Ionce met Huang Guangyu, then China’s richest man, in his office perched high above Beijing. A putrid smog enveloped the building, rendering Mr Huang’s view – for which he was presumably paying top renminbi – about as impressive as if we had met at the bottom of a coal mine. He chain-smoked throughout (adding to the swirling fog) and fiddled distractedly with his mobile phone as he answered questions about Gome, the vast electronics retailer he had built from scratch.
Ten days after we met, Mr Huang disappeared. He emerged more than a year later, in April 2010, in a Beijing courthouse where, after a cursory trial held behind closed doors, he was sentenced to a 14-year prison sentence for bribery, insider trading and “economic crimes”. That could have been the end of it. But Mr Huang has not gone away.
Still the largest single shareholder of Gome (pronounced “guo-mei”), with a more than 30 per cent stake, he is fighting to maintain control from behind bars. Specifically, he wants to remove Chen Xiao, chief executive, who has overhauled the company since Mr Huang’s incarceration. Mr Chen invited Bain Capital, a US private equity group, to take a stake and has implemented a turnround plan.