On April 29th, Guizhou Maotai has once again changed its chairman. Ding Xiongjun will no longer serve as the chairman and director of the company, and will be replaced by Zhang Deqin. This marks the fourth change in the chairman position of Guizhou Maotai in the span of six years.
In the evening of the 29th, Guizhou Maotai announced that according to relevant documents from the Guizhou provincial government, Zhang Deqin will assume the roles of company director and chairman, while Ding Xiongjun will no longer hold the positions of chairman and director of the company.
Earlier, on the night of the 26th, during the release of the annual report for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, Ding Xiongjun was absent from the list of participants.
Since 2018, there have been four changes in leadership at Guizhou Maotai.
On the night of May 6, 2018, Maotai Group held a meeting in the middle of the night to announce a major personnel change, removing chairman Yuan Renguo from his position. In September 2021, Yuan Renguo was sentenced to life imprisonment for bribery. On September 11th of the previous year, it was reported that Yuan Renguo died in prison due to illness.
Yuan Renguo was accused of engaging in corrupt practices, using the operating rights of Maotai liquor to forge ties with Wang Xiaoguang, former member of the Guizhou provincial Party committee and deputy governor of the province, as well as Wang Sanyun, former deputy secretary of the Guizhou provincial Party committee who later served in Gansu province. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China once stated that from 2009, as the price of Maotai liquor surged, Wang Xiaoguang, through Yuan Renguo and others, obtained operating rights for four exclusive Maotai liquor stores for his family and relatives. Over seven years, these stores received a total quota of 131.48 tons of Maotai liquor, generating profits of over 40 million yuan.
After Yuan Renguo was dismissed, Li Baofang took over as the new chairman in 2018. In March 2020, Li Baofang stepped down and was succeeded by Gao Weidong. However, Gao’s tenure lasted less than two years, making him the shortest-serving chairman since the listing of Guizhou Maotai in 2001.
Gao Weidong fell from grace in May 2022 and was officially expelled in December of the same year. His expulsion report stated that he engaged in power-for-sex and money-for-sex transactions, led an extremely corrupt life, was deeply involved in gambling, and engaged in prostitution multiple times. In February of this year, Gao Weidong was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking bribes worth over one hundred million yuan.
In August 2021, Ding Xiongjun took over from Gao Weidong, serving as the chairman of Maotai Group for two years and eight months.