Multiple Western security sources say Chen is a suspected senior Chinese intelligence operative, a claim Chen has confirmed was put to him by Australian officials at Melbourne airport in March but which he vehemently denies. Kopsidas says Chen "wanted to lease out an entire wing … he was talking about a significant proportion of the building". Security experts have raised serious concerns about the CSIRO sharing its premises with foreign-owned companies, a position that could allow for potentially easier access to sensitive scientific and commercial information. Nick Zhao at a Liberal Party meeting, with Gladys Liu (standing). Credit:Facebook But in the end, the deal fell through. Chen was willing to pay perhaps $10 million – a fortune for an ordinary businessman but, in Kopsidas' view, not fair value for the company's potential. "In the end, he just wandered off and we never heard back from him … it was really unusual," Kopsidas says. What the microbiologist did not know was that Chen's behaviour was part of a series of questionable dealings the Chinese-Australian businessman has engaged in around the globe.

And he certainly did not know that one of those dealings – Chen's alleged attempt to install a candidate in the Australian Federal Parliament – may have already been underway. If such a proposal had succeeded, sources say the candidate would answer not to his constituents or the Australian people generally, but to the intelligence apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. A troublesome candidate The subject of that alleged plan, a struggling, big-spending luxury car dealer Nick Zhao, seemed in some ways ideal for the task. He was an existing member of the Liberal Party in the Highbury branch – part of the electorate of Chisholm, which has a high proportion of ethnically Chinese voters. Nick Zhao sitting next to Gladys Liu at a meeting at her house in 2016. Credit:Facebook It's a seat that Gladys Liu, who also has Chinese heritage, won at the 2019 election. Photographs show Liu seated next to Zhao at a meeting of the multicultural branch, of which the federal MP was the president, in her former house on Australia Day in 2016. Shown a photograph of Zhao, Liu says she has "no recollection" of meeting him. There is no suggestion that she was involved in the matter.

Nick Zhao (right) at his car dealership. Zhao drove a $300,000 dark blue Audi R8 but he owed millions of dollars to a lot of increasingly angry people, and was therefore potentially susceptible to financial inducement. And he had a smooth tongue. "He was very good at making people feel warm and fuzzy about a business, or their involvement in a business," says a former manager of one of his car yards, David McFadden. "He was a very good story-teller." But, says McFadden, Zhao had a fatal flaw: "He never followed through." He had also made enemies. Some remain so angry at Zhao they say they are glad that, in March 2019, he died in a motel room. One investor, who did not want to be named, claimed Zhao had lost about $1 million of his money, and was uncontactable for a year before his death. Thinking about him brought back nightmares.

“He f----d me over big-time – he ruined my life ... he put me through emotional and financial stress that almost made me lose my wife and two kids." A Zhao employee said his boss frequently asked him to create fraudulent invoices for cars to give to friends. "I'm talking weekly. It was millions of dollars a month … He was giving me high-performance sports cars to drive. Even my wife got cars." Zhao's Volkswagen dealership was repossessed by head office after the scam was uncovered and, Zhao was accused of lying under oath in court when trying to win an injunction against Volkswagen. He was later charged with perjury and obtaining financial advantage by deception. In 2018, administrators began to pursue him over the collapse of his Brighton car dealership. His enemies, his criminal charges, his record would likely have made it impossible for this man to contemplate being preselected in an eastern suburbs Liberal seat, let alone elected, to parliament. Curious businesses We only know about Zhao and Chen because Zhao volunteered his story to ASIO about a year ago, perhaps in an attempt to escape some of his legal problems.

Chen has denied he ever knew Zhao. In two interviews with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, he said, "I swear to God I don't know this guy." He also denied being a military officer despite being pictured in Chinese military uniform. But he agreed that he sometimes travelled to international meetings including APEC and the G20 falsely in the guise of a journalist – for which he thanked his "good friend" Zeng Xiaohui, the boss of powerful state-owned newspaper China Times. For the time being Chen is overseas. He left the country in March and hasn't returned. He says he normally travels back monthly to visit his family, but has not done so for months. It remains unclear what Chen's actual business is. Alleged Chinese intelligence operative Brian Chen. On the nameplate, his business in Australia, Prospect Time, is part of Chinese president Xi Jinping's signature "Belt and Road" initiative. But many of the deals it has worked on appear to have gone the way of the Imunexus debacle.

In the past two years, Prospect Time announced deals including a $3.3 billion infrastructure plan in the Philippines, a $220 million hotel complex in the Pacific island of Palau, an oil project in Maldives and an undisclosed project in Thailand, where Chen claimed to have met former Thailand prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Several of the countries where deals were announced have been targeted by Beijing in its aggressive push to build its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. But in the years since, not a shred of evidence exists showing any of Prospect Time's announced projects commencing. Loading Chen said his business was still pursuing a major residential project in Portugal, which, in 2017, was said to be worth $2.9 billion. But by 2018 the project had collapsed with local Portuguese authorities refusing to answer local journalists' questions. His businesses in Australia are equally curious.

Prospect Time was established in 2004. Chen was listed as a director of a company registered to an apartment in Doncaster, 20 kilometres east of Melbourne. But in interviews, he was not able to detail any tangible output of the company. He says he was eyeing a factory in Melbourne's north (in a suburb he could not name) to begin manufacturing special vehicles, but the factory was "too expensive so we didn't make the final decision". He also claims he owns a garbage disposal business in Melbourne, but couldn't say where it was or point to any proof of its existence. "The company has existed for a long time but the business hasn't started." he says. What is clear, though, is that in China he owns a special vehicles company in partnership with an affiliate of Chinese military behemoth, Norinco. All this was suspicious enough for Australian officials to stop him at Melbourne airport on the way out of the country in March to ask if he was a Chinese intelligence operative. "It's horrible. I was freaked out that time," Chen told The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes.

After the Australian officials quizzed him on why he had photographs of tanks on his company's website, the pictures were removed. Zhao's death will be investigated by the state's incoming Victorian coroner, John Cain, who will be confronted with rumours of foul play and the hard facts he's presented by a police inquiry. Loading ASIO, and director-general of security Mike Burgess, are also investigating. They revealed in a rare statement last weekend that Australia's intelligence agency has been "actively investigating" Zhao's allegations. But a mystery remains: did Chen approach anybody else? Perhaps another troubled, but less troublesome potential candidate with an offer of million-dollar backing to run as the Chinese candidate for Australia's parliament.