US deals blow against Chinese Corruption

ralphrepo · May 6, 2009

It's about time someone did something about the dirt bags that have been ripping off China and the Chinese people. Corrupt Chinese banking executives have been escaping to foreign countries for years, and often with millions in ill gotten gains. Thankfully, the US government is doing something about it. I hope this trend continues:

In a rush? For a quick synopsis, just read the red highlighted lines.

US jails China bankers for fraud

Two former Bank of China managers and their wives have been given lengthy jail sentences in the United States for stealing $485m (£320m). Xu Choafan, Xu Guojun, Kuang Wan Fang and Yu Ying Yi had also been convicted of passport fraud and of laundering the money through banks and casinos. The Las Vegas court also ordered to four to pay back $482m. Prosecutors said the convictions showed foreign nationals could not "live off their ill-gotten gains in the US". Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun were sentenced to 25 and 22 years respectively while their wives Kuang Wan Fang and Yu Ying Yi to eight years each. The charges against the four included monetary transactions with stolen money, transportation of stolen money, passport fraud and visa fraud. The court heard how, beginning in 1991, the men had masterminded an elaborate scheme to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars over a 13-year period. They laundered the money through false corporations and personal accounts in Hong Kong, Canada and the US, where they intended to emigrate.

Prosecutors said the group had carried out "a significant number of transactions" at Las Vegas casinos, including placing bets of up to $80,000. They had also obtained false identities and entered into sham marriages with US citizens to enable them to settle in the country, said federal officials. They were eventually arrested in 2004 and were found guilty in August 2008. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer thanked federal agents and prosecutors for their "tireless effort" in uncovering the conspiracy. "We will hold fully accountable those foreign nationals who abuse the financial systems of their home countries and who then, by fraudulent means, seek to live richly off their ill-gotten gains in the United States," he said. A third manager, Yu Zhengdong, had pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators. He was later jailed in China.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8037171.stm
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After serving their US sentences, I hope Uncle Sam renders them persona non grata and kicks them out; deport them back to the PRC where they can serve a few more years.

AsianInvasion · May 7, 2009

Ralph what exactly did those two men do?? How did they steal 485M? o-o

ralphrepo · May 7, 2009

AsianInvasion said: ↑

Ralph what exactly did those two men do?? How did they steal 485M? o-o
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Embezzlement. It's the age old story of having people who are too easily swayed by the allure of money, handle large sums of money. As they were handling it, a lot of it fell into their pockets instead. -rolleyes Here's a story from 2004 that explains how long this had been going on and what it's costing China:

In a rush? For a quick synopsis, just read the red highlighted lines.

Kansas City Star
Chinese officials embezzling billions in state assets, fleeing the country
by Tim Johnson
September 9/2004

Kaiping: In this city and many others in China, senior officials are embezzling tens of millions of dollars and fleeing overseas with their families. They're seldom caught. The stolen loot is recovered even less frequently. According to the latest official count, some 4,000 senior Chinese officials and managers of state-owned businesses have fled abroad over the past two decades with as much as $50 billion dollars in embezzled money. China's government-controlled media call the corruption "staggering," and the matter is an Achilles heel for China's rulers, who repeatedly announce campaigns against graft. With some regularity, corrupt officials are given lengthy jail terms, or even executed. But much of the citizenry doubts that the ruling Communist Party is making any headway. "People become kind of numb to these campaigns because they bring few results," said Yang Fan, an economist at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing.

In the latest pilot program, special teams are now interviewing some senior officials as they prepare to travel overseas, quizzing them about their motives for trips and the whereabouts of family members, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. "Many of them are thought to have sent their family members to study or live overseas before skipping the country themselves," the Xinhua report said. If there's any good news in the outflow of stolen money, experts say, it's that some of the embezzled assets make a U-turn and return to China, the fastest-growing major economy in the world. That's one reason for an explosion of Chinese-controlled offshore companies in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore banking havens.

The tiny British Virgin Islands, a territory of 22,000 people under United Kingdom control, is now the second-largest source of foreign direct investment in China, after Hong Kong. Last year, the British Virgin Islands pumped $5.78 billion into China. Reasons for using the offshore corporations, Chinese experts say, include tax avoidance, concealing ownership and hiding assets stripped from state companies. Such financial trickery means little to the residents of Kaiping, a city on the banks of the Tan River about 100 miles west of Hong Kong, in one of the most industrialized regions in southern China. But the gleaming 21-story Bank of China building along the river is a symbol of the local corruption. The bank's former president, Yu Zhendong, and several other managers pillaged $483 million, the government charges.

