Chapter 473: You’ve Already Tracked Down All the Evidence?!!

Chapter 473: You’ve Already Tracked Down All the Evidence?!!

Send him to prison, or have him executed?!

What shocked Su Ruiwen wasn’t the idea that Xu Zhenyuan had done things that could land him in prison or in front of a firing squad. Capital crimes, perhaps not. But things that could put him behind bars? Certainly.

Maybe not in recent years. Wu Chen himself had admitted Xu hadn’t been up to anything lately.

But in the past? Absolutely. That was only natural.

Nearly every billionaire had done something shady on the way up. Exceptions were rare. Nobody was completely clean.

Su Ruiwen was no exception. Business talent alone hadn’t made him the richest man in Donghai. The marketplace was a battlefield, and when the fighting began, it was like the Eight Immortals crossing the sea, each displaying their own powers. Staying entirely within the law was all but impossible.

So Su Ruiwen knew Xu Zhenyuan must have broken plenty of laws, especially before Jinfu Group acquired Meiyuan Jewelry. Any one of those offenses might have been enough to send him to prison, at the very least.

But that hardly mattered.

No one could ever get their hands on the evidence. If they could, Xu’s old rivals would have put him away long ago. They wouldn’t have waited until now.

None of that came as a surprise.

What stunned Su Ruiwen was his belief that Li Ruobing meant to go straight for the kill. She intended to frame Xu Zhenyuan and have him locked up, or perhaps simply have him killed!

It shattered everything Su Ruiwen thought he knew about her.

Li Ruobing was famously forceful and domineering. The sensible thing was not to cross her.

But Xu Zhenyuan hadn’t crossed her! There was no grudge between them. They barely knew each other, beyond being aware of each other’s existence.

Li Ruobing wasn’t the type to think, ‘That person might become a threat, so I’ll eliminate them by extreme means.’

If she were, she would have gone after her business rivals long ago. That sort of thing meant flipping the table and breaking the rules of the game, and it would have turned everyone against her.

She had never done it!

More importantly, Xu Zhenyuan wasn’t even a potential threat to Li Ruobing. He was a potential threat to Su Qingying, and nowhere near a life-or-death one at that.

What did it have to do with Li Ruobing?

Was she really prepared to frame and destroy a man worth billions, a man with no direct connection to her, just to remove a possible threat to her close friend?!

That went beyond being domineering.

That was fucking insane!

At the same time, Su Ruiwen felt threatened.

He was delighted that his daughter and Li Ruobing had become close friends, as close as sisters. But if Li Ruobing went this far to help her, she would only end up hurting them both.

It also sharpened his sense that someone was encroaching on his territory.

Jinfu Group belonged to the Su family!

And Xu Zhenyuan was Jinfu Group’s second-largest shareholder! Today Li Ruobing might decide Xu was a threat to Qingying and take him out with no regard for the consequences. Who would be next tomorrow? And the day after?

What if Li Ruobing and Su Qingying fell out someday?

Wasn’t that a disaster waiting to happen?

Even with all his composure and cunning, Su Ruiwen could barely hold his emotions in check. The shock showed plainly on his face, and the more he thought about it, the more alarmed he became.

He could hardly believe it. Was this really Li Ruobing?

If her boyfriend, Wu Chen, hadn’t been sitting right across from him at that moment, Su Ruiwen might almost have suspected she harbored some special feelings for his daughter.

Silence settled over the office again. This time it lasted well over a minute.

Knock, knock.

The door opened, and a female secretary came in carrying two cups of tea. She stepped to the side of the desk and set one in front of each man.

“Chairman…”

“Your tea, sir.”

She withdrew quickly.

The silence returned.

Su Ruiwen eyed Wu Chen with suspicion and astonishment. Gradually, the look faded, and his face returned to normal, though a slight frown remained. “How exactly does Miss Li intend to go about it?”

He didn’t raise any objection outright.

The man across from him was Wu Chen, not Li Ruobing. What good would objecting to Wu do?

For now, it was more important to find out exactly what Li Ruobing had in mind.

“As I said. Send Xu Zhenyuan to prison, or have him executed.” Wu Chen touched the still rather hot teacup lightly and repeated himself with a smile.

“How, specifically?” Su Ruiwen pressed.

“There are plenty of ways.” Wu Chen’s smile didn’t waver.

