Ex-banker in 20-year China fraud case repatriated

BEIJING • A former Bank of China manager who fled to the US two decades ago where he was convicted in a US$485 million fraud case has been returned to China, marking a victory in President Xi Jinping's efforts to have corrupt officials brought to justice back home.

The "forced repatriation" of Xu Guojun "marks significant progress in the handling of the 20-year-old case", the ruling Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a statement on Sunday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian confirmed at a regular press briefing yesterday in Beijing that Xu was repatriated from the US.

Mr Xi has made rooting out corruption a pillar of governance since taking power nearly a decade ago, a strategy that has helped win him public support. It has also left the nation's law enforcers with the task of hunting down dirty officials around the world, many of them in the US which does not have an extradition treaty with China.

The lack of a written agreement on returning fugitives means officials from the two nations must negotiate fugitive handovers on a case-by-case basis. That process slowed during the Trump administration, when a trade war sent ties spiralling and a range of other disputes broke out over issues from Taiwan and Hong Kong to visas for students and journalists.

The Bank of China case caused a stir two decades ago due to the large amount involved, and was widely seen in the Asian nation as a textbook example of corruption in the state banking system.

In 2008, a grand jury in the US state of Nevada convicted Xu, another manager and their wives of defrauding the Bank of China, racketeering, money laundering, transporting stolen property as well as passport and visa fraud.

Xu was later handed a 22-year prison sentence.

US prosecutors said the couples emigrated to the country using false identities, and presented evidence of their transactions at Las Vegas casinos, including bets of as much as US$80,000.

The two managers and a colleague, all former employees of Bank of China at its sub-branch in Kaiping county in Guangdong, laundered funds through Las Vegas and Macau, and then used fake passports to flee to Canada in October 2001, the Chinese bank said in 2002.

The CCDI statement said more than 2 billion yuan (S$422 million) of stolen money has been recovered and the other Bank of China managers involved in the case, Yu Zhendong and Xu Chaofan, have already been repatriated.

BLOOMBERG