Chinese police are investigating accusations of illegal money raising against a 26-year-old businesswoman who built a paper fortune in businesses, including coffee shops and construction materials, news reports and the local government said yesterday.
The probe into Wu Ying (
The daughter of poor farmers, Wu attracted creditors by offering high returns on investments in her businesses, the Southern Metropolitan Daily newspaper said.
Wu started out in 1998 running a chain of beauty parlors, and last year invested 300 million yuan (US$38.5 million) in 15 companies ranging from a hotel to auto repair shops in her hometown of Dongyang in eastern China.
A notice issued on Saturday by the Dongyang police department said Wu was under investigation for suspected illegal money raising and the companies in her Bense Holding Group were being audited and their debts registered.
Creditors were asked to register with authorities in hopes of recovering some of their money. Spokesmen for the Dongyang police and local government said they had no additional information.
China's Communist rulers are increasingly encouraging entrepreneurs, while trying to curb corruption and white-collar crime, especially pyramid schemes, in which those who invest earliest can enjoy massive profits while the businesses themselves generate little or no income.
Such scams have frequently led to street protests and violent attacks by investors who have little faith in China's weak and overworked legal system.
In an apparent attempt to head off any such actions, the Dongyang police notice said that members of the public had an obligation to cooperate with the investigation and "maintain public order and guarantee social stability."
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the