What’s new: China’s top graft-busting watchdog has given a damning assessment of corruption in the country’s biggest policy lender, the China Development Bank (CDB).
In a recent article on its website, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said it had held a special conference on Communist Party governance with the CDB’s party committee to review and analyze corruption cases at the policy lender over the past decade.
Graft was rampant, the agency said, citing a raft of reasons including a lack of self-discipline at the leadership level and lax internal governance.
Some leaders became examples not of self-disciplined leaders but of corrupt ones, the CCDI said in an explanation of the “underlying reasons” for what went wrong at the bank. The lender strayed from its core business and main responsibilities, and effective monitoring and control mechanisms were lacking, it said. When it came to hiring, capability was prioritized over moral standards, the CCDI said, describing the lender’s corporate culture as “backward.”
Although the fight against corruption at the CDB has been “overwhelmingly won” and the victory has been “consolidated,” the situation remains severe and complicated, the CCDI said.
Multiple CDB officials have been investigated for suspected graft since the party’s 18th National Congress in November 2012, when Xi Jinping was elected head of the party. They tended to be high-ranking officials born in the 1950s and 1960s who had been corrupt for a long time, while the proportion of younger officials involved in graft had grown, the CCDI said. Many corruption cases involved infrastructure investment, it said.
The background: More than 30 senior and midlevel officials at the CDB, both former and incumbent ones, have been snared in graft probes in recent years, according to Caixin’s tally.
They include Hu Huaibang, a former chairman who allegedly helped CEFC China Energy Co. Ltd. and HNA Group Co. Ltd. obtain billions of dollars in dubious credit. In 2021, Hu was sentenced to life in prison for taking bribes.
Contact reporter Zhang Yukun (yukunzhang@caixin.com) and editor Nerys Avery (nerysavery@caixin.com)
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