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Lai Xiaomin, former president of ‘bad bank’ Chinese state Huarong, he was executed this friday after being sentenced to death at the beginning of the month in which he is considered by the local press as the “biggest case of financial corruption” of the recent history of the country.
According to a short note published by the officer People’s Daily, Lai was executed today “in accordance with legal procedures and with the approval of the Supreme People’s Court of China. “
On January 5, a court in the Chinese city of Tianjin (northeast) sentenced Lai to death on charges of corruption and bigamy.
According to investigations, the former banker – who was expelled from the Communist Party of China (CCP) in 2018 – accepted bribes of more than 1,788 million yuan ($ 277 million) between 2008 and 2018, a period in which he was also one of the main leaders of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC).
According to the ruling published by that court, Lai explicitly requested the bribes in exchange for promotions or project awards, something that “endangered the security and stability of national finances and had an extremely negative social impact.”
Unusual grief
Death sentences are less and less in this type of corruption cases in China, and are usually accompanied by the so-called “two-year extension”, which means that the convicted person is not executed. unless he repeats his crimes in the two years following the sentence and is usually reduced to life imprisonment.
However, in Lai’s case, his status as a senior official in various public bodies and the “extreme gravity”, according to the court, of his crimes played against him.
The executed, arrested in 2018 and whom the court described as “anarchic and extremely greedy”, was also found guilty of participating in the embezzlement of another 25 million yuan ($ 3.9 million) from the accounts of the state financial asset management company that he presided.
His belongings included a large number of real estate, luxury watches, automobiles, gold, and art collections.
For the moment, and despite the fact that the Justice has ordered the confiscation of all its assets, they continue without recovering 104 million yuan ($ 16.1 million) illegally obtained by Lai.
Corruption in China
Huarong is one of the four ‘bad banks’ in the Asian country, founded in 1999 after the Asian financial crisis with the aim of purging insolvencies in the Chinese banking system, although with the arrival of Lai it began investing in high-risk assets, according to a documentary aired early last year on state television CCTV .
In that program, Lai confessed that he preferred cash payments and that he drove with a trunk full of money to an apartment he called “the supermarket,” in which the authorities found more than 200 million yuan (30.9 million yuan). dollars) in cash.
Televised confessions are increasingly common in China in high-profile cases, and the anti-corruption campaign is one of President Xi Jinping’s star shows.
In 2019, China ranked 80th on the corruption perception index produced annually by Transparency International, ranking at the level of countries such as India, Morocco or Ghana, although improving from position 87 the previous year.
