China Executes Banker For Taking Bribe

China has executed a former senior banker for accepting £116m in bribes in the latest corruption purge by President Xi Jinping.

Bai Tianui, the former general manager of the asset management firm China Huarong International Holdings, was killed on Tuesday in the northern city of Tianjin.

Bai, according to prosecutors, abused his position in the state-owned offshore investment company between 2014 and 2018, having accepted a “huge amount” of bribes amounting to 1.1bn yuan.

In a statement, the court said: “The amount of bribes received by Bai Tianhui was extremely large, the crime’s circumstances were particularly serious and the social impact was particularly severe.”

It added that Bai’s crime had “harmed the interests of the state” and the Chinese people and “he should be severely punished according to law”.

The Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest court, said the facts of the case were “clear” and the evidence against Bai was “conclusive and sufficient”, so his sentence was “appropriate”.

Officials did not detail how Bai was executed, but said he was allowed to meet with close relatives beforehand.

The Tianjin High People’s Court upheld his death penalty after rejecting his appeal on Feb 24.

In China, a death sentence handed down by lower courts must be submitted for review to the Supreme People’s Court.

Huang had been set up to handle bad loans from state banks and was renamed China Citic Financial Assets Management after a government-orchestrated bailout in 2021.

It was one of four companies formed in 1999 to help clean up bad debt piles choking China’s banking system, and the company later expanded into investment, loan and property businesses.

Bai is the second senior executive from the firm to be executed for corruption.

Lai Xiaomin, Tianui’s former boss, was executed in January 2021, a month after being found guilty of taking £191 million (1.8 billion yuan) in bribes and embezzling more than £2.6m (25m yuan) in public assets.

He was also found guilty of bigamy after living with a woman “as man and wife for long periods” outside of his marriage and fathering illegitimate children.

China’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, detained 54 state regulators, bankers and senior financial executives in the first nine months of the year, according to a tally from South China Morning Post.