Beijing: The executive behind one of China's most spectacular corporate scandals has been jailed for eight and a half years, Chinese media reported on Sunday.
The former president of the collapsed D'Long group, Tang Wanxin, received the sentence on Saturday for illegally taking public loans and for stock price manipulation, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday. Tang was also fined 800,000 yuan ($99,825).
A court in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei province, also sentenced six other former D'Long executives to jail terms ranging from 21 months to five and a half years, Xinhua said.
D'Long International Strategic Investment and D'long Co Ltd were each fined 5 billion yuan ($624 million).
D'Long was once held up as one of under-developed western China's burgeoning private flagships. But now it is "the largest ever financial crime in China", the official China Daily said earlier this year when Tang went on trial.
Founded in 1986 in the far western Xinjiang region by Tang and his three brothers, D'Long giddily expanded from film development and agricultural goods to a range of investments in auto parts, mining, securities and even tomato paste.
Its fortunes unraveled in 2004 after wary investors accused it of using its massive stock investments as collateral for loans to plow back into investments.
Banks choked off credit, and the government stepped in to hold up the tottering empire and later oversee its dismantling.
In China, only banks and other approved financial institutions can accept public deposits, and the court found that a D'Long-controlled company took loans of 43.7 billion yuan ($5.45 billion), and failed to repay clients over a third of that, Xinhua reported.
Tang's lawyer, Tao Wuping, did not say whether Tang would appeal the sentence.
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