THE EVENTS LEADING up to the capture of Michael Ni Wenliang, the man behind China's biggest futures scandal, could have come straight out of a Hollywood film. Police stopped a taxi on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen expressway and arrested the passenger, a Taiwanese carrying three fake diplomatic passports from the African nation of Guinea, which he was to deliver to Ni and his two chief associates to enable them to escape to Thailand.
The officers obtained Ni's mobile telephone number from the passenger and traced the telephone to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. Early the next morning, Ni made more calls, enabling police to locate him at a hotel in the Stone Forest resort, outside Kunming. At 5am, police burst into his room and arrested Ni and his two associates.
On May 29 this year, 41-year-old Ni and three of his accomplices were executed for fraud, after obtaining more than 500 million yuan (about HK$468 million) between June 1997 and July 1998 from 4,100 people by promising them guaranteed monthly returns of 10-30 per cent from futures trading. The two caught with him in the hotel bedroom received a suspended death sentence and life imprisonment respectively.
Of the money, 170 million yuan was paid back to the investors as 'interest' by the fraudsters to give the impression the business was legitimate. The remaining 330 million yuan has not been recovered. Ni and his associates are believed to have transferred most of the money overseas.
The victims include people from many walks of life, including retired people, civil servants and full-time stock traders. Their investments ranged from tens of thousands to up 10 million yuan. They do not expect to get any more of their money back. News of the scandal first surfaced in August 1998, after Ni suddenly closed the company and disappeared. Investors who had put their life savings into his firm, first called Shandong Zhonghui Futures and later Xinguoda (Great New China) Futures began to complain.
Claiming compensation, they marched to Zhongnanhai, the home of the Communist Party leaders and China Securities Regulatory Commission, saying the commission had approved Ni's firm and it could not have earned so much without support from high levels of government.
This year, the mainland media has maintained a news blackout on the arrests and trial, until a detailed report in the Beijing Daily in mid-June, announcing the sentences. According to this account, Ni was a pseudonym for Cao Yufei, who was born in Taipei and fled Taiwan in 1989 after involvement in a futures scandal.
