With the approval of the Chinese Supreme People's Court,...

With the approval of the Chinese Supreme People's Court, two men convicted of illegal fund-raising and embezzlement were executed respectively in Tianjin Municipality and Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province.
Yu Qian, from Tianjin, was charged with defrauding nine companies into depositing a total of 68.5m yuan (8.3m US dollars) in banks under the pretext of higher interest rates, between April and October in 1998, according to the local court.
Yu embezzled the money through bank cheque fraud, spending 9.98m yuan to pay interest and pocketing the remaining 58.52m yuan.
Li Jian, from Henan Province, collaborated with others to illegally collect money from the public with higher than average interest rates, raising a total of 336m yuan (40.5m US dollars) and 20,000 US dollars between May 1996 and May 1998.
Worried he might get caught, Li fled the city with a huge portion of the money in early May 1998 and later was arrested.
Both men appealed to the higher people's courts in Tianjin and Henan but their pleas were rejected by the courts.