Cambodia Home to Frenchman in Bo Xilai Drama
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Throughout the drama this spring revolving around the dismissal of the ambitious Chinese official Bo Xilai and the investigation of his wife as a murder suspect, the most mysterious figure has been a French architect named Patrick Henri Devillers. When Mr. Bo rebuilt the Chinese city of Dalian as its mayor in the 1990s, Mr. Devillers, who had married into a prominent local family, helped him lay out the new street grid and design city landmarks. When Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, set up a company in Britain in 2000 to select European architects for Chinese construction projects, Mr. Devillers was her partner. Adding even more spice to the intrigue, both of them gave the same address, an apartment in Bournemouth, on the southeastern coast of England. … Those connections have produced a sometimes breathless swirl of international media coverage of Mr. Devillers for more than a month, made even more intense because journalists have struggled in vain to find him… But the man who reluctantly and quizzically opened his front gate to an unexpected and unwanted visitor on a recent night in Phnom Penh belied the image that has been painted of him. …
