PRINCE GROUP’S ALLEGED FINANCE CHIEF CAN’T SELL HIS £8.9 MILLION LONDON PENTHOUSE — THE UK FROZE IT ON THE LAND REGISTRY — THE 127,271 BITCOIN THE US TIES TO THE SAME NETWORK ARE ALREADY IN US CUSTODY
UK authorities put a freezing order on the Land Registry record of a 13th-floor London apartment near St James’s Park, The Times reported and Decrypt relayed on October 12, 2026. The owner is Thet Li, 39, whom the US Treasury called a “de facto illicit finance CFO” for the Prince Group. He paid £8.9 million for it in 2022. The order bars him from selling or renting it. Prince Group “categorically rejects the notion that it or its chairman, Chen Zhi, has engaged in any unlawful activity.”
Li has been under a UK asset freeze since March 26, 2026, when the UK designated him under its global human rights sanctions regime, entry GHR0187, alongside Wu An Ming and others tied to Chen Zhi. The US Treasury sanctioned him on October 14, 2025, one of 146 Prince Group targets. Per The Times, as Decrypt and Cryptopolitan report it, UK authorities have also seized £10.6 million in watches and jewelry and £92,570 in cash, and planned to ask a court on Monday, October 12, to let them keep it.
On the same day as the Treasury sanctions, October 14, 2025, the Justice Department filed to forfeit about 127,271 bitcoin from Chen Zhi’s network. Its release said the coins had been “previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession,” and that they “are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.” It did not say how the government came to control them.
Look at the two tools. A flat stays where it is. A clerk writes a line on a register and nobody can sell it. A watch sits in a drawer until police open the drawer. Bitcoin in a wallet answers to whoever holds the keys and to nobody else. Britain froze Li’s apartment with a form. Nobody freezes a key with a form. For those coins to sit in US custody, someone with the keys had to move them or hand them over, and the public record still does not say who. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,657.