A former executive at Chinese game publisher Yoozoo Interactive Co. Ltd. (游族网络) (002174.SZ) has been sentenced to death for murdering the company’s chairman and chief executive, Lin Qi, a court announced Friday.
Xu Yao, 43, who joined Yoozoo in 2017 and got involved in managing film projects related to best-selling Chinese book “The Three-Body Problem,” poisoned Lin on Dec. 14 and Dec. 15, 2020, leading to his death, after conflicting with the latter over management issues, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court said.
Xu also targeted and poisoned two other colleagues at Yoozoo over the period between September and December in 2020 due to workplace conflicts, the court said. Two other colleagues also consumed the poison, according to the court. All four survived.
It is not clear whether Xu will appeal.
The death of Lin on Christmas Day 2020 sent shockwaves across China because of his vision to turn the “Three-Body Problem” sci-fi trilogy into world-class intellectual property.
The case then took a twist with an online allegation that a woman who bore Lin a son out of wedlock was seeking to exercise the infant’s inheritance rights. Following that were details of the poisoner’s obsession with the U.S. TV series “Breaking Bad.”
A native of Wenzhou, East China’s Zhejiang province, Lin made his fortune in the web and mobile games sector. In 2019, the software engineer-turned-entrepreneur founded Yoozoo in Shanghai and took it public through a backdoor listing.
Born in the same year as Lin, Xu had a background in law, graduating from the insurance law section at France’s Paul Cézanne University in 2006 and subsequently completing study at the University of Michigan law school in the U.S. two years later. He later returned to China and worked at well-known financial conglomerate Fosun Group before joining Yoozoo.
He resigned from Yoozoo’s board in 2019 and went to its film division where he took charge of the “Three-Body Problem” projects.
Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com) and editor Kelsey Cheng (kelseycheng@caixin.com)
