Twenty-eight employees of the Yilin Wood Company have been jailed after a Beijing court found them guilty of involvement in the city’s biggest pyramid selling case.
The scheme’s leader, Zhao Pengyun, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined 300m yuan (US$44m).
According to a Chinese news agency, the group defrauded more than 22,000 investors of 1.68bn yuan (US$246m) by promising high returns on sales of forestry plantations.
However, some of the land could not support forestry, was not managed, or did not exist. The group also failed to pay for some property purchases and wages to thousands of forestry workers.
Instead, the ringleaders spent the revenue on houses, cars, jewellery and antiques. One even spent some of the funds on releasing his own music album and cosmetic surgery, the court found.
