Matthew Ng has lost almost everything. His considerable fortune, his vibrant career, his freedom and, worst of all, the life of his beloved daughter Isabella, who starved herself to death at just 14.
He is now serving his sixth year in jail, after being sentenced to 111/2 years by a Chinese court, for commercial transactions that would not be considered -improper, certainly- not a crime, in Australia.
Yet he is serving that sentence in Australia, where the average sentence for serious fraud is about 17 months.
He is suffering one of the -longest periods of confinement for white-collar crimes in Aus-tralian history. 
After four years in Chinese prisons, he is now into his second year of incarceration back in Australia, the country of his education and citizenship - at St Heliers Correctional Centre in Muswellbrook, NSW.
His lawyer, Tom Lennox, calls Ng, who has denied the charges from the start, "Australia's Chin-ese political prisoner". A request for early release has been refused by George Brandis, prompting Ng to write that if he were to meet the Attorney-General, he would say to him: "Australia is a country that makes its own laws. Under the treaty with China, you have the power to pardon me, to set me free, to release me on -licence." Ng recently communicated with The Weekend Australian via Lennox. "If Australia can't uphold- its own laws in its own land, what hope for the future?" he wrote. "It appears to be trading its long-term security for short-term economic gain." He is the first, and so far only, Australian to be returned under the International Transfer of Prisoners (China) Regulations of 2011, part of the International Transfer of Prisoners Act of 1997.
Ng was jailed in Guangzhou, the great metropolis of southern China, after being accused- of bribery for offering a board seat to the principal of a company that his firm took over - conventional practice in Western economies.
The case was triggered by the hostility of the city's Communist Party secretary to the incorporation of a state-owned enterprise - which had been failing - within a company established by Ng to introduce e-tickets for air travel in China. Following Ng's jailing, the company was returned to state control.
He applied last   May for early release from St Heliers on the grounds of a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, the disproportionate- nature of the sentence, the four years spent in "inhumane and unhealthy" con-ditions in Chinese jails and the -impact on his family.
Ng wrote to Malcolm Turnbull the day after he became Prime Minister, pleading for help: "I am greatly inspired and encouraged by your statement that this is the most exciting time to be an Aus-tralian." He has yet to receive any response.
In   December, the Attorney-General's -Department responded that Ng was "not a mental health -patient", adding: "Given Mr Ng's excellent record of employment and lack of referrals to psycholog-y for acute or severe symptoms, he appears to be managing his mental health symptoms adequately." But Lennox says no psychologist has been sent by a government agency to speak to Ng.
Advice was provided to Brandis from the Department of Foreign Affairs that "the Chinese authorit-ies have made clear that they are closely monitoring the first -successful transfer cases and will see them as test cases".
"DFAT's view is that the granting of early release or pardon would very likely have a negative effect on the operation of the scheme and prejudice other current or future cases." This week, a spokeswoman for the Attorney-General's Department said that "for privacy reasons-, it is not appropriate to comment on individual cases".
She said "any consideration of early release- on licence under section 19AP of the Crimes Act 1914 for Mr Ng would need to take account of implications for Australia's ability to negotiate subsequent prisoner transfers with China and other countries under the scheme".
Lennox responded by saying: "Chinese justice is now being practised by Australia, in Australian jails. It's an incredible situation." Matthew Ng was born in Guangzhou in 1966, the year Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution. His great-great-grandfather had come to Australia for the 19th-century gold rush, and returned with sufficient savings to fund his children's education.
His mother was a factory worker, his father a teacher. His grandfather had spent almost all his life in the US, "so I was seen as not coming from the best caste" by Chinese authorities, he says.
Despite his family background, Ng was allowed to enter the elite Guangya Selective High School, where he excelled. In 1987, he joined his sisters - two older and one younger - in New Zealand and gained a bachelor of science degree, and then a masters, at Auckland University.
His parents followed a year later. His sisters -remain with their -father in Auckland. His mother was killed in a road accident in 1997.
In 1990, he married Kathy, his first girlfriend, in Auckland. They had a daughter, Isabella.
He moved to Sydney to take an MBA, in 1993-94, at the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of NSW, and went on to join a boutique merchant bank run by Nick Whitlam, where Turnbull had been joint head not long before.
