Mou, once China's richest man, is sentenced to life imprisonment

From rich to poor, hero to villain. Mou Qizhong was once wealthy, powerful and respected. Now he will sit in a jail cell for the rest of his life. Mou was an entrepre neur who made millions of yuan from his wild ideas. But then things turned sour and he owed money, lots of it. To solve the problem he tried to borrow money illegally from the Bank of China and this was to be his downfall.

The Intermediate People's Court in the central Chinese city of Wuhan recently sentenced him to life imprisonment, a sentence that was higher than his defence lawyers had expected. Even Mou was confident that he would not be punished having already escaped a death sentence during the Cultural Revolution in the '60s.

Mou was arrested in January last year and was tried six months ago. Even the state-run media reported the event, an obvious sign that authorities had turned against him.

Mou had friends in high places having made many donations, especially to the Communist Party. However, the jail sentence clearly shows that they had all gone.

'He lost favour and they [the authorities] started digging back into his past,' said Gordon Chang, a lawyer and specialist on the Chinese legal system.

Mou's company was believed to have obtained US$75 million (HK$585 million) from the Bank of China through another company, the Hubei Light Industry and Export Corp. The latter company had pretended it needed to import goods and so approached the bank's branch in Hubei.