Liverpool, for example, is home to some of Britain's best Art Deco design, in the Queensway tunnel under the Mersey, the Royal Court theatre and the city's first airport terminal.
Operating out of offices in Hong Kong's Queensway, the syndicate calls itself China International Fund or China Sonangol.
And China needs the raw materials that the Queensway syndicate can supply.
But they raise questions of immense public interest.Who benefits?Oversight of the Queensway syndicate's businesses is almost non-existent.
Later, African partners took over.Although the Queensway syndicate has sometimes been suspected of being an arm of the Chinese government, there is little evidence of that.
I may have hit an off-night when I tried their new place in Queensway, but I think the food is better at the Chinatown branches.
In return, the syndicate promised to invest "up to $7 billion" in housing, transport and public utilities, according to the government of Guinea (GDP $4.5 billion).Ultimately this deal foundered on a Guinean election, but at the time the Queensway syndicate was so pleased that it reportedly gave Guinea's military ruler a helicopter as a present.
Meanwhile, the syndicate has continued to prosper.The third complaint against the Queensway syndicate is that its cash props up certain political leaders and thereby fuels violent conflicts.
As a former Wall Street banker, he already had money before he returned to the country of his birth.The deserted railwayThe second complaint about the Queensway syndicate is that in Africa it has failed to meet many of the obligations it took on to win mining licences.
"Buccaneers are cutting themselves a large slice of Africa's resource cake," says Gavin Hayman of Global Witness, a watchdog that mapped the syndicate's deals.The Queensway rulesThe syndicate is built on links forged during the cold war.
However, they appear to grant the Queensway syndicate remarkably profitable terms.
