Boyaa Interactive CEO receives prison sentence for bribery

Zhang Wei, the chairman and CEO of the China-based gaming company Boyaa Interactive, has been sentenced to a one-year jail terms on bribery charges. This has resulted in the steep fall of the company’s share praises. The company is also scrambling to find a suitable replacement.

Zhang resigned from all positions he held at the company immediately after the verdict.

Zhang went in front of a judge with the Municipal of Intermediate People’s Court in May to answer to charges brought against Boyaa Shenzhen of offering “bribes by entities.” Boyaa received a fine of $364,667 (RMB2,500,000) and Zhang was sentenced to a year in prison, with a suspended sentence of 18 months. Upon being found guilty, Zhang immediately launched his appeal, which was denied last week by China’s Higher People’s Court.

According to a Boyaa announcement from last Friday, Dai Zhikang is set to replace Zhang as the board’s chairman.

Boyaa’s second-quarter earnings fell 34.4 per cent after China launched its crackdown on online gambling applications in April. In a sweep to rid the country’s landscape of gambling, regulators not only banned virtual games, but also determined that poker is no longer a competitive sport.

In its revenue filing for the second quarter, Boyaa said that the decline was due primarily to “the effect of regulatory risk regarding the market rumor of the implementation of the ‘Administrative Measures of Online Chess and Card Games’ by the Chinese government aiming to shut down Texas Hold’em poker games and prohibiting the operation of Texas Hold’em poker games starting from 1 June 2018.”

Source: CalvinAyre