China executes billionaire for Mafia ties
President pushes corruption war — or purge of rivals?
A Chinese billionaire famed for his love of casinos, cigars and luxury cars was executed Monday in one of the most dramatic episodes yet in President Xi Jinping’s war on corruption.
Liu Han, 49, a mining tycoon once worth at least US$8 billion, was one of five alleged Mafia bosses to receive the death penalty after being convicted of offences that included gun-running and murder.
The man “tyrannized local people and seriously harmed the local economic and social order,” Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said in a brief dispatch announcing the execution.
Liu made his money in construction and went on to become chairman of the Hanlong Group, a Chengdu-based mining company, with interests in Australia, Africa and the United States.
At his peak, the tycoon was a vocal and extravagant regular in the business pages, boasting of his diamond watches and fleet of Bentleys, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces.
In a 2010 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Liu bragged of plans to buy a billion tons of uranium.
“Liu Han always wins. Liu Han never loses,” said the billionaire, who was reportedly wearing a knee-length mink jacket.
Yet for all his business acumen, his parallel life as an “evil gangster” proved his undoing.
The disgraced billionaire was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to death last May, with a court in Hubei province declaring him head of “a cabal of ferocious gangsters.” Xinhua said Liu was “a ruthless underworld kingpin” and claimed one of his gangs had been found with three grenades, 20 guns, 677 bullets, 2,163 shotgun cartridges and more than 100 knives.
The most violent of his alleged crimes came in 2009 when he masterminded a drive-by shooting in Sichuan in which three people were killed.
State media spun Liu’s exe- cution as the latest victory in Mr. Xi’s war on corruption. The tycoon’s Mafia group had been “harboured and indulged by government officials,” Xinhua claimed.
Skeptics believe the billionaire’s execution is merely the latest chapter in a political purge of Mr. Xi’s rivals. Liu had connections to Zhou Yongkang, the disgraced former security chief, who was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and is awaiting sentencing for corruption.
Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist who studies corruption in China, said Mr. Xi faced a tough juggling act
Lui’s Mafia group was harboured and indulged by officials
to convince citizens he was successfully slaying powerful and corrupt “tigers” such as Liu and Mr. Zhou without simply exposing a party that was rotten to the core.
“It is a tricky business because as you hang more pelts from the walls of Zhongnanhai [ t he leadership compound in Beijing] ... do people say, ‘Wow, you are a great tiger hunter!’?
“Or do they go, ‘Oh my God! There are an awful lot of tigers out there in the hills!’?”
Liu, who was executed with his brother and three alleged accomplices, denied the charges.
“I ’ ve been framed,” he shouted during his sentencing last year, according to Hong Kong’s South China
Morning Post.