Wu Ying's dad, lawyer held for defamation
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 31, 2014
The father of Wu Ying, the disgraced businesswoman who is serving a life sentence for illegal fundraising, was detained for defamation in Zhejiang Province Wednesday.
Wu Yongzheng is being held by the public security department in Dongyang City after accusing the senior official in charge of organizing the seizure and sale of his daughter's illegal gains of being corrupt, Xinhua news agency reported.
The report did not elaborate, but his detention came just a day after Lin Wencai, an attorney employed by Wu Ying, was taken into custody on similar charges, China Business News reported.
According to Zhu Jianwei, another member of Wu Ying's legal team, Lin was detained after handing in a statement to the authorities — which he claimed had been written by Wu — accusing the deputy mayor of Dongyang, Chen Jun, of corruption.
On July 22, Lin and Zhu visited Wu at Zhejiang Women's Prison in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. During the meeting, Lin told Wu that Chen had been appointed to handle her assets, Zhu was quoted as saying.
On hearing this, Wu told Lin that Chen should not be allowed to oversee the matter as he was corrupt, the report said.
She then wrote a statement in which she said that while in detention she had compiled a list of the people that had asked her for bribes. On the list was Chen, who had asked her for more than 100,000 yuan (US$16,200), Zhu said.
On July 23, armed with the "statement," Lin appealed to the provincial high court, Dongyang Party committee and the municipal government to have Chen removed from the position of handling Wu's assets, Zhu said.
But three days later, the city government's information office issued a statement on Weibo saying it had spoken to Wu Ying and determined that Chen had not asked her for a bribe.
According to news portal thepaper.cn, officials visited Wu in prison and questioned over the claims made in Lin's statement.
She admitted she might have "remembered things wrongly," and when shown a photograph of Chen, was unable to identify him, the report said.
Xinhua said Chen has pressed charges in relation to the allegations, but did not say if they were against Lin or Wu.
Wu Ying, 33, was convicted in 2009 of cheating investors out of 380 million yuan.
The ex-boss of Bense Holding Group was in 2006 named the sixth-richest woman on the mainland, with a fortune of 3.6 billion yuan.
According to Oriental Outlook magazine, Wu has a history of accusing officials of graft. Among those she has named and shamed are the former head of an Agricultural Bank of China branch in Lishui, Zhejiang, and the former deputy director of the Jingmen People's Congress in Hubei Province.
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