Yuan Baojing and two accomplices were put to death by lethal injection after a court in China's Liaoning province upheld a capital punishment judgment handed down last year.

Yuan was convicted in January 2005 of hiring a hit man in a failed plot to kill a business partner who had caused Yuan's company to lose $11m in futures trading, according to earlier news reports. The man who found the hit man then blackmailed Yuan, and the tycoon paid his own brother and then cousin to kill the blackmailer. The blackmailer was shot dead in October 2003.

Yuan's brother and cousin were also executed yesterday.