Chinese meaning of the word “canceled.”
A Shanghai court last week sentenced Chinese-Canadian billionaire Xiao Jianhua, age 50, to 13 years in jail and imposed a record fine of $8.1 billion on his company, Tomorrow Holdings.
His crime: acting like a Chinese businessman.
Tomorrow Holdings (also referred to as Tomorrow Group) is a conglomerate of investment companies involved with banking, insurance, real estate, coal, cement, farming, and rare earth minerals.
Xiao and his companies have been accused of bribery, the illegal use of public funds, and the betrayal of entrusted property. In most cases, the latter two charges refer to individuals selling real estate or raising funds for investment under false pretenses or without the proper licensing.
In Xiao’s case, the ill-gotten gains were allegedly used for securities trading, overseas investment, and the acquisition of financial institutions. In addition to the fine noted above, Xiao was fined $951,000 for ‘violating an unspecified financial management order and harming state financial security.’
Over the past 20 years, Xiao and his companies are said to have illegally collected more than $45 billion in public deposits and given more than $100 million worth of real estate, shares, cash and other assets to unnamed Chinese government officials in order to avoid financial supervision and secure illicit benefits (i.e. bribery).
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Xiao is one of China’s richest men and is known for managing assets belonging to the CCP’s political elite and their descendants. The financier hasn’t been seen or heard from since 2017 when he was abducted from the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong. Xiao was captured by human smugglers and transported via wheelchair, with a bag over his head, to a ship that took him to mainland China without stopping at immigration checks. He has likely been held in isolation ever since.
Xiao’s family filed a missing person’s report after his disappearance but withdrew it a day later (the family was almost certainly threatened by authorities). Statements from Tomorrow Holdings regarding Xiao’s health after the kidnapping were scrubbed from online sources days after they were published.
In 2018, a news report claimed Xiao would soon be brought to trial for “manipulating stock and futures markets” and “offering bribes on behalf of institutions.”
In 2020, Chinese regulators seized 9 of his companies as part of a larger crackdown on financial corporations. At the time, Xiao was worth an estimated $5 billion and the subsumed companies were valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.
Xiao’s sentence was finally delivered August 19th, 2022 by the Shanghai First Intermediate Court, which found him guilty of fraud and corruption. The sentence was “mitigated” after Xiao confessed to paying out $100 million in bribes and assisted authorities in recovering some illegal gains.
Unfortunately, Canadian diplomats who sought to aid Xiao during the trial were denied access due to the Chinese Government not recognizing his dual citizenship.
Keep in mind this is China, where bribery is a fact of life and is more often than not extorted by public officials. It’s perfectly plausible Xiao was guilty of bribery and may even have been a scumbag, but in this case the Chinese government is charging him with bogus crimes and confiscating his companies and his wealth – and we can assume many are sharing in that wealth.
Sources:
China sentences tycoon Xiao Jianhua to 13 years, fines his company $8.1 billion