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The founder of one of China’s largest copper trading houses has been sentenced to life in prison after a court in Xi’an found him guilty of contractual fraud, bribery and related offences — a verdict that caps the dramatic collapse of a company that once handled a quarter of China’s copper imports.
He Xinbi, 61, built Maike Metals International from a 50,000-yuan loan — worth roughly $8,700 at the time — taken out with friends in Xi’an in 1993. The company began by trading mechanical and electrical goods before pivoting to scrap metal, copper wire and refined copper. At its peak, Bloomberg reported, Maike accounted for about one quarter of all copper imported into China.
The Verdict and the Losses
The Xi’an court issued its ruling in September, finding that Maike’s conduct had exposed several Chinese banks to potential losses exceeding one billion dollars, according to Bloomberg’s sources. The verdict itself has not been made public. He Xinbi has filed an appeal against the sentence.
Prosecutors built their case around allegations that the company pledged metals it was storing and transporting as collateral to raise credit — a financing model that unravelled when the underlying assets could no longer support the debt. Maike had also invested in hotels and business centres, leaving it exposed when China’s property market crisis struck those holdings.
The Defence and the Collapse
Lawyers for He Xinbi argued that neither he nor his company had any fraudulent intent. They pointed to more than a decade of cooperation with lenders and said Maike had continued servicing loans and trying to meet its obligations even after cash flows deteriorated under pandemic restrictions. In the defence’s account, at least part of the banks’ losses stemmed from weaknesses in the creditors’ own internal risk-management systems rather than deliberate deception.
The timeline of the company’s unravelling is stark. Pandemic-era restrictions from 2022 disrupted Maike’s operations; the property market downturn hit its real-estate investments; and a fall in copper prices compounded the financial pressure. By October 2023, senior executives had lost contact with He Xinbi and concluded he had been detained by police. The following month, Maike filed for bankruptcy.
The case illustrates the particular vulnerability of commodity traders who use inventory financing — pledging physical metal as collateral — when prices fall and liquidity tightens simultaneously. Bloomberg’s reporting on the verdict has drawn attention to the scale of the exposure and the severity of the punishment handed to a figure who had been one of China’s most prominent metals entrepreneurs.