Chinese tycoon Lin Qi, who died on Christmas Day, may have been poisoned, Shanghai police reported.
Lin, 39, was the president and CEO of Yoozoo (also known as Youzu), a game developer company such as Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming.
According to local media, Shanghai police pointed to one of Lin’s colleagues, identified only by his surname Xu, as the main suspect of poisoning.
Lin is believed to have a net worth of around 6.8 billion yuan (US$1.292 million), according to the Hurun List, a ranking of China’s richest people.
Employees and former employees gathered outside Yoozoo’s office on Friday to say goodbye to Lin.
Who was Lin Qi?
The businessman was a star in China’s lucrative video game market and had also made a foray into film production.
He founded Yoozoo in 2009 and successfully led the company during a period when the industry underwent substantial changes due to the transition to mobile gaming.
Lin was also an avid calligraphy fan, as well as a poetry enthusiast.
He was hospitalized on 16 December with symptoms of being poisoned and died on Friday 25.
The company Yoozoo released an emotional statement on its official Weibo microblog at the departure of its founder.
“ Goodbye youth,” he said. “We will be together, we will continue to be kind, we will continue to believe in goodness and continue the fight against everything that is bad.”
The post received thousands of comments.
Was he poisoned?
In a first statement, Yoozoo said that Lin had gone to the hospital after feeling bad, but that he was in a stable condition.
But according to the police, Lin is believed to have been poisoned.
On Thursday, 24 December, police arrested a man named Xu as a suspect of alleged poisoning.
According to local media reports, the person in custody could be Xu Yao, who runs Yoozoo’s film production arm.
There was also some speculation in the local media about his Lin had been poisoned with aged pu’er tea, a fermented Chinese drink.
What is Yoozoo?
In addition to his Game of Thronesgame, Yoozoo released along with China’s Tencent Holdings the hit Brawl Starsby Finnish developer Supercell.
The company also acquired the film adaptation rights of the Chinese science fiction novel Three-Body Problem, to recreate the book in six films.
But the project never took off and finally, in September, Yoozoo Pictures announced that it had reached an agreement with Netflix to co-produce an English television series.
The book Three-Body Problemis the first installment of the Trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Pastby writer Liu Cixin.
The play has received praise reviews and tells former US President Barack Obama and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg among their fans.
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