Pasadena Bank Denounces Aspersions Against Its CEO

Pasadena-based East West Bank has pushed back against what it called “some elected officials looking to score points against President Joe Biden” and denounced six House Republicans who asked the FBI to investigate the bank’s CEO, Dominic Ng, based on reports in The Daily Caller.

“The suggestions in recent media accounts that Mr. Dominic Ng is or in the past was a foreign agent are not true,” the bank said in a statement.

“The information in these reports is false and comes at a dangerous time when hate crimes against Asian Americans are rising,” the bank said in an email to Pasadena Now.

In the course of his work as a global executive, the bank said, Ng regularly interacts with government officials to forge the partnerships needed for international business and to represent American economic interests abroad. 

As a financial executive working to facilitate trade between the United States and China, the world’s largest economies, Ng occasionally meets with Chinese officials – as do other American business leaders, without controversy, the bank said.

These meetings are a standard operating procedure for American business leaders whose businesses have operations in China or transact with Chinese-based companies. 

American executives met with senior Chinese officials under the Trump administration, and chief executives from American companies including UPS, Pfizer, Carnival, Cargill, Prologis, Hyatt, and Goldman Sachs met with President Xi Jinping at the 2018 Global CEO Council in Beijing.

“In today’s economy, such meetings suggest nothing about a person’s loyalty to their country,” the East West Bank statement said.

“Ng is the subject of unfounded allegations at a time when anti-Asian sentiment is rising,” an East West Bank representative said in an email. These types of claims cast suspicion on the Asian American community, which has seen an increase in hate crimes in recent years.

Ng has lived in the United States since he began attending the University of Houston as an undergraduate more than 40 years ago, and he has been a proud U.S. citizen since 1988.