Couple Founders of E-commerce Giant Dangdang.com Fall Out in Explosive Scandal
Grudges for rich families seem to run deeper than they do in ordinary families.
Conspiracies, divorce, promiscuity and STDs. All of these sound like an episode of the hit show Why Women Kill. However, on the morning of October 24, the two founders of one of the biggest Chinese e-commerce giants Dangdang.com, Li Guoqing and his wife Peggy Yu, put on a similar show on Chinese social media WeChat.
In a WeChat Post, Li Guoqing explained that he and his wife got divorced and that he was left with nothing. In return, his wife Peggy Yu accused him of taking 130 million yuan in cash from their home. Yu also pointed out that Li Guoqing and his public relations team manipulated the media, and lied about almost everything. Furthermore, Yu exposed that Li Guoqing was suspected of being homosexual, infected with syphilis, and that his brother had been jailed in prison six times for drug addiction, with the most recent sentence lasting fifteen years. She also claimed to have been the one who had to clean up all the mess, whether it was about company affairs or his shameful personal life over the years.
“You have kidnapped my life for twenty years. I’ve really had enough. F**k off,” Yu ended her heated accusation.
It is reported that before the WeChat fall out, Li Guoqing was “active” in the media for months. In an official statement to the media by Dangdang.com, Li Guoqing tried to divert public opinion to influence the result of his ongoing divorce proceedings.
On October 23, Li Guoqing posted on Weibo, saying that he had filed a divorce complaint to the court in the end of July. However, Yu rejected the divorce after receiving the divorce subpoena from the court on October 17.
On the morning of October 24, Li Guoqing replied to his wife’s remarks on Weibo again, saying, “I thank you for coming back to China with me instead of moving abroad. I’m grateful that you have been assisting me in the company without a title. But in the end, you became the empress and took away the company that I founded… And now you disguise yourself as a victim, trough personal attacks and spreading rumors about me. It is unbearable.”
In 1999, Li Guoqing and his wife Peggy Yu founded the company Dangdang.com. On December 8, 2010, the couple led Dangdang to an official public listing on the New York Stock Exchange, making Dangdang the first B2C online marketplace in China solely based on its online business to be listed in the US. In September, the company announced its delisting and returned its status to a private holding company. Dangdang’s twists and turns reflected the fluctuations of China’s e-commerce industry.