He also worked with Anaconda Nickel, run by Andrew Forrest. The company sent him to Kuala Lumpur, where he worked with -associated firm Asian Capital Partners, returning to Auckland in 1998 after the Asian financial -crisis.
His personal life, he admits, had become "quite complicated, I made mistakes". Kathy wanted to focus on her career, but Ng wanted more children. He had also met another woman, Niki, in Malaysia.
By now an Australian citizen, he returned to Sydney to work for the Commonwealth Bank's strategy and development group, but his attention had been caught by events in the country of his birth.
A Chinese portal, china.com, had listed on the Nasdaq stock -exchange in the US, capitalised at $US1 billion. "I wanted to join the internet gold rush. I was 33. I thought, 'if not now, I never will'." Other than a house he had bought for his parents in Auckland, he gave what he owned to Kathy and headed to Guangzhou.
Working on a hunch of rapid growth for Chinese tourism, he quickly built a successful company using capital raised in Hong Kong, the US and Australia. His company was the first to introduce e-tickets in China, in   March 2000.
Then the internet bubble burst and the good times turned tough. A US investor who had agreed to pump $10 million into his company could manage only $2.5m and the outbreak of SARS further reduced the appetite for investments in China.
Ng sold what he could, and mortgaged the house he had bought for his parents, to keep his business, Et-china.com (ETC), afloat. In 2005, the Guangzhou city government asked Ng to take charge of a travel company it owned, GZL, and save it from -likely bankruptcy.
ETC paid $8m for a 28.6 per cent stake. The following year, ETC acquired a further 26 per cent. The investments were made in cash raised from US hedge funds and from family investmen-t vehicles of wealthy Australians, including Frank Lowy and James Packer.
The company thrived, with its revenue tripling in three years. ETC was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2007 and Ng negotiated a trade-sale with Kuoni, a Swiss company that is a world leader in packaged travel. Guangzhou was going to be the headquarters for the Asia-Pacific region, with Ng the chief executive. "Everyone was going to be a winner," Ng said.
But not everyone shared his enthu-siasm. Guangzhou Communist Party secretary Zhang Guangning, a steel industry veteran who had been promoted from mayor, said GZL belonged to "the people" and so could not form part of a commercial joint venture, however successful. A prosecutor would later tell Ng that "the big boss didn't want you to run GZL".
The Guangzhou party elite, Ng said, "wanted to keep the company for themselves", even though Ng had controlled it for almost five years. "Even though it was in such poor straits when I had taken it on," he said, "they discovered its value when the Swiss company was ready to pay more than $200m for it." Its value had soared tenfold since Ng started running it, and at the operational level the Swiss deal would not have changed how it was run, but Guangzhou's party chief wanted it back. The holding company at the apex of state-owned enterprises that included GZL sent a fax to Ng while he was on a work trip to Kuala Lumpur, asking whether he controlled GZL and, if so, how that had happened.
He flew back to Guangzhou to be told he could not sell his interests to the Swiss. But he had alread-y done so. It was a routine deal between listed companies - his own, listed in London, and the other, in Zurich.
The deputy chairman of the holding company was blunt: "One way or another, we want the company back." Authorities wasted no time. His audit manager, financial controller and the executive chairman of GZL were taken into custody. Interroga-ted in secret locations, the evidence provided by the three was later used against Ng.
Two weeks later - while the three were still being questioned - Ng was advised that he would be next and that he should make his escape. He spent the next few weeks travelling, finally coming to the conclusion that the best strategy would be to return to face the music, wrongly believing that authorities would not arrest the chairman of a London-listed company during the Asian Games then under way, in   November 2010, in Guangzhou.
"I went back because I believed I had done nothing wrong," he says. He kept the then Australian consul-general, Grant Dooley, informed- of his movements.
Ng told officials tasked with seizing control of GZL that it was part of a business that had been -obtained through open tender by Kuoni, and that this process could legally be reversed only if GZL made a buyout bid deemed fair by all parties. "I also warned that my staff should not be touched by the authorities or I would go to TheNew York Times. I was stupid to do that." The police arrived at his house at 7pm on   November 15, 2010. Ng has been a prisoner since that day.
