Liu Han
| Liu Han | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Native name | 刘汉 |
| Born |
25 October 1965 Guanghan, Sichuan, China |
| Died | 9 February 2015 (aged 49) Xianning, Hubei, China |
| Cause of death | Execution |
| Occupation | Chairman, Hanlong Group |
| Net worth | $6.4 billion |
| Relatives | Liu Zhangke (father), Li Wanzhen (mother), Liu Wei (brother; executed 2015) |
Liu Han (Chinese: 刘汉; pinyin: Liú Hàn; 25 October 1965 – 9 February 2015) was a Chinese billionaire businessman, the former chairman of the conglomerate Hanlong Group, with interests in power generation and mining. His assets were officially valued at 40 billion yuan (US$6.4 billion). He was convicted of murder, running a mafia-style gang, and many other charges, and executed in February 2015.
Liu Han was born in 1965 in Guanghan, Sichuan province, the middle child in a family with three sons and two daughters. His father, Liu Zhangke (刘章科), was a veteran of the Korean War, who worked as a secondary school physics teacher after leaving the army. He died in 1990. His mother, Li Wanzhen (李万珍), worked as a street vendor.
In mid-1980s, Liu Han began buying and reselling timber, construction material, and petroleum. In the early 1990s, he started to operate gambling dens in Guanghan with his brother Liu Wei. He entered the commodity market in the mid-1990s, trading soy beans and steel between 1994 and 1997, which earned him hundreds of millions of yuan.
Liu's commodity trading resulted in a dispute with the Liaoning billionaire Yuan Baojing. Yuan lost nearly 100 million yuan and believed that it was caused by Liu's manipulation of a broker. He offered a former policeman, Wang Xing, 160,000 yuan for Liu's life. Wang in turn hired the contract killer Li Haiyang. In February 1997, Li shot at Liu twice in a Sichuan hotel but missed him. Li was captured and later sentenced to life in prison. Wang Xing then repeatedly blackmailed Yuan Baojing, who eventually hired his cousins to murder Wang in 2003. Yuan was convicted of murder and executed in March 2006.
Liu Han founded Hanlong Group in 1997. In 2000, he moved the conglomerate's headquarters from Mianyang to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Around 2002, he became associated with Zhou Bin, a son of Zhou Yongkang, then Communist Party chief and top leader of Sichuan. He built two hydroelectric stations in Ngawa in 2001. He sold the stations in 2005 for 500 million yuan to a British Virgin Islands company, which then resold them to a subsidiary of Datang Power for 2.7 billion yuan only two months later.
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