Man sentenced to imprisonment over rumor-mongering

The head of a private IT company was sentenced to two-years-and-nine-months imprisonment for defamation by a local court in Shanghai on Thursday.

Fu Xuesheng, 48, who was the chairman and legal representative of Shanghai LabInfo Technologies Ltd., was found guilty of creating and spreading online rumors about government officials and company executives, according to the Zhabei District People's Court in Shanghai Municipality.

The rumors were spread on the Internet from August 2010 to August 2013, and his posts, which were open to comments, were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, according to the court.

In one case, Fu fabricated that a man called Huang, a legal representative of an interior design company who later died, had bribed a deputy district head in Shanghai, where Huang's company was located.

He and Huang were previously involved in a financial dispute.

Fu also spread rumors about the district official, saying he had accepted more than two billion yuan (about 320 million U.S. dollars) in bribes, owned over 60 houses, had ten mistresses and had murdered Huang.

After Fu failed to win a tender issued by China's petrochemical giant Sinopec in Dec. 2012, he took "revenge" on the winning bidder by spreading the rumor that it had used an African man to sexually bribe a Sinopec executive surnamed Zhang, who helped it to win the contract.

Fu's actions had impacted society and seriously harmed social order. He violated criminal law and should be punished for defamation, the court added.

Fu was arrested by the Shanghai Police last August.

According to a judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme Court and Procuratorate, defamation charges can be levelled against the authors of online posts that are deemed rumors and viewed by more than 5,000 users or retweeted more than 500 times.

Defamation charges carry sentences of up to three years in prison.