"They were waiting for me when I arrived home," he said. "They followed me into the garage and said they wanted to talk to me. They took me to the police station, and allowed me to ring Grant Dooley and my lawyer, but they were not allowed to see me." He was then, in the early hours of the following morning, taken to Detention Centre No 3, stripped, "given a smelly prison uniform to wear and taken to a room with about 20 prisoners - including murderers, rapists, drug dealers".
Months went by. The then prime minister Julia Gillard raised his case with her Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao, who assured her Ng's trial would be open and transparent.
The case was due to be heard on   August 9, 2011. Ng's lawyer was given access to 52 volumes of documents the prosecution planned to table just two days before the trial. Ng himself was not allowed to see the documents.
The case was heard in a tiny courtroom. His family had arrived to support him, but only his wife and one sister were allowed in. As a result of a complaint from Frances Adamson, who had been recently -appointed as Australia's ambassador in Beijing, the trial was videoed-. It took three days and one night. Ng claims his lawyer "ripped apart the prosecution's case".
The chairman of GZL had been invited to remain on the newly merged entity as a director - a routine practice - but this was branded "bribery".
Aware that almost every case prosecuted in China ends in conviction, he was not expecting to be acquitted. But in sentence terms, he said, "I thought they would give me a two to three years' suspended jail sentence, and send me packing. I was wrong. They wanted to -destroy me." They almost did. Found guilty, he was sent to a notorious jail in another city in Guangdong province, in Dongguan, for 21/2 years. "You wouldn't want to go there, trust me." Now housed in the comparative comfort of a NSW correctional centre, the hopes of Ng, 49, rest with Brandis: "I'm not asking him to judge China's judicial system, but I should be qualified for early release because of the exceptional circumstances of the case." The cataclysm that claimed Ng also enveloped his family. With his Malaysian second wife, Niki, who had a daughter from a previous relations-hip, and their two children together, "we had a beautiful, wonderful family, we had a great life in China". When he was arrested, though, his assets were frozen. "Niki's life was sent into a tailspin. Unscrupulous lawyers took money from her, claiming they could get me freed. She went to New Zealand to stay with my sisters, then came to Australia. And now I'm still not released after being back in Australia for over a year." Their relationship appears over, although Ng is reluctant to accept that is the case. But it is the fate of his daughter Isabella, from his first marriage, that has caused him the greatest grief.
She travelled to China when he returned there, to attend the same elite school, Guangya.
She read online the defence statement presented by his lawyer, and wrote to him: "Dad, anyone can now see that you are innocent. These are not even crimes that you are charged with. It's just because someone doesn't want to lose control- of a company that had previously been failing. I can see you'll be home soon, Dad." Ng says: "When I lost the case, she couldn't believe it. She stopped eating." She fell into a deep depression and starved herself. Doctors couldn't stop her decline. She was just 14. Two years later, after he was transferred to Australia, Niki told him Isabella had died. "I couldn't bring myself to understand that. I have her picture next to my bed." Ng had returned to his homeland a true believer in the China Dream. "Now, for me, there are only nightmares." Ng was transferred to Australia on   November 28, 2014. "I was very hopeful, thinking that because the Australian government had spent so much time on my case, that I would be given my freedom after a few months." It was not to be.
David Marquard, a fellow MBA graduate from Ng's time at UNSW, has visited him several times in prison, and urges his release because "he has served his time, in Australian sentencing terms".
The Australian government has done "a fabulous job in getting him back, but his life has been -destroyed, his family and -career gone", Marquard says. "Justice is not being served by keeping him in jail any longer." Marquard points out that although Alan Bond was sentenced to 11 years for a $1.2bn fraud, he served only four years - and Ng has already served a year more than that, for charges that would not be actionable in Australia.
"I have a very compelling case," Ng insists, clearly frustrated that he has failed to attract the same level of public support as other Australians jailed overseas, including- journalist Peter Greste and Bali Nine members Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.To Ng, it looks as though vengeful Chinese power players saw to it that he got such a lengthy jail term that his only hope lay with Australian officials - and those officials are now unwilling to help.