A technology company’s CEO, who might have given a Chinese politician’s son the Ferrari in which he crashed and died, was jailed for nearly five years and fined more than US$100 million for insider trading, court documents showed yesterday.
A dozen former executives of major Chinese technology conglomerate Founder Group (北大方正集團), including CEO Li You (李友), were convicted of insider trading and other offenses, the intermediate people’s court in the city of Dalian said.
Li was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison and fined 750.2 million yuan (US$108.4 million), it said.
Founder Group was established in 1986 with investment from Peking University and has expanded into IT, healthcare, real estate, finance and commodities trading.
Li and former Founder Group chairman Wei Xin (魏新) were linked to fallen Chinese presidential aide Ling Jihua (令計劃), who was jailed for life in July for corruption, illegally obtaining state secrets and abuse of power, Beijing News said.
An ex-aide of former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), Ling was brought down in the high-profile corruption crackdown by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that has deposed several senior officials.
Chinese media have previously quoted reports saying that Li gave Ling’s son, Ling Gu (令谷), a Ferrari.
Ling Gu was killed in a high-speed crash in Beijing in 2012, in which two female passengers, one of them naked, were injured, a scandal that helped trigger his father’s downfall.
Ling Jihua asked for and accepted more than 6.43 million yuan from Wei and was aware of payments from Wei to his son, Xinhua said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts