A serial killer dubbed China's "Jack the Ripper" for the way he mutilated several of his 11 female victims was executed on Thursday, three decades after the first murder.
A court in the north-west city of Baiyin, Gansu province, which handed him the death sentence in March last year, announced on China's Weibo micro-blogging site that it had been carried out.
China's supreme court had approved the execution, it said.
Gao Chengyong, 54, robbed, raped and murdered 11 women and girls between 1988 and 2002 in Gansu and the neighbouring Inner Mongolia region.
In March 2018 he was found guilty by the Baiyin City Intermediate People's Court and handed death sentences for both robbery and intentional homicide, and lesser sentences for rape and dishonouring corpses.
Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home, often cutting their throats and mutilating their bodies, according to state media reports. The youngest victim was eight years old.
Some victims had their reproductive organs removed, the Beijing Youth Daily said when Gao was arrested in 2016.
"To satisfy his perverted desire to dishonour and sully corpses, many of his female victims' corpses were damaged and violated," the court said on Weibo when he was convicted.
"The motives of the defendant's crimes were despicable, his methods extremely cruel, the nature of the acts vile and the details of the crimes serious."
Police had been hunting Gao for years.
"The suspect has a sexual perversion and hates women," police said in 2004 when they linked the crimes for the first time and offered a reward of 200,000 yuan (Dh110,000) for information leading to an arrest.
"He's reclusive and unsociable, but patient," according to the police profiling at the time.
A lead in the case came when police collected and tested the DNA of one of Gao's relatives over a separate minor crime, the China Daily had reported.
Police concluded the killer they had been hunting for 28 years was a relation, and Gao's DNA matched the murderer's.
The original Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in east London in the late Victorian era, who is widely believed to have murdered five women, mutilating several of them. Those killings have never been solved.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