Local residents boil at the massive rip-off

"There is no cure for corruption in China. There is no hope," said Zhou Chung, the Hong Kong-raised owner of the Flowers and Grass florist shop. Feng Qiling, a 20-year-old medical student, said she expected severe punishment for Yu when his capture was announced in the United States, where he'd fled. "I hoped he would get the death sentence," Feng said. But Yu, who was returned from Nevada on April 16, will serve the same 12-year sentence for fraud and using an illegal visa that he was given by a Nevada state court.

The embezzlement was discovered in October 2001 when the Bank of China integrated 1,040 of its computers around the country and discovered that $483 million was missing.

False passports in hand, the Kaiping branch bank's top officials left for the United States. A vice president committed suicide. An inquiry found that the managers had funneled money to overseas corporations and banks. Fraud of varying, but often massive, scale occurs regularly around the country. When the chief of highway administration in Henan province in central China fled the country Jan. 2 with a reported huge stash, he became the third consecutive chief to abscond with taxpayers' money. Henan has seen 190 officials flee abroad amid corruption probes.

In late August, ex-soldiers in the southern city of Chongqing now employed at the bankrupt 3403 Factory, which makes military materiel, squared off with police over a proposed management buyout of the plant. "The factory will be sold to the managers at an extremely cheap price," said Yang, the university economist, who wrote to protest the sale to the National People's Congress, the nation's rubber-stamp legislature. Fire sales of state assets such as factories enable managers and favored business owners to get rich, often with high-ranking benefactors behind the scenes. "This type of corruption is the most serious because it's conducted in an open and legal way," Yang said. "It's like open looting of assets."

Corruption probes routinely stop before they get to senior levels of the Communist Party.

But infrequent media reports hint at taint at those levels, too. In early July, the 21st Century Economic Report newspaper charged that Premier Wen Jiabao's son, Wen Yunsong, the head of a mainland information technology company, had obtained some $900 million worth of shares in a company under false pretenses. The story was picked up by Chinese Web sites and by Xinhua, but it was dropped within 24 hours. No official investigation has taken place.

Transparency International, the nonprofit group that rates countries every year on their perceived levels of corruption, put China this year at 66th out of 133 nations. As China undergoes huge public works spending, including preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, "the opportunities for corruption are high, and the task of curbing it Herculean," the report said.

Source: http://www.odiousdebts.org/odiousdebts/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=11373
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Financial fraud is nothing new. It is something that affects every nation, but in the final analysis, it's the little guy or the average man on the street that ultimately picks up the tab (either in tax expenditures or heavier transactions cost). As far as I'm concerned, this is one type of crime that they should have sentencing guidelines based on monetary value of the crime. Anything worth more than one million should automatically mean life in jail. Further, it's not just the US; there's also a lot of stolen Chinese money in Australia, the UK, and Europe.

What we have here today is the US effectively saying to Chinese criminals that while you may steal from your country and flee, you cannot hope to flee to the US and live off the proceeds of your crime against China. I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a serious cross border anti-crime cooperation between the US and the PRC. There are probably thousands of Chinese living in fear of Snakehead reprisals both in the US and within the PRC. These are the guys that collect thousands from each of their illegally smuggled Chinese into the US, and threaten to hurt a family member in China if the smuggled person fails to pay. Likewise, they may extort money from people in China by kidnapping a smuggled person in the US or elsewhere. The ones hiding in the PRC has thus far avoided prosecution from US anti people smuggling laws. Many have connections to local government officials and Chinese Communist Party members, and have used their influence to avoid arrest. Perhaps now, the PRC would reciprocate and give those criminals one less place to hide.

a4agent · May 7, 2009

Canada and US are the heaven of Chinese criminals. There is another big fish still in Canada.

This only shows the ugly side of the US you self-hating white ass-kisser LOL China has been asking for thse guys for a long long long long time, but US does not want to kick them out US.

haha..no wonder you are a self-hating white ass-kisser of the supreme...post garbage to mislead young
innocents bystanders. Trying to paint these yankies as Mother Teresa ain't going to help..sorry, but everyone knows this Uncle Tom is a murderer. LOL

US deals blow against Chinese Corruption

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

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ralphrepo Well-Known Member

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