Wu Ying, former owner of Bense Holding Group, was sentenced to death in one of the China’s biggest financial frauds.

Wu Ying, a Zhejiang billionaire, who was convicted in China, for fraudulent ways against gullible public, had been awarded death sentence. And when her appeal for lesser punishment, came up on Wednesday, an eastern Chinese court had upheld the sentence. The Zhejiang Provincial Higher People’s Court Wednesday rejected Wu Ying’s appeal as she “brought huge losses to the nation and the people”, Xinhua reported.

Born to a farmer's family in the city of Dongyang, Zhejiang Province, Wu started from scratch by opening a beauty salon in 1997. Later built her own empire, Bense Holding Group and was rated as one of the richest business woman of China. But in 2009, she was sentenced to death, a deprivation of her political rights for life and confiscation of all personal property at her original trial by the Jinhua intermediate people's court in December. The indictment said (thirty-year-old) Wu swindled nearly 390 million yuan ($57 million) from 11 people by fraudulently promising high returns. The business woman raised 770 million yuan by promising high returns to investors between May 2005 and February 2007. She was arrested in February 2007. The death-sentence verdict has sparked an outcry on Internet with netizens calling for a more lenient punishment. The death sentence is still subject to review by the country’s Supreme People’s Court. (AarKay)