Key player in China's recent financial masterstroke

Today's Wall Street Journal revealed that former HK financial secretary Antony Leung, who joined the Blackstone in January, played a very big role in pulling together a deal in which China used forex reserve to buy the Blackstone stake.

Leung, also husband of former Chinese Olympic diving champion Fu Mingxia, achieved this by leveraging his experience in business and government to gain the trust of Chinese officials.

The WSJ said that the deal between Blackstone and Chinese government was extraordinary not only because of private equity's complicated image in China and because the government has never directly taken a minority stake in a foreign company before, but also because the national forex investment company of China was yet to be really launched-- it was still in the planning stage when Leung approached Lou Jiwei, the Finance Ministry official who is heading preparations fro the agency, to see if he was interested in investing in any Blackstone funds. Within weeks, a very short turnaround for China's consensus-driven bureaucracy, Leung has secured the deal worth 3 billion us dollars.

Leung was not the matchmaker in the Barclays deal, since the British bank has a longstanding relationship with China Development Bank. But once the Chinese State-run policy bank decided to negotiated with Barclays, it hired Blackstone's M&A advisory service to provide counsel, and Leung became the day-to-day point-person in talking to China Development Bank.

Leung affinity for the mainland began when he was at school. He was a pro-beijing student leader at college. He attended Howard business school before working with Citigroup for 23 years. He is now the Asia China chairman of Blackstone.

Leung will continue to play an instrumental role in the ambitious project of Blackstone in China, and continue writing himself into the finance history of China.