Mining tycoon sentenced to death
Print Edition
A MINING billionaire, his brother and three accomplices were sentenced to death yesterday for the murder of eight people and other crimes spanning nearly two decades.
Liu Han, 49, head of the Hanlong Group and one of China’s richest businessmen with a fortune estimated at US$855 million in 2012, and his brother Liu Wei were found guilty of “organizing and leading a mafia-style gang,” said the Xianning Intermediate People’s Court in central China’s Hubei Province.
Their associates were Tang Xianbing, Zhang Donghua and Tian Xianwei.
The Liu brothers’ gang, based in the southwestern province of Sichuan, killed eight people and wounded many others over nearly 20 years, the court said.
“Liu Han and Liu Wei had extremely malicious intentions, their acts were exceptionally atrocious, their social influence extremely vile and their crimes and the consequences extremely serious,” it said in a Weibo post. “They should be severely punished according to the law.”
Another 31 gang members were given penalties ranging from three years to suspended death sentences — normally commuted to life imprisonment.
Among them were former police officers Liu Xuejun and Lu Bin, jailed for 16 and 11 years, and former prosecutor Liu Zhongwei, sentenced to 13 years.
All three had taken bribes and allowed Liu Han’s illegal gang to operate freely.
The group led by Liu Han was identified as a criminal ring as it had an established hierarchy and regular members, profited from criminal activities and carried out multiple murders, assaults and illegal detentions in an organized way, the court said.
The organization was allowed to function by corrupted government officials, the court said. It illegally monopolized the gaming business in Sichuan’s Guanghan City, tyrannized local people and had a serious effect on the area’s economic and social order, the court said.
The Beijing News previously quoted a friend of Liu Han’s as saying he spent “a huge amount of money” to get to know a “leader” in 2001 and from then “rapidly expanded his business to other provinces and foreign countries.”
In 1993, Liu Han, Liu Wei and Sun Xiaodong, who was not among the 36 sentenced yesterday, made money running gambling dens and dealing in construction materials and futures in Sichuan’s Guanghan and Chengdu cities as well as in Shanghai and Chongqing, according to a prosecutors’ statement released when the trial began on March 31.
Since 1997, when Liu Han and Sun set up the Hanlong Group in Sichuan’s Mianyang City, the two cooperated with Liu Wei in recruiting a gang of thugs, and the group gradually developed into a criminal organization. It had 10 regular members and 20 followers.
Hanlong Group has interests ranging from tourism to minerals and assets of more than 20 billion yuan (US$3.2 billion).
It launched a takeover bid of more than US$1 billion for listed Australian iron ore company Sundance Resources in 2011. But the deal collapsed last year after Hanlong failed to follow through. Media reports at the time said Liu Han had been detained.
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