Source: Reuters
“In a handwritten submission from his prison in rural northern China, billionaire pig and chicken farmer Sun Dawu implored the court to hear his appeal. He was serving an 18-year sentence on charges including corruption. There was far more at stake than his own unjust conviction, the 70-year-old tycoon wrote in his Nov. 16 plea. Without his leadership, the business he’d built for decades would collapse, he warned. His company, Hebei Dawu Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Group, had more than ten thousand employees. If his appeal was delayed, ‘the enterprise will be completely wrecked,’ he wrote in the legal document, seen by Reuters. ‘I don’t think this is what leaders of the court, party committees and governments at all levels want to see.’ The collapse of the giant business Sun built would indeed be unwelcome for Chinese leaders, at a time when a massive property crisis poses the biggest threat to China’s economy in decades.” (09/10/24)
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-economy-crackdown-tycoons/