[The judgment against Lai Xiaomin, a former chairman of Huarong Asset Management, followed a shift away from capital punishment for white-collar crimes.]
Lai Xiaomin, the former chairman of
Huarong Asset Management, was found guilty by a court in the coastal city of
Tianjin of receiving some $277 million in bribes between 2008 and 2018. The
government will confiscate his personal assets, it said.
Mr. Lai was “lawless and extremely
greedy,” the Secondary Intermediate People’s Court of Tianjin said
Tuesday in a statement, which added that his actions put national
financial security at risk.
Mr. Lai, 58, was among the
highest-profile figures to fall from grace amid a sweeping crackdown on
corruption by Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. Mr. Lai was kicked
out of the Communist Party in 2018 for violating party law and
regulations, including abusing his power for sex. He confessed to taking cash
bribes last year in a televised show on state media.
The unusually harsh sentence could
send a signal that Mr. Xi is not ready to ease his anticorruption campaign,
which he began shortly after he
took control of the Communist Party in late 2012. The campaign has
taken down some of his most
powerful rivals. But it has also helped him contain concerns in China that
party officials were becoming increasingly corrupt.
“Sentencing Mr. Lai to death will
get a lot of support from lower- and middle-class people,” said Zhang Peihong,
a partner at Hui Ye Law Firm in Shanghai.
China employs the death penalty
widely, though government officials do not disclose figures. But its use for
crimes like embezzlement, bribery and corruption has dropped in recent years
amid public disapproval.
The issue got an unusual public
airing in 2012 when Wen Jiabao, then China’s premier, used his nationally
televised annual news conference to caution courts overseeing the case of Wu
Ying, a young woman who became a business tycoon but had been sentenced to
death for financial fraud. Her sentence was later
reduced.
Reports of executions for
business-related crimes dropped, though they did not disappear. In 2013,
officials executed Zeng Chengjie after a court convicted him of financial
crimes. His family claimed that Mr. Zeng was executed before it was told,
in an episode that sparked anger online.
In sentencing Mr. Lai, the court
picked a high-profile target. Mr. Lai took the helm of Huarong in 2012, helping
it to expand into new areas like investments and securities. Huarong was set up
in the late 1990s to take on the failing loans of state-owned companies — a
type of outfit known as a “bad bank” — lifting the burden from big state-run
lenders that were looking to sell shares to the public.
Huarong did business deals with
some of China’s flashiest private companies at a time when they were feeling
ambitious. Among them were CEFC China, an energy company, and HNA, a
conglomerate with businesses ranging from hotels to airlines. Both came under
regulatory scrutiny after officials became
skeptical of companies that borrowed heavily to build their business
empires.
A high-profile death sentence will
send a message, though its interpretation depends on the audience, said Joshua
Rosenzweig, the deputy regional director for East and Southeast Asia at Amnesty
International.
“A lot of the messages that the
Chinese authorities try to send with these judgments, you are meant to fill in
the blanks and come to your own conclusions,” he said.
“This could be a message to the
public that the Xi regime is still treating corruption as a serious issue, or
it could be a message to the business elite in China that they need to keep
their noses clean,” Mr. Rosenzweig said. “Or it could be a message to both.”
Cao Li contributed reporting.
