I guess it's the latin characters included in a Chinese font.

Chinese fonts do have a little tendency for using "ɑ" instead of "a". For example, the STSong shipped with MacOSX uses Garamond as its latin style, except a special single-story "ɑ".

very interesting answer ahyangyi. I'll have a look and see if it's in the glyphs in my copy

I think it's an entirely different font actually. The shoulders of many of the characters are much less pronounced than in Helvetica. It's almost a hybrid between and geometric sans and a grotesque.

If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them.

with a lot of imagination,
it could be an ITC Avant Garde Gothic Bold Condensed
made even heavier by the designer

Great spot fvilanakis!

It's not perfect, but if you use AG bold condensed, put a 0.4 stroke around it and stretch is horizontally 130% it's pretty damn close.

So much type crime going on!