When someone shares with you something of value, you have an obligation to share it with others.
Thursday 7 January 2010
Boom time for China’s corporate crooks as the economy soars
In the beginning, there was the Forbes list of China’s richest. Then came the more locally flavoured Hurun report with its own tally of mainland billionaires.
Boom time for China’s corporate crooks as the economy soars
Neil Gough 07 January 2010
In the beginning, there was the Forbes list of China’s richest. Then came the more locally flavoured Hurun report with its own tally of mainland billionaires.
So perhaps the latest addition to the mix was inevitable: the first annual list of “Crimes of Chinese Entrepreneurs”.
By combing the major corruption-related reports in the mainland press last year, Shenzhen-based lawyer Wang Rongli has dissected 95 of the biggest corporate graft investigations, busts, dismissals and demotions, trials, convictions and executions involving the country’s most crooked businessmen from both private and state-owned companies.
His results suggest that corporate crime is becoming increasingly lucrative - provided the perpetrators do not get caught - and that the scale of corruption has soared in recent years in line with economic growth.
The total losses of government funds from 31 cases of confirmed corporate crimes by officials at state-owned firms last year came to 3.41 billion yuan (HK$3.87 billion), or an average of 109.8 million yuan per person, Wang wrote in his report last week in the Legal Daily. That represents roughly a tenfold increase from an earlier and more extensive study of 500 corruption cases that Wang conducted between 2003 and 2008, which surmised the average bribe or misappropriation of funds per bent official was just over 10 million yuan.
The new list of corporate crooks declines to rank entrepreneurs by proceeds from crime (Forbes, by contrast, added Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera to its latest list of billionaires, at No 701 with a fortune of US$1 billion). But picking apart the roster of China’s bad businessmen does yield some interesting results.
Of the 84 confirmed crimes by entrepreneurs in the report, 35 involved cadres from state-owned companies and 49 were executives in private firms. The average age of criminals at state-owned firms was 54.6 years, while private company offenders averaged 45.9 years old.
Forty businessmen were sentenced for economic crimes last year, including four who were executed.
Among the most corrupt officials at government firms, three were sentenced to life in prison after accounting for total losses to the state amounting to 1.29 billion yuan. Zhang Jialin, a former National People’s Congress delegate and the chairman and party secretary of motorcycle producer China Qingqi Group, was jailed over 842 million yuan in bribes, kickbacks and misappropriated funds.
Wang Hongsheng, a former general manager of Taiyuan City Economic Construction Investment, netted 310 million yuan in “black money”. And the former president of Zhejiang Petrochemicals Building Materials Group, Wang Xianlong, was brought down over 140 million yuan in illegal proceeds.
1 comment:
Boom time for China’s corporate crooks as the economy soars
Neil Gough
07 January 2010
In the beginning, there was the Forbes list of China’s richest. Then came the more locally flavoured Hurun report with its own tally of mainland billionaires.
So perhaps the latest addition to the mix was inevitable: the first annual list of “Crimes of Chinese Entrepreneurs”.
By combing the major corruption-related reports in the mainland press last year, Shenzhen-based lawyer Wang Rongli has dissected 95 of the biggest corporate graft investigations, busts, dismissals and demotions, trials, convictions and executions involving the country’s most crooked businessmen from both private and state-owned companies.
His results suggest that corporate crime is becoming increasingly lucrative - provided the perpetrators do not get caught - and that the scale of corruption has soared in recent years in line with economic growth.
The total losses of government funds from 31 cases of confirmed corporate crimes by officials at state-owned firms last year came to 3.41 billion yuan (HK$3.87 billion), or an average of 109.8 million yuan per person, Wang wrote in his report last week in the Legal Daily. That represents roughly a tenfold increase from an earlier and more extensive study of 500 corruption cases that Wang conducted between 2003 and 2008, which surmised the average bribe or misappropriation of funds per bent official was just over 10 million yuan.
The new list of corporate crooks declines to rank entrepreneurs by proceeds from crime (Forbes, by contrast, added Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera to its latest list of billionaires, at No 701 with a fortune of US$1 billion). But picking apart the roster of China’s bad businessmen does yield some interesting results.
Of the 84 confirmed crimes by entrepreneurs in the report, 35 involved cadres from state-owned companies and 49 were executives in private firms. The average age of criminals at state-owned firms was 54.6 years, while private company offenders averaged 45.9 years old.
Forty businessmen were sentenced for economic crimes last year, including four who were executed.
Among the most corrupt officials at government firms, three were sentenced to life in prison after accounting for total losses to the state amounting to 1.29 billion yuan. Zhang Jialin, a former National People’s Congress delegate and the chairman and party secretary of motorcycle producer China Qingqi Group, was jailed over 842 million yuan in bribes, kickbacks and misappropriated funds.
Wang Hongsheng, a former general manager of Taiyuan City Economic Construction Investment, netted 310 million yuan in “black money”. And the former president of Zhejiang Petrochemicals Building Materials Group, Wang Xianlong, was brought down over 140 million yuan in illegal proceeds.
Post a Comment