The former chairman of Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co Ltd, Ma Xingtian, has been sentenced to jail for 12 years, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
Ma was sentenced for manipulating the stock market, violating or failing to disclose important information and offering bribes, Xinhua reported.
Former vice chairman Xu Dongjin and 10 other related people have also been sentenced to jail, Xinhua said.
China’s regulators have turned their gaze on stamping out fraud following a string of scandals that undermined investor confidence in the nation’s financial sector.
A court in Guangzhou in southern China had in April accepted the country’s first class-action lawsuit filed by a government- affiliated body against Kangmei Pharmaceutical over fraud allegations, as the country vows ‘zero tolerance’ against accounting fraud and other capital markets ‘tumours’.
The China Securities Investor Service Centre (CSISC) had sued Kangmei on behalf of more than 50 individual investors in a landmark case in China’s capital markets, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said.
Kangmei is alleged to have engaged in intentional and systematic financial cheating worth 30 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) between 2016 and 2018, according to the regulator, which said “toxic tumours” in capital markets must be eradicated swiftly, and relentlessly.
- Reuters with additional editing by Jim Pollard
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