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Saga of smuggled plane ends in Russia
It's the story of the unwanted Russian airplane that's finally back home. A confiscated TU-154M passenger aircraft smuggled to China from Russia flew "home" to Moscow yesterday after being left unused for almost nine years at the Chengdu-based Shuangliu Airport in Southwest China. "The plane took off from Shuangliu Airport at 10:48 am," said Wang Hongkai, deputy general manager of the Beijing Jiahe Jiamei Home Furniture & Structural Material Limited Company yesterday. Wang's company bought the plane in 2000 through a bidding process, receiving national attention since it was the first time that an aircraft was sold on the auction block on the Chinese mainland. The 164-seat plane was reported to be one of the four planes that was illegally introduced by Mou Qizhong, a notorious business tycoon in Central China's Hubei Province. He smuggled the plane, having it flown into China back in 1989 for 500 carriages of domestic-made products, including instant noodles. Mou sold the plane to Sichuan Airlines, where it was flown for almost 7 years until it was confiscated by local customs officials in June 1999. That was when authorities found Mou to be involved up to his eyebrows in financial fraud. He was later given a life sentence by a local court. The Russian-built plane was then authorized to be auctioned off at the Sichuan Auction Centre on December 26, 2000. Wang's company won the bid by offering a price of 1 million yuan (US$120,000). A Russian-made TU-154 plane is valued at around US$8 million in accordance with the price tag in the 1990s, according to a local Tianfu Morning Post report. Wang thought it might also help to build a good image for his company since no one enterprise on the Chinese mainland used a plane to offer such leisure services to customers, he added. The plane did bring fame to Wang's company as well as a large number of furniture buyers and profits. Yet the firm's plans were thwarted after it ran into great difficulty in getting the aircraft from Chengdu to Beijing. The civil aviation authorities suspended it from flying in 1999, so it could only be transported by road or sea. On December 26, 2003 just three years after it bought the plane Wang's company decided to sell it. A Russian company soon offered 2.16 million yuan (US$ 260,000) at a Beijing auction. "The buyer is an aeronautics technology and equipment company based in Moscow and its president headed a five-member crew to take delivery of the plane yesterday," Wang said. The plane has 1,700 flight hours, which is far from the expected 30,000 hours that is its expected lifetime operating capacity, according to the Chengdu-based post.
(China Daily 03/01/2005 page2) |
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