The family of Zhang resorted to Wang Yong, head of Dacheng Jinan office’s criminal defense practice and retained him as defense lawyer for the first-instance trial. Wang visited Zhang in prison several times and conducted a careful analysis of the case.
The atmosphere of the trial was intense. Wang argued that Zhang’s behavior should only be deemed as an act of private lending, rather than illegally absorbing public deposit as defined in the Criminal Law, that private lending where money flows to those demanding it was in itself legal. Wang believed that significance of the trial was that private lending should be properly regulated and legalized and that if Zhang’s behavior constituted criminal offense and was punished accordingly, it would symbolize a public intervention and crackdown on ordinary private lending activities, and thus counterproductive to the establishment of proper transactional order.
On December 16, 2013, the People’s Court of Rizhao Economic and Technological Development Zone decided that the public prosecutor’s statement of facts and evidence were not strong enough to prove Zhang guilty and adopting the defense lawyer’s opinion, found Zhang not guilty. Zhang, having been detained for 16 months, was set free at the court.
The prosecutor protested against the first-instance decision, believing that fault was made as a result of admissibility of improper evidence and reiterated that Zhang’s behavior was illegal, public-oriented, inducing and with widespread impact and cannot be simply dismissed as innocent.
Zhang, upon receiving the notice of protest, contacted attorney Wang and had Wang represent him again in the second-instance trial. Wang restated that the evidence presented by the prosecutor lacked accuracy and sufficiency and that the first-instance decision was made on solid factual and theoretical grounds. He believed that it was necessary to understand the defendant’s motive and purpose of the borrowing and the actual use of money and that it was unfair to define the defendant’s behavior as criminal whereas the money was used for maintaining day-to-day operation of the company and the defendant observed the obligations provided in the loan contract.
The two sides’ opinion differed greatly. On August 25, 2014, as the prosecutor failed to submit sufficient evidence to prove otherwise, the Intermediate People’s Court of Rizhao dismissed the protest and upheld the original decision.
The case in question sheds some light on the judicial determination of the legality of private lending.