The Princess, the Professor, and the Billionares: A Global Game of Power, Sex, and Money

In the glittering ballrooms of the London School of Economics and the high-stakes boardrooms of China’s “Silicon Valley” Hangzhou, Keyu Jin was more than just an academic; she was the most expensive chip in a global game of power. A tenured professor at LSE and a frequent face at Davos, Jin was the daughter of Jin Liqun, the president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. But behind the facade of intellectual prestige and political pedigree lay a darker narrative of obsession, financial ruin, and a billion-dollar fraud that scammed some of China's most prominent tech moguls out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The story of Keyu Jin is a tale of two worlds, each ensnared by her allure and the power she represented. In the West, she was the star protége of Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary and President Emeritus of Harvard. The unsealing of Jeffrey Epstein's classified email archives in November 2025 revealed a startling obsession. Summers, then 64, was documented begging Epstein for a courting playbook to win over Jin, whom he referred to by the racially charged code name "Peril." The emails suggest a disturbing dynamic, with Epstein acting as a sinister "wingman" and urging Summers to use his power to ensure Jin was "doomed to be with you.”

While Summers’ reputation has been shattered by these revelations, Jin’s role in the Eastern half of this drama was even more pivotal. In China, Jin’s name and political connections were leveraged by Yu Haijun, the founder of the luxury auto empire Baolide Holdings Group, to perpetrate a massive financial fraud. Yu, a high-school-educated tycoon who was still legally married to his first wife and already a father of six, had captured Summer’s Harvard Goddess, Jin.

A Banquet and the Fraud of Baolide

The political trust associated with Jin and her father may have also been the ultimate bait for investors. At a 2022 gathering at Yu's lakeside villa in Hangzhou, which was initially described as a shareholders' meeting, titans of China's tech industry like NetEase (NTES) founder William Ding and former Ant Group CEO Simon Hu found themselves instead celebrating the "Full Moon Party" for a new born child belonging to Yu and Jin. Seeing Jin and her father in person appears to have lulled these savvy moguls into a fatal illusion that Yu possessed unquestionable political backing.

Yu Haijun and Keyu Jin

Under this facade of respectability, Yu concealed the reality that his empire was already insolvent. Baolide’s crisis finally became public in September 2024, when wages went unpaid, customers complained of delayed luxury vehicle deliveries and Baolide declared bankruptcy. By November 2025, a Hangzhou court ordered the substantive connsolidated bankruptcy liquidation for 57 Baolide-related entities, ruling that their finances were so commingled they could not be separated—a rare and severe outcome highlighting the scale of the scandal.

The Collapse and the Aftermath

Government-commissioned audits found extensive circular transactions among Baolide affiliates designed to inflate assets and obscure massive liquidity risks. A separate audit concluded that Yu Haijun, along with his wife, had misappropriated nearly 3.4 billion yuan—roughly $500 million—in company funds. Investors reported the company for suspected contract fraud, though Yu has denied these allegations as "nonsense," blaming the collapse on market environments and investor disputes.

The total losses are staggering, estimated between 1.3 billion and 1.75 billion yuan. Ding alone reportedly lost nearly 1 billion RMB to the scheme. Today, the ruins are absolute: Yu Haijun’s empire has imploded, and his original wife has reportedly fled overseas with the family assets. Keyu Jin, the link between Epstein’s list and the Baolide fraud, finds herself in the ruins of both worlds—neither the muse of the Western elite nor the savior of the Eastern tycoon, but a figure in a cautionary tale of how personal relationships can override even the most rigorous financial scrutiny.