What’s new: A former executive director and Communist Party committee member of state-owned financial conglomerate Citic Group Corp. was sentenced to 18 years in prison Saturday for embezzlement and receiving 5.5 million yuan ($849,000) in bribes.
Zhao Jingwen was also given a 3.2 million yuan fine (link in Chinese) by the Changsha Intermediate People’s Court in Changsha, capital of Central China’s Hunan province, according to a court statement.
Zhao, 67, worked for Citic for more than three decades before retiring in 2014. He was put under a graft probe in early 2019 by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the top anti-corruption watchdog.
The Changsha court found that from 2000 to 2014, Zhao and others attempted to take more than 191 million yuan in bribes, 20.5 million yuan of which was planned to go to him. He ended up raking in a much smaller amount, or 5.5 million yuan, of bribes, according to the statement.
In return, Zhao helped people get projects, contracts, jobs and promotions.
He also embezzled 1 million yuan by forging contracts and using fake invoices.
The background: Zhao’s indictment is one of the latest cases in a long push to drive corruption from the financial sector. Recent high-profile cases also include investigations into senior officials at policy banks, a former banking regulator, and a former vice president of a state-owned asset management company.
In a January meeting with China’s anti-corruption agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping said (link in Chinese) supervision of the financial sector should be strengthened.
Related: In Depth: Bad Business at a ‘Bad Bank’
Contact reporter Zhang Yukun (yukunzhang@caixin.com) and editor Joshua Dummer (joshuadummer@caixin.com)
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