A tycoon who was the youngest person on Forbes magazine's list of China's 400 richest people last year was sentenced to life in prison yesterday for fraud, state media said.
Zhou Yiming (
He used the money to acquire a 28 percent stake in Sichuan Mingxing Electric Co, it said.
Accomplices
A court in Chengdu City in Sichuan Province ruled that Zhou began to siphon capital from the electric firm after he gained control, acquiring nearly US$69 million with the help of accomplices.
Five of his accomplices were sentenced to between three years and five years in the case, Xinhua said.
Forbes ranked Zhou as number 207 among the 400 richest Chinese people last year. His personal fortune was estimated to be US$121 million.
Zhou joins a fast-growing list of people to have been named on the Forbes list of richest Chinese to have run afoul of authorities.
Huang Guangyu (黃光裕), a household appliance retailer and founder of Gome Appliances (國美電器), topped Forbes' most recent annual list released last month with a fortune estimated at US$2.3 billion.
But the 37-year-old Huang has been implicated in a probe into US$165 million in loans extended by the Bank of China between 1997 and 2004, Chinese media have reported. Gome has denied the reports.
The main target of the probe appears to be Huang's elder brother, real estate developer Huang Junqin (
Other rich men listed by Forbes that are facing jail terms include Zhang Rongkun (
Zhang has been implicated in Shanghai's snowballing pension fund scandal.
Political link
That affair has led to the downfall of Chen Liangyu (
Zhou Zhengyi (
Yang Bin (
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