One year ago today, Chinese billionaire Liu Han was executed in Hubei province, along with his younger brother Liu Wei and thee other associates.
One of the prime catches in the anti-corruption hunt of current president Xi Jinping, Liu was a mining oligarch whose personal fortune was once valued at $6.4 billion.
He was also allegedly “an organized crime boss that no one dared provoke”. He was arrested early in 2014 for embezzlement, gun-running, and orchestrating a hit on a rival crime lord.
Liu’s fall was widely perceived as a strike against his close ally, the powerful former security minister Zhou Yongkang. After months — years even — of rumors about his impending fate, Zhou was arrested for corruption in December 2014; he has since been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
On this day..
- 25: Aulus Cremutius Cordus
- 1768: Quamino (Dubois)
- 1866: Dr. John Hughes, Cleveland bigamist
- 1883: Milton Yarberry, Marshal of Albuquerque
- 1887: Clement Arthur Day
- 1943: The last five Young Guards shot in Krasnodon
- c. 415 B.C.E.: The men of Melos
- Podcast: One For Ten
- 2013: Afzal Guru, India parliament attack terrorist
- 1555: John Hooper
- 2011: Martin Link
- 1619: Lucilio Vanini, aka Giulio Cesare
- 1929: José de León Toral, assassin of Álvaro Obregón
- 1963: Abd al-Karim Qasim, Iraqi Prime Minister
By those standards a lot of rich westerners would be executed. He should have moved to America. Enough money and you have virtual carte blanche