“For example?”

“For example…” Wu Chen let the words trail off. He picked up his teacup, blew across the surface, and took a sip.

Only after setting it down did he go on. “Fourteen years ago, for example, on the eve of Jinfu Group’s acquisition of Meiyuan Jewelry, which was structured as part cash, part share swap.

“Xu Zhenyuan was Meiyuan’s chairman and largest shareholder at the time. To secure a bigger stake in Jinfu Group, he had someone falsify the accounts and paper over part of Meiyuan’s losses.

“The witness to that is Fu Tong. He still works for Xu Zhenyuan, though outside Jinfu Group, managing Xu’s investments. You should know who Fu Tong is, Boss Su.

“Or take ten years ago. Xu Zhenyuan was swindled on an investment and lost roughly thirty million yuan. Because of a loophole in the contract, he had no legal way to get the money back. He swallowed it for a year. Then, nine years ago, he hired men to go south and kidnap the man who’d cheated him, Sun Xueming. Sun was murdered. His body was sealed in concrete inside an oil drum and sunk in a river. It’s still there, in that river in Fu Province. No one’s found it.

“Then there was eight years ago. Boss Su, you transferred Xu Zhenyuan to head the Market Expansion Department and appointed him senior vice president. You handed him Jinfu Group’s most important expansion business at the time, and he went north to scout locations and open stores.

“Over the next two-plus years, under his direction, about a hundred and fifty new Jinfu Jewelry stores opened across five northern provinces. Altogether, Xu Zhenyuan padded the expenses by nearly twenty million yuan, and almost all of it went into his own pocket. There are plenty of witnesses to that, all still inside Jinfu Group.

“Five years ago, Xu Zhenyuan was driving alone when he cut across lanes and someone rear-ended his Bentley. He got into a fight with the other driver right there on the street and took a punch to the face. He lost a great deal of face.

“Afterward, Xu took his revenge. He sent someone to break the other driver’s legs. You’ve probably heard about that, Boss Su, but you don’t know who actually did it. I can tell you. It was Xu Zhenyuan’s bodyguard, a man named Lu Bing. He ambushed the driver on his way home, threw a sack over his head, and beat him. The case was never solved. Lu Bing did such a clean job that Xu gave him a hundred-thousand-yuan bonus.

“Four years ago, one of Xu Zhenyuan’s mistresses wanted to become more than a mistress. She called Xu’s wife, and his daughter, too. After that, she vanished. Her body is buried in an industrial park in Donghai’s northern outskirts.

“And two years ago, Xu’s daughter fell for a pretty-faced young freeloader. Xu disapproved. He found a woman to seduce the young man and then falsely accuse him of rape. The young man was framed and sent to prison. The woman who made the accusation took her money and went south. The phone number she’s using now is…”

Wu Chen spoke unhurriedly, pausing now and then for a sip of tea, as if he were telling a story. There was no reason to rush. It was simply rare for him to talk this much at one stretch.

As Su Ruiwen listened, his expression kept changing.

At first he was taken aback and skeptical. Then he was shocked. By the end, he was goddamn dumbfounded!

Wu Chen had begun with the oldest incidents. Things that far back were hard to look into, so Su Ruiwen could only wonder whether they were true.

But as Wu Chen’s dates crept closer to the present, the incidents became easier to check.

Su Ruiwen had even heard rumors about some of them. Wu Chen didn’t just repeat the rumors; he explained exactly how each incident could be used to bring Xu down. There were key witnesses! He even knew where the bodies were buried!

When a witness was no longer local, Wu Chen casually rattled off a phone number that could be used to trace and contact them.

The more recent the incident, the easier it was to verify.

And the more Su Ruiwen heard, the more convinced he became that Wu Chen wasn’t making any of it up. It was all too easy to check. Lying would be pointless; he’d be exposed in no time.

Take the body Wu Chen claimed was buried in the northern industrial park. Su Ruiwen could send men to dig right now. He’d know by the end of the day whether it was there.

And if none of this was a lie…

That was what left Su Ruiwen stunned.

How did Wu Chen know?!

How did he know it all in such detail?!

So Li Ruobing wasn’t planning to frame Xu Zhenyuan at all. She meant to dig up his old dirt and put him away? They’d already tracked down all the evidence?!!