Under World Liberty's revenue split, a Trump-family entity, DT Marks DeFi LLC, and certain family members receive 75 per cent of net token-sale proceeds. Reuters has reported that roughly $75 million in revenue from the Aqua1 purchases reached Trump-linked entities.
The man behind Aqua1 is Guren "Bobby" Zhou, a UK-based Chinese businessman first identified by Reuters in October 2025. According to The Times, Zhou was arrested in March 2021 by the National Crime Agency on suspicion of money laundering. He has not been charged. A court record filed last November accuses him of taking part with five other people in a money laundering effort beginning in 2019, and British officials said late last month that the investigation remained active. Two of his longtime employees, including a woman who had handled his companies' bills for more than a decade, were charged in London last September, about 90 days after the World Liberty announcement.
Zhou, who has left Britain, is the only one of the six named in the indictment who has not appeared before the court.
His earlier career was in hardwood flooring. Companies House records traced by the Financial Times show a Guren Zhou listed as a director of 13 overlapping UK flooring companies between 2008 and 2019, operating between Southampton, Preston and London, all since dissolved. The Times reported that he burned through $7.6 million in a previous crypto venture that became worthless, made false claims about celebrity endorsements, and left Britain owing roughly $5 million to his own father's company.
The introduction was made at the top. Reuters has reported that Eric Trump met Zhou and his associates at a crypto conference in Dubai in May 2025 and pitched a minimum buy-in of at least $20 million, at a point when World Liberty had not built the finance platform it had promised at its September 2024 launch.
"We're very proud to be, you know, a major player in the World Liberty, which is Trump's family's crypto venture," Zhou said on a UAE livestream.
The blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence determined that a wallet controlled by Web3Port had bought $20 million of World Liberty tokens in January 2025, and a second wallet likely controlled by Aqua1 bought $80 million in June — meaning the headline $100 million figure is a composite rather than a single traceable payment. Arkham did not respond to requests to explain its methodology.
Patrick Prinz, chief operating officer of the Swiss digital-asset investigations firm Recoveris, told the paper that the combination of business failures, sudden wealth, transaction size and an open investigation should have triggered a documented source-of-funds check, adding that anti-money-laundering law classifies the Trump family as politically exposed persons, warranting "the highest level of regulatory scrutiny available in the financial system".
David Wachsman, a World Liberty spokesman, said the company "maintains a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards", but declined to say whether it knew the source of the funds. A spokesman for Aqua1 has said Zhou "has never been convicted of any financial crime in any jurisdiction, and any implication to the contrary is defamatory and false". Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the president had no conflicts of interest and "only acts in the best interests of the American public".
Zhou did not respond to requests for comment. No regulator has found that World Liberty breached anti-money-laundering rules.