Huang Peiyu was 60, chairman and general manager of a Xiamen Motor, a listed company assembling Toyota and Nissan minibuses, with a monthly salary of approximately 10,000 yuan (about HK$9,308) and perks and bonuses several times that.
It should have been the perfect end to the career of a former soldier from Chengdu who found himself in the happy position of running a profitable firm in one of the country's pleasantest cities.
But the money and perks were not enough and Huang fell victim to the '59 syndrome' - heads of state companies embezzling millions of yuan in public money just before their retirement so they can enjoy a life more luxurious than their pensions allow.
Huang set about it in a way he could not have learnt in staff college in the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
He set up a web of companies in Hong Kong and the Virgin Islands, to siphon money from Xiamen Motor, and was planning to buy a shell listed company in the United States.
But someone in his firm blew the whistle and his patrons in the party and government could not protect him. On November 25, Huang was sentenced to death, suspended for two years, by a Xiamen court for embezzling 37.51 million yuan and will spend his retirement not in a villa in Los Angeles or the Australian Gold Coast, but a prison.
