Billionaire jailed for 13 years in China for illegally taking funds from public

New Delhi, Aug 19 Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-Canadian billionaire at the centre of an alleged abduction scandal in Hong Kong in 2017, has been sentenced by a Shanghai court to 13 years in prison and his company fined a record 55.03bn yuan, the media reported.

Xiao, 50, and his Tomorrow Holdings conglomerate were charged with illegally absorbing public deposits, betraying the use of entrusted property, and the illegal use of funds and bribery, the Shanghai first intermediate court said, The Guardian reported.

Xiao was also fined 6.5m yuan for the crimes, the Shanghai court said, accusing him and Tomorrow Holdings of "severely violated financial management order" and "hurt state financial security", the report said.

From 2001 to 2021, Xiao and Tomorrow Holdings gave shares, real estate, cash and other assets to government officials totalling over 680 million yuan, to evade financial supervision and seek illegitimate interests, the court said.

Born in China and educated in the country's top institution, Peking University, Xiao was known to have links to the country's Communist party elite. But he has not been seen in public since 2017 after he was investigated amid a state-led conglomerate crackdown.

A reclusive figure, Xiao's massive business fortune was turned upside down in January 2017 when he was whisked out of Hong Kong's Four Seasons hotel in a wheelchair allegedly by plainclothes Chinese security agents, who, at the time, were not permitted to operate in Hong Kong.

He was taken across the border into China, possibly by boat to avoid immigration checks, according to a report in the New York Times.

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