A CHINESE court Friday fined the firm behind the now-defunct Fanya Nonferrous Metals Exchange 1 billion yuan (US$149.04 million) for illegal fundraising and handed its founder a lengthy prison term, Xinhua reported.

The Kunming Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Shan Jiuliang, who founded and ran the minor metals bourse, to 18 years in prison for crimes including embezzlement, according to the Xinhua report.

Shan, whose company was said to have caused investors “huge economic losses,” was also fined 500,000 yuan and had 50 million yuan of his personal property confiscated, the report added.

The Fanya exchange was launched in 2011 in Kunming, in southwestern Yunnan Province, with the aim of raising the prices of minor metals like bismuth by building up stockpiles using money borrowed from thousands of individual investors.

But the exchange froze transactions and members’ accounts in 2015 after experiencing “liquidity” problems and was later taken over by government investigators.

The same Kunming court had in January attempted to raise funds to pay off investors owed nearly 40 billion yuan by auctioning off the bourse’s inventories of indium, a silvery metal used in flat-panel screens and semi-conductors, on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao.

The sale ultimately attracted no bids.

Besides Shan, 20 other defendants are facing criminal charges for Fanya-related crimes. These include Yang Guohong, former vice president of the exchange, who is accused of illegally appropriating property by abusing his position. (SD-Agencies)