BEIJING – In one of China’s biggest bank frauds, former bank manager Xu Guojun was handed a life sentence in December 2023 for embezzling and misappropriating more than 2.3 billion yuan (S$430 million) between 1993 and 2001.
Xu, who used to run the Bank of China’s Kaiping branch in Guangdong province, fled to the United States in 2021 but was repatriated in 2023. He was sentenced in a court in Guangdong.
Among other things, Xu and two others had applied for fake loans to obtain the large sum, investigations revealed.
The case was highlighted in the work reports by China’s supreme court and top prosecuting body released on March 8 during the country’s annual parliamentary sessions.
It comes amid a deepening of China’s ongoing anti-corruption drive, with graft cases totalling some 24,000 in 2023, a 4.3 per cent rise from 23,000 in 2022. There were 22,000 cases in 2021.
President Xi Jinping has made battling corruption a key priority since he took office in 2012.
One of his earliest tasks as president was to initiate an anti-corruption drive that has taken down “tigers” such as former national security chief Zhou Yongkang and Central Military Commission vice-chairman Xu Caihou. But the blitz has also been criticised as a pretext for Mr Xi to get rid of his political enemies.
Meanwhile, telco fraud, which covers scams conducted through calls, messages and e-mails, hit a seven-year high of 51,351 cases in 2023, up 67 per cent from 2022.
Common telco fraud cases include fake overseas job offers, as well as impersonation and rebate scams.
The abetting of telco fraud surged to a high of 145,579 cases in 2023 – a 13 per cent increase from 2022. This was the third most common offence in China, after dangerous driving (333,000 cases) and theft (156,000 cases).
In recent years, telco scams have been a growing problem in China, as in elsewhere. In December 2022, China passed the Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Law, which gives enforcement agencies the power to pursue overseas suspects, as well as order telcos and banks to help hunt down scammers.
China’s Public Security Bureau cracked 1.156 million telco fraud cases, arrested 1.553 million suspects and recovered losses of more than 286.1 billion yuan as at end 2022.
Other notable cases in 2023 highlighted in this year’s court and prosecutorial reports include three high-profile and egregious rape cases in eastern Shandong province and the central provinces of Hubei and Henan.
In each of these three cases, which took place between 2017 and 2019, a male culprit had targeted girls who were still in primary school through online chats and went on to rape and blackmail them.
One of the rapists instigated his victims to look for other young girls for him, while another lured his victims to hotels where they were subsequently gang-raped. The three men were all executed.
