Owner behind secret Chinese-run lab found in California charged with federal crimes by DOJ

A federal grand jury handed down new charges on Thursday for the man accused of being behind the Reedley lab that regulators said was illegally distributing misbranded COVID-19 test kits as the owners lied to investors.

Jia Bei Zhu, 62, previously faced three counts of lying to regulators and distributing misbranded medical devices, but the grand jury on Thursday returned a new 12-count superseding indictment.

The new charges filed in the Eastern District of California courtroom in Fresno County included conspiracy and wire fraud related to the lab discovered in late 2022 , the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.

Zhu is a citizen of China who lived in Clovis at the time of the lab’s discovery , according to prosecutors. His romantic and business partner, 38-year-old Zhaoyan Wang, was also named in the indictment.

Their attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two were linked to a limited partnership based in Oakland that owns the property in question at 850 I St. in downtown Reedley that was secretly used by Universal Meditech Inc. and Prestige Biotech Inc.

The companies stored dozens of refrigerators filled with vials of blood, viruses and other infectious agents; containers of laboratory chemicals; hundreds of laboratory mice; and an array of other stored laboratory equipment.

The defendants were accused by prosecutors of defrauding buyers of COVID-19 test kits between August 2020 and March 2023. They allegedly imported “hundreds of thousands” of test kits from Ai De Ltd., which was a company in China that they controlled, and falsely represented to the buyers that the test kits were made in the United States, according to a news release.

Prosecutors said the pair told regulators the kits were pregnancy tests in order to get them into the U.S.

They represented to buyers they could make as many as 100,000 kits a week in the U.S. approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to federal prosecutors. They avoided showing the buyers around the lab by claiming it was under construction.

Zhu remained in custody pending his trial, according to the DOJ. Wang was not in custody.

Zhu faces maximum statutory penalties of 20 years in prison for the conspiracy and wire fraud charges, and an additional three years in prison for the distribution of adulterated and misbranded medical device charges, the news release said.

The next hearing was set for Sept. 11.

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