Chinese lawmaker seeks 130m yuan compensation from police for ‘illegal’ detention

A lawmaker in northwest China is claiming 130 million yuan (HK$150 million) from a local police department as compensation for being “illegally” detained for 13 days, according to mainland media reports.

Hu Xufeng, 36, a member of the People’s Congress of Shangnan county, Shaanxi province, claimed the unusually high level of compensation because his detention caused “destructive damage” to his business, he told news portal Thepaper.cn.

“There was a financial dispute between me and Xue Yanhe, a policeman with Yanan’s National Security Brigade,” he said of his detention in 2013. “The city’s police department treated it as a criminal case and locked me up for 13 days.”

Hu is chairman of the Shaanxi Honoring Industrial Group, which operates in many areas including construction, media, hotels and electronics.

He was arrested for suspected fraud by police in Yanan, a neighbouring city, where Xue was a policeman, after he failed to repay a 4 million yuan debt to Xue on time in 2012, Hu said.

He could not pay the debt because he had been very ill and was short of cash, he said. Hu was arrested in Shangnan in August 2013. The detention was changed to residential surveillance in a hotel in Yanan two days after Hu was arrested. He had to sell group properties at a low price to pay the urgent debt, and was released on bail two days after he repaid Xue.

Hu’s position as a congress member guaranteed legal immunity until the local legislature approved his detention.