Senator Pete Ricketts—known in his old post as Nebraska governor for his tirades against Marxism and Beijing—has continued to rake in cash off the 2021 sale of an Ethiopian cement plant to a Chinese state-backed firm, his new financial disclosures show.
The new filings by the son of billionaire Cubs owner Joe Ricketts reveal that he had received payouts in the amount of $2,501 to $5,000 last year from his holdings in the National Cement Share Company. The submissions note these are mere “holdbacks” from the 2021 sale of the stake in the complex to West China Cement held by a private equity firm in which Ricketts served as limited partner—a $23.4 million transaction which The Daily Beast reported on last year.
The recently appointed Republican senator’s office told The Daily Beast he would get a further payment of between $1,001 and $15,000 at an as-yet unknown date in the future. His team further asserted he had no decision-making role in the sale. Ricketts’ press staff in the governor’s office had previously failed to return calls and emails from The Daily Beast regarding the deal.
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“Senator Ricketts has been a staunch opponent of the Chinese Communist Party and diligent supporter of our allies in South Korea—both as governor and now in the U.S. Senate. Any insinuation otherwise is completely false,” a spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “As senator he has repeatedly criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s influences and called for stronger U.S. leadership to combat their influence abroad.”
As evidence of his anti-China record, the spokesperson pointed to Ricketts’ 2020 ban on the use of the app TikTok on Nebraska-owned devices, and highlighted the closure of the Beijing-linked Confucius Institute at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that same year.
However, the state school at the time attributed the shutdown of the controversial Chinese cultural center to budget cuts. And while Ricketts adopted an extremely hostile posture toward the totalitarian regime at the end of his tenure as governor, even declaring a “Victims of Communism Remembrance Month” to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding in 2021, he praised the Confucius Institute in an exclusive interview he granted in 2018 to China Daily—the official mouthpiece of President Xi Jinping’s political apparatus.
West China Cement, which purchased the Ethiopian cement concern, traces its origins to a pair of manufacturing facilities local Chinese authorities established in the 1970s, and today its largest shareholders include Anhui Conch Cement, itself controlled by the Anhui provincial government. The firm has an explicit mission of advancing state economic development goals, and experts The Daily Beast consulted said that the acquisition of the Ethiopian company was crucial to the expansion of the communist country’s footprint in Africa and to the advancement of its globe-spanning Belt-and-Road Initiative.
Ricketts’ investment in the Ethiopian venture ran through vehicles steered by Gabriele Schulze, an investor who became notorious during the Trump administration for engaging in backchannel diplomacy on behalf of North Korea. In his disclosure to the Senate Ethics Committee, Ricketts valued his present stake in the Schulze Global Ethiopia Growth & Transformation Fund at $500,001 to $1,000,000.
During his eight-year reign in Lincoln—right through his final filing in January of this year—Ricketts consistently reported to state authorities that this fund’s headquarters was located in an office tower in Beijing, where Schulze set up shop two decades ago.
But Ricketts’ disclosure to the Senate makes no reference to the Chinese address, and instead places the entity in the Cayman Islands. The senator’s spokesman insisted this updated location is correct, and the years of his filings as governor—including those submitted just months ago—were in error and that he would amend them soon.
