CHINA: Yuan Baojing's remarkable rise from poverty in rural China to head of a multi-billion euro investment group ended with a lethal injection after the stock market supremo was executed with his brother and cousin after their murder of a failed hitman turned blackmailer.
It's a story that has gripped China with its mix of "Scarface"-style murders and "Wall Street" stock market antics. Yuan Baojing, his brother Yuan Baoqi and cousin Yuan Baosen were executed by lethal injection on Friday, shortly after a public trial in their home town of Liaoyang City, in the northeastern province of Liaoning.
The execution came as a surprise as many believed that he would escape execution after he gave all his money to the government late last year.
The case has received much media attention in China.
The extortionist, a corrupt policeman, had threatened to expose Yuan's attempts to murder a business associate who cost him millions of euro on the futures market.
Another cousin Yuan Baofu, was also sentenced to death, but the sentence was suspended for two years, which means he may escape execution for good behaviour, the Beijing News reported.
China's unstoppable economic advance was good to Yuan Baojing, who hailed from the predominantly rural area near Liaoyang. Born in 1966, he was the third child in a poor worker's family of five children.
He began his rise from rags to riches after he graduated from the Chinese University in Beijing in 1989 and joined the securities department of the China Construction Bank in Huairou, a district of Beijing. He honed his market player skills at the bank and quit three years later, registering his company Jianhou Group in Beijing.
Within six months, he had made €200,000 profit which he successfully invested in the securities and bond markets.
He became a corporate raider, buying up over 60 companies and by 1996, at the tender age of 30, he was worth over three billion yuan, or €300 million.
Yuan suspected that a friend and business associate of his, Liu Han, was in league with a broker in Sichuan province, which had led to him losing €10 million in failed trades on the futures market.
He met Wang Xing, who was a police officer at the time, in a Beijing hotel late in 1996 and Wang said he would do the "hit" for €16,000.
Wang contracted Li Haiyang to do the job. He tracked Liu to a Sichuan hotel in February 1997 and fired two shots at him, but missed. Liu fled but was later caught and jailed for life.
Soon after, the former policeman started asking Yuan for money, threatening to expose him for organising the attempted murder.
The hunter became the hunted. Early in 2001, Yuan Baoqi, who was also a yuan billionaire, suggested to his brother that they should eliminate Wang. Yuan Baojing agreed, and gave him €30,000 to pay the contract killers, two cousins - Yuan Baofu and Yuan Baosen.
On November 15th, 2001, the cousins jumped Wang and stabbed him repeatedly, but only managed to seriously injure Wang. He stepped up his blackmail efforts and in 2003, Yuan Baojing stumped up another €18,000 to finish the job. The killers followed Wang home from a mahjong parlour near midnight on October 4th and shot him dead with a hunting rifle.
Police traced the murder back to the Yuan brothers and he was tried and sentenced to death. Yuan Baojing's wife, Zhuo Ma, a famous Tibetan dancer, transferred ownership of shares in an Indonesian oilfield, worth billions of euro, to the government just one day before he was due to be executed on October 14